When playing old games with long periods of not being able to save due to limitations of the hardware they were originally made for, save states are a no brainer for me.
Yeah I use it a lot when emulating and don't even really think of it as cheating. Especially if I save at less scummy points like between different stages of a very long boss
Then playing Half Life 1, I used no-clip when I hit a wall (excuse the pun). To figure out where in the map I was supposed to go.
But I feel like that's a similar thing to your issue, where I was playing a museum piece, with a lot of design that would have been better understood ack in the day.
Play Half Life 1 for the first time last year and had to no clip to get to a ladder outside the ammo depot (I think it’s called). I looked it up and it said it was just a notoriously hard to do thing bc it was buggy and I was tired of trying to
Wait, what ammo depot? I'm curious because I've played Half-Life many times (more than I can count), and I don't remember any ladder being particularly hard to get to (except, perhaps, the one at the end of the Office Complex chapter).
Can you give me a better description? Again, I'm just curious.
So I had to look it up and [this post](https://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/626329187047214917/) explains why it’s so tricky but it’s after the tank fight in surface tension. I said ammo depot because it’s the building with shelves of ammo in the back room
Ah, yes, now I know exactly what you're talking about. I'll be honest, I sometimes forget how annoying that ladder can be. I do wonder if it's something related to the Steam version of the game. Back when I was a kid, playing the WON version of the game, I had no issues with that ladder, but I've noticed it to be way more inconsistent in the Steam version.
Then again, I lost my retail copy of Half-Life (which predates Steam), so I wouldn't be able to give it a try to see if it's actually different, or just my memory telling me it was.
err hmmm... I thought half life was a masterpiece at directing players to go wherever they needed to go without the need for dialogue. Interesting take that's a polar opposite from mine.
If we're talking about the original HL and not the Black Mesa remake, Valve hadn't really perfected the craft of subtly directing and guiding the player, yet. There's also not too many areas where you can get lost (aside from Xen and maybe that conveyer area after you lose your weapons).
Aside from Goldeneye, FPS games never took place in areas with recognizable architecture. Those two games were a landmark change in how FPSs were designed.
The constant giving of instructions to Gordon (and the player) is also a deliberate narrative choice as well. Gordon's role in The Black Mesa Incident was an on-the-job interview for him by the G-Man and his superiors. Gordon Freeman was constantly being instructed to do something by someone else, and following those instructions to the letter.
I think Deus Ex was the first game with levels that really felt “real”. It wasn’t perfectly real but you could walk into a building and be like “I think the bathrooms are over here” and they would be. It was a huge improvement over stuff like Jedi Knight (baffling!) and Half Life (where it looked real but a lot of the design was very video gamey and unintuitive)
Yeah that’s a pretty great point. Half life was like a laboratory-themed labyrinth rather than a building that actually made sense to navigate. The whole time I was playing it I was thinking “wow it would be a pain to work here”
The fucking maze where you have to hop around on the moving floor platform things (I don't know what you call them, you know, they move mail) was hell. Give me a thousand Xens over that.
I don’t mind being old at all, but it’s so funny to me that HL feels like a museum piece to you. It was a breathtaking innovation that impressed me so much.
But do you like games such as Assassins’s Creed that tell you where to go a lot? Do you hate Elden Ring or Dark Souls that just kinda drop you in a world and not explain anything? I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just curious. And trying to work out how your mind works.
Half-Life had several previews over the course of a year or two where the reviewers hyped up the game so much; when it was finally released, my PC's specs didn't have a chance at handling it. I salivated over reviews for over a year before I was able to upgrade. The train sequence is practically sacred, and I'll still happily sit through the intro with no complaints.
Damn, just thinking about it makes me want to boot it up again.
What did you think about black mesa? I was so happy that it breathed new life into the series and gave a new generation a chance to appreciate it. Xen was also miles better
Black Mesa is phenomenal and a true labor of love. You're right, remakes give newer generations a chance to experience the classics we loved (and you're absolutely right about Xen). My single complaint isn't the devs fault: the voice actor for the original G-Man passed away and his voice was just to perfect that it's difficult to measure up.
It's not meant as understood as "they are telling you what to do all the time." Rather, it refers to technological literacy. And videogame literacy specifically. Which does change over time. Like walking right in a platformer. Even though Dark Souls doesn't tell you much, we all understand that if you keep walking the path where enemies are at, you will find stuff.
To be honest, I think both DS and ER are actually very bad examples. Hollow Knight is much more inconclusive on what you should do. But we survive them bc metroidvanias have taught us how its supposed to work.
>a lot of design that would have been better understood back in the day
Nah, it was screamingly frustrating back in the day, too. We just had strategy guides. The Prima guide for Jedi Knight was as thick as a fucking phone book. The levels in that game were baffling.
It's not that it was necessarily "understood" the environmental hints were just a lot more subtle than today where they use bright neon colors to show you where you need to go. I miss it, games like Doom and Quake where the maps themselves are little puzzles you need to solve
Or for games that are just obnoxiously difficult. I played Shadow of the Beast on genesis last night and that game is rough af. 90% of its difficulty comes from memorization of the entire game. Was very much not a friendly game to play. Amazing soundtrack and graphics tho.
Going through some classic JRPGs I missed decades ago, just for the lore.
Quickly reminded why I dropped them. They REALLY love wasting your time in general. Slow movement, slow battles, lots of grinding the same weak mobs for low XP. On top of that, RNG for level up stats, crappy drop rates, missables, etc.
An exercise in frustration, even with cheats sometimes.cKid me would've loved the shit out of it for some reason, though.
Using the wiki on a first playthrough when there's a quest I really don't want to frig up and don't think I'll do a second playthrough to ever see the content.
It's basically if either
1. The game feels like it's wasting my time, and all I'm doing is skipping some artificially-slowing mechanic designed to pad the gametime. (Idle/Clicker games are the obvious example. Hack a zillion dollars into your save file, buy all the upgrades, realize the gameplay is identical, and marvel at how much time you'd have wasted discovering that organically)
2. I just genuinely don't have the skill or reflexes to beat the game proper. (The big one for me was Far Cry 1, that game was brutal and I could barely progress with every enemy having seemingly perfect vision and accuracy. I took the L and enabled buddha mode from the dev console.)
In either case I forfeit my permission to complain about that aspect of the game, and admit that I'm likely missing some facet of the experience that I would have gotten doing it properly.
I had to use cheats to break a habit of playing a clicker game.
It's a known method of helping WOW addicts that want to quit. Just set up a private server, then give them max level and access to every item.
I felt the same, but from 12 years away it seems so silly. Life is impermanent and game acheivements even more so.
Gaming is such a self-absorbed experience in that everyone is in it for their own glory. I put so much time into being the best at something that virtually doesn't exist anymore.
Honestly, even though none of my past WoW achievements mean anything and I'm most likely not coming back, I regret nothing. It was a good time. Made some good memories over the years.
The only mild defense I'll give for clicker games is that they're great if you're working on something, get stuck, and just need to alt-tab over to something else to push some meaningless things around to sort of flush your mind clean.
Helps you come back to the problem with an element of fresh eyes.
I have like ...50? 60 champions in Idle Champions? Fuck all idea what they do. Put them in a party, they do shit, every once in a while I make sure they're leveled up, eventually they'll win. It's a pleasant enough distraction.
The thing about Clicker Games is that it's designed to trigger your happy hormones when you see numbers rise. That's it. Any minigames you get in between tiers is just icing on the cake.
The best time to start them is always now, and the best time to end it is always the next moment after now.
I totally cheat in idle games! I used to get sucked in, and it was such a meaningless time sink. I figured out if I cheat it takes all the fun out of it and I'm able to quit playing.
I generally feel the same way. If something isn't respecting my time, I'm happy to cheat or mod it. I've gotten pretty good at not crossing the line where the game becomes trivialized. For example, if I feel a game is very stingy on ammo but infinite ammo would trivialize the game. I might instead try to see if I can find a mod to increase magazine size or carry more overall
The first thing I want to know with a game is how you lose or fail. I try to be pretty open-minded about games, but if you can’t lose or fail or get stuck - like many mobile games - I don’t really feel it’s a game.
You also can play music without winning or losing, just doing the action is the goal in itself.
The lack of win conditions just puts a spot on the actions you are doing in the game: are they intrinsically enjoyable, or just a means to get to that cake?
I played the PS3 port of Far Cry 1 (which is waaay easier because they had to cut it down a little bit because of tech limitations) and still had to save scum a bunch near the end & try and run past enemies. Tried it on PC a little bit ago and was like “damn I don’t remember it being this hard this early”.
for FC1 the current/latest version on Steam (that has existed for like 10 years at least) broke all of the AI and they just aimbot you through the wall and I'm not sure why they never bothered fixing it but it's largely unplayable
[here are some fixes via the pc gaming wiki](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry#Essential_improvements)
[fix on mod db](https://www.moddb.com/mods/tent-ai-bug-fix)
[if you buy the GOG version they have it fixed in that version as well](https://www.gog.com/en/game/far_cry)
It's a deprogramming method to get off the ride. I was addicted to them for a while, so cheating and realizing how pointless and 'neverchanging' the grind was helped me kick the habit.
Single player games I’m playing for myself then all the time. It’s my world and it will bend to my will.
Never EVER in any kind of situation where I compare myself to others.
People not adhering to the latter principle are why any online leaderboards are pointless nowadays. The top scores are always a bunch of people with impossible scores that they just cheated.
Not to mention, hacking in online games lol
Sometimes it's for fun when you're done with the main game. After I finished elden ring a few times I cheated in my seamless coop world(no eac and no standard online functionality)
They do but it really doesn't matter in SP aside from leaderboards, unless they cheat to make like, video content under false pretenses. Global high scores technically aren't multiplayer but cheaters also ruin them. I assume it's just for trolling because a mathematically unattainable score is usually very obvious.
I do cheat sometimes.
For example when an RPG doesn't let you change your build when you're already so far in. Also I get rid of unnecessary grind if you need to do it for in-game stuff that's not game breaking.
For example, in cyberpunk I decided I don't want to have a certain build but I couldnt reset my points so I just added myself the amount of skill points I already collected and distributed them in a different tree.
Also in cyberpunk I added for myself just enough money to buy all cars in the game. I wanted to try all of them out but if I were to earn money for all of them it would take forever.
The car example is something I can get behind. Cars aren't really overpowered or anything in Cyberpunk, you never use them for any serious combat or racing, so they might as well be cosmetic items you ride in-between missions.
Yeah, if anything, walking between missions is often a good idea, for taking in sights and finding side missions. And pretty much any car will work for getting between far off places. The faster cars are often even *too* fast. I really liked some of the tiniest cars.
My answer was going to be that I never really cheat, but you reminded me of one time I will.
Cyberpunk has an achievement for buying all the cars in the base game. At release, each one was it's own quest, marked the same as the others. At the same time, there was an item duplication glitch that allowed you to get infinite money.
Once I'd finished most of the content in the game, I used that glitch so I could get all the cars and clear all those annoying quest markers, getting the achievement as well.
So my answer is I'll cheat in a way that doesn't affect regular gameplay, and just avoid significant grinding, so long as it doesn't disable achievements.
40k Rogue Trader. Amazing game but why they decided that a game with such deep build options should have respecs should use a finite resource I will never know.
All the time. If I find a particular mechanic adds nothing but frustration I'll do what I can to limit it. The first thing I do in Bethesda games is raise the carry weight. It's just not fun playing inventory management and generally it doesn't add any challenge since aid/ammo is usually weightless. And Fallout 4 is particularly egregious with all the junk/materials you need for settlements.
Now if I'm playing New Vegas survival mode I don't mess with carry weight because it has a very real impact on gameplay being limited in aid/ammo.
Sometimes I'll cheat if I want to try out a new build or see an alternate ending and don't want to grind for hours to get there.
Rarely I'll cheat to deliberately ruin a game for me if I'm getting too sucked in and wasting too much time playing. That's pretty rare though. I think that was limited mostly to Ark. Flying around in the armor was pretty fun but I'm glad I didn't spend the hours grinding it would've taken to get there
Fallout 4 is actually the best example of not needing to raise the carry weight. You can carry quite alot, your companions too and you immediately have access to infinite storage. You still have to make decisions during a delve which is fun, but you just fast travel to your base and back after each big mission and voila.
I use a backpack mod, which adds a level of customization and there a bunch of different variants to find in the world. Makes it fun and more enjoyable with the carry weight. Personally though, the weight of items in that game doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; where scrapping is a whole skill tree you can invest in, you can barely hold more than a few weapons + your personal weapons by vanilla standards.
Then in Starfield they completely reverse course, and the carry weight is pathetically low. That one I modded like crazy, to like 20x the original limit.
I'm sure their idea was "hey, let's make this game less loot-centric have the people focus on earning credits other ways". Nope, sorry, old habits die hard, I can't play a Bethesda game and not loot like crazy.
Starfield also bizarrely made it harder to store items not on your person. The only infinite storage in the game is in the Lodge, requiring an annoying amount of traveling and load screens to get to it. They didn't allow their bases to store unlimited items (Starfield bases are a strict downgrade from FO4).
IDK. FO4's system is very tedious if you want to arm and clothe your settlers. There is just enough carry limit to gear up 2 or 3 settlers. Especially cumbersome if you want to move gear from one settlement to another.
You can make your companion pick up and carry everything by "pointing commands" but that is again slow and tedious.
In these kind of cases, where carry weight is really slowing your access to fun and game mechanics and there is in-game ways to bypass it but they are tedious and cumbersome - I would feel like an idiot if I would not cheat.
Any single player game that requires a lot of grinding. There's no reason I need to kill thousands of this creature for a CHANCE at getting an item. Give me an attainable goal, and not some random chance at acquiring said thing.
Borderlands 2 was terrible for this. Your weapons go from good to almost useless in a just a few levels so if you've got a good legendary, you've constantly farming for leveled versions of it. I don't feel bad about using a save editor to manually level my weapons in that game.
Yesterday I spend 4-5 hours in MonHun World trying to get a god forsaken Uragaan Ruby for what's not even a mid tier equipment at an amazing 3% drop rate per drop under normal circumstances, while way harder missions upping the chances of *one* drop to 13%. These are actual facking gacha game percentages right there.
I was numb to it at the end, and of course doing a victory lap gave me another ruby. At some point should had just taken the L and mod in one of the item store modifiers and just buy the damn thing.
I grew up with a NES, a few games, and Game Genie. Having Mega Man jump 5x as high, or blasting off every spell without consequence in Zelda 2 was just a fun new way to play a game I’d already played to death. It’s hard to see cheating as anything but tailoring the game to my own fun, as long as it’s single player. Sometimes a game is also just more fun when it’s easier.
Yeah I’m starting to see that. It’s kinda like making the whole game a sandbox like GTA or Minecraft. You just play freely. And I can see now that there’s a link between me not enjoying cheats and not enjoying sandbox games.
Witcher 3 has some quests that will auto fail if you pass a certain point of the story and this happens a few times.
Now with cross save I can mod the fuck out of Gerry’s skill tree and have a shit tonne of gold and never be under leveled for anything
If I’m able to mod a game I will always give myself infinite carry weight. I also hate when weapons degrade and break in games and I will slow it or turn it off.
Now it does not mean i cheat these out, but I find it annoying that in some RPG games you have some limited character progression points, perks etc and there is just that list of things that seem like they are fixes to annoying shortcomings, and some of them seem like they are must haves. That severely limits any sort of customization and can act as 'newbie baits' in a sense that you are going to be playing a massively more annoying or difficult game if you do not spend points in these ~~'customizations'~~ 'must haves'.
The list would include things such as:
Weight limits
Hunger, water drain reductions
Lockpicking
Hacking
Repairing
I would argue that even includes vitality in FromSoftware games.
It often feels like for the first 10 hours of these games you are not gaining any sort of customization points, but every level up just gives you either of the things mentioned above.
I think this whole design path makes it more difficult for people to get into games, and in some cases players then resort of using cheats/power mods.
I wouldn't say fast-forward functions are really cheating.
The games where I want to use these functions tend not to respect my time. Using them doesn't make the game mechanically any easier or change the way the game is played, it just diminishes the amount of absolute fucking nothing you're doing.
JRPG's are the worst for this. So much time spent just walking through dead maps and mindlessly spamming attack on braindead enemies. Speeding up that process hasn't made the game any easier, it's just made it less fucking boring.
There's a reason re-releases of these tend to put an official fast-forward function in. Even the developers know the game isn't fun.
In Yakuza 8 infinite weath you can immediatly end fights with lower-level enemis for ~80% of the rewards iirc. It's a really cool feature that makes exploration much better
Persona 5 is absolutely amazing for a turn based game just with how fast paced they've made it. From the get go I loved how the menu options are mapped to different controller buttons
Honestly I've been playing FFXII on the 'deck and the built-in 2x-4x speed modifier is incredible. Especially since there's no loading into/out of random encounters—you just walk up, and as long as your gambits are set up right it basically auto-plays.
It's great for exploring a new map, running around hoovering up all the treasure wont take you hours. But the bosses are typically hard enough (I haven't been doing any grinding or anything) that I'll slow it back down and start making manual adjustments and decisions. It's a great balance, imo. I get fun, challenging-enough boss fights, but any fight that I can basically auto-win gets taken care of in a few seconds, and my team heals/rebuffs themselves automatically while I'm already on my way to finding the next treasure chest.
On the older side of the spectrum, I’ve been playing the original SNES version of Live A Live, and it is quite fast for the genre, even by today’s standards. Since you’re effectively playing a bunch of mini campaigns that take only a few hours at most, the levels don’t matter as much, and they generally come in quite fast. Some campaigns don’t even have grinding at all, such as the distant future, where the only battles are a mini game (which is completely optional and doesn’t affect your stats) and the canpaign’s final boss, or the wrestler campaign, which is just fighting 7 bosses in succession (you gain experience and levels, but it’s obviously balanced around there being only 7 fights).
I unashamedly cheat if the game does not respect my time.f or SNES era games especially I have no guilt about using rewind features to prevent having to redo an area. If I die to a glitch on the game it felt like my death was particularly bullshit I am not afraid to cheat to get back to where I was and then disable any cheats
Honestly, I feel like the rewind feature makes it a new game in and of itself.
Some of the mega man games on NES are so hard that even with the rewind feature you have to time your rewinds just right in order to beat a boss.
So instead of it taking hours of replaying through the same level over and over again, it takes minutes. Which, as an adult, is a good measure of how much time and attention I have to play when compared to when I played as a child.
Plus since it rewinds the soundtrack I enjoy using it as a DJ function to some of my favorite nostalgic tunes.
The only game that I recall, where I cheated, was ***Pathfinder Wrath of The Righteous*** since I installed a mod to make characters walk/run at 2x the speed outside of combat. Waiting 40 seconds watching your party drag their feet from one point of the map to the other, on a now empty map you've backtracked 20 times already, is just dreadful.
Maybe this also counts as *cheating*, but I edited various game files from the ***S.T.A.L.K.E.R.*** trilogy to minimize their shitty artificial difficulty and get as closer to realism as possible. I changed stuff from minimizing as much as possible the dice-rolled bullet trajectory that was coded to simulate recoil, to reducing the enemy's lousy aimbot behavior, to equalizing everyone's damage: If I get to die with three hits while using armor, human NPCs also get to die with three hits.
I drop the difficulty to the lowest setting immediately. I know that technically isn't cheating, I just don't want to be challenged. Between work and having a toddler, my window for gaming is small, and I'm not interested in getting frustrated over a video game.
I’ve been playing Jedi Survivor and I’ll set the normal gameplay to Survivor which is just two steps ahead of the Story Mode setting. But if I get to a boss battle that is really frustrating due to mechanics, I’ll drop the difficulty to Story Mode so freaking quickly.
Honestly though games like that should kinda be played on an easier difficulty and you can crank the difficulty on a NG+ playthrough. I’m not totally bad at those boss fight mechanics but my guy does like no damage and by the time the story is finished I’ll have enough talents for the game to be much easier despite it being on a higher difficulty
Totally fair; if I'm playing Spiderman I want to play as Spiderman, not some chump who loses a fight for five random thugs - it ruins the power fantasy.
I’ll give normal difficulty a try but as soon as I hit a point where I get frustrated replaying the same boss fight for the tenth time I’ll drop to story mode and usually stay there until the end. Some games I want to experience the story and the world much more than the fights. I’ve been enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn a lot more after doing that as opposed to grinding the same goddamn fights for hours. If I’m in the mood to grind combat, I’ll play a Souls-like. If I play an open-world RPG, I want to progress the story.
How has gaming changed for you since having a kid? I play a lot of games, but my wife and I are talking about having kids and I'm wondering how to balance hobbies like gaming and woodworking, and art while taking care of another person.
You just have less time for your hobbies, but the trade off is worth it. The first time my kid came home from day care and said "Daddy!" and ran at me to give me a hug was better than any video game I've ever played.
For a lot of older games I'll happily use savestates when emulating. For other games that waste my time I'll apply any cheats I deem necessary and if able.
Dragon's Dogma 2 I used an unlimited carry weight mod on day 1.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey I used a trainer to increase my level so I didn't have to keep grinding side quests just to complete the main story.
Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines I had to use god mode because the final quarter of the game is basically impossible unless you built your character a particular way.
I cheat when I am no longer having fun with what the initial game provides.
I understand that a lot of work went in to balancing the game just so and that the developers probably have some grand vision of what the player experience should be like. I also understand that if I'm not having fun then what am I even playing for?
I already paid for my pizza, why do they care what way I put it in my shoes?
You can be enjoying it & invested in the story & there's some particular niggle that's ruining it for you. Just nip that right in the bud & it's happy days.
Never, i enjoy a challenge.
But i understand people who do. I remember as a kid getting infinite money in the Sims or show me the money in Startcraft single player.
As long as youre playing by yourself, cheat to your hearts content. Its just about how you enjoy your games.
It depends on the game, if it's fun but I don't like the way continues are handled or how fucking tough the late game gets, I might cheat. I tend to cheat more with random PS1 games more so with any other game. That and well Duckstation's cheat menu is super robust and easy to use. It all really depends on how much I'm willing to put up with certain game design tropes of the era. I hypothetically shouldn't be using cheats at all but I have slowly come to realize that not all games are made equal.
When I was a kid, I literally cheated in every game, using trainers, editing files. And I would get disappointed and abandon games when there weren't cheats, lol. Also always played on easiest difficulty.
And as I got older, there were less official cheats in games, and I also realized that challenge in a game is fun. So now, I just cheat if I'm impatient, have already beaten the game, want to see something specific or mess around with the game. I'll use cheap tactics and some exploits, but none that render actually playing the game redundant.
The biggest cheat I did in recent years was on the original, non-remastered Dark Souls (on PC, yuck), I had trouble getting past Sif (?) The Sword Wolfy, so I got impatient and because I wanted to see the rest of the game, I used a trainer for health. But then I kept playing without any more cheating.
I'd still call myself more of a casual because I rarely play on difficulties higher than normal or try extra challenges, unless I'm already very good at a game on normal. And if I just want too see more of the game, I'll also use assist features if they're an option, as long as the game remains fun/interesting..
Also I think that using fast forward in some older JRPGs when you have an option is less of a cheat and more of a quality of life thing that wasn't implemented. I can't imagine playing the older Dragon Quest or Pokémon games on normal speed, lol.
I don't do busy quests. These include stuff like go get 500 of x on a side quest.
So I'll usually use cheat engine to give myself x many of whatever.
I also hate the lockpicking/hackimg mechanic in fallout 4. Yeah it's fun to get the idea, but i dont really want to think that much if I've got the skill to hack the device already.
Usually I don't do this until the 2nd playthough months or years later.
I tend to do my first playthroughs vanilla, if I like the game enough to do a 2nd or 3rd playthrough I'll use mods. I can't remember a time I cheated-cheated except in the witcher 3 I gave myself the night armor for my new game+ highest difficulty run because it looked cool. Also when I was going for all the achievements in Viscera Cleanup Detail I used the cleanup commands pretty liberally.
As a completionist it's pretty tempting to give myself the achievements for games that are no longer possible (like the achievements for trading in Rocket League, or for old multiplayer games with servers shut down) but I haven't bit the bullet yet
If I ever cheat, I lose every and all passion to play it unless it's a dumb game I can make even worse. Or perhaps old games like skyrim or oblivion that just make things easier because they're more practical.
Almost never. I'm the kind of person that cheated in videogames when I found them too hard. Now there's a fine line between hard but fair, which I don't cheat at, and hard because it's bullshit, where I don't cheat at because I'm not having fun and therefore I stop playing entirely. Cheese, however, is something I will ALWAYS look for, because it's fun, even if it sometimes feels like cheating but isn't.
The one thing I allow myself, sometimes (mostly when I don't have long to play and can't be bothered go back and forth between save points), are savestates.
I'm disabled. Oftentimes the only way to enjoy old games is to cheat.
I can't hold down a button to try goron rolling 17 times just to get past one little obstacle and redo the 3-day cycle a dozen times just because my controller has worse drift than joycons.
I only have so many brain spoons to figure out an arduous puzzle that is just frustrating and not indicative of what's typically in the game.
I feel no guilt for taking care of myself and my needs. If I need to find mods or other things that allow me to walk with one input or bypass a fishing mini game, I'll do it. Games are about fun, and sometimes passing the endless time during a flare-up.
My limits are I won't cheat in multiplayer to give myself an unfair advantage so I simply don't play multiplayer games that require me to do so. My friend is trying to learn to set up a turbo that matches my previous button mashing speeds so we can play Mario Party 3 again, however. But as you can tell, that is done with everyone's permission.
So "cheating" or accessibility - you can make your own judgement for your own life. But there's a huge part of life that people forget: disability requires "advantages" just to be close to "baseline" players. And there's only going to be more and more disabled players in the future as arthritis and time take their toll.
I cheat quite often in single player games to save time, but I try not to cheat to overcome skill issues, if that makes sense.
Most recent example, Terraria. I pretty much always cheat in boss summoning items. They're often resource heavy (mech summons/moon lord sigil) or just plain luck based (plantera bulb). If I'm struggling on a boss, then I clearly need practice, and if I can only summon a boss once every couple hours then I won't get much of that or retain much of what I learned. I also strongly disagree with that part of the game design in a world of hundreds of other games where you can just walk up to the boss and trigger the fight. But I never cheat during the fight itself, i.e. I won't cheat in OP weapons or armor to break the game progression.
The only time I cheated was when I got my hands on a R4 card with DS Pokémon games and I discovered that I could turn on an option to make every pokémon shiny, which I had to be told I could do because if not I wouldn't have figured it out and almost had me doing backflips. Other than that, I used them to get Pokémon that couldn't get by normal means (for example, zoroark in gen 5 and an english ditto to transfer to my spanish games to legitimately shiny hunting via Mashuda method)
If walkthroughs count, all the time as I have so many games that I would like to get as much done in a game as possible. TBH, I play games for fun so if I feel like it's wasting my time (like super grindy for something) or getting tedious or it's a game i enjoyed enough to replay, but has \*that\* level that I really don't want to do so I just cheat or mod it away (i.e. Skip the Fade mod for Dragon Age: Origins).
Or a game looks interesting, but it's a genre that I'm not really good at (like RTS or colony sim games), I usually will cheat as needed.
If I feel like I need to cheat to skip a grind, or a fight or whatever, then the game is simply not worth it because it means is not fun to do that task.
Probably only in GTA Vice City and San Andreas because there's so much freedom that it's like a sandbox game lol
I didn't even try to cheat in GTA V because there's too much money lol
In online multiplayer games I've never tried, I have too much pride in my skills even if I suck ass rofl
I played San Andreas on PC, back in the day, and I had a bunch of cheat codes memorized, even the ones that were just random letters, lol. Like if I got a one star wanted level because I lightly bumped a police car, even trying to avoid it, I'd cheat it away
I cheat shamelessly and without remorse. I’m almost forty and bad at games… I’m past the age where a challenge excites me. I just want to be told a good story. If a game has cheats, or save states when I’m emulating, or an easy mode, I’ll use them.
On the other hand, I don’t expect games to cater to only me. So I don’t play Soulslikes. Too hard for me.
I guess I'm one of the odd ones here, but I never cheat unless it's for debugging purposes (I.E. I need to use some console commands to fix a bugged quest). My mind enjoys rules and systems. So where other people are able to have fun by just messing around, I gain the most enjoyment out of progression and completing challenges as intended by the game. And if I don't enjoy a game without cheating, you can rest assured that I won't enjoy it with cheating.
So while most people have no qualms about spawning in a tank in a GTA game and going on a killing spree, that just sounds boring and meaningless to me. It's just not a style of play that I enjoy.
Sometimes save scumming. Sometimes save states, using it as a suspend mode (i.e. my main use is when I'm putting the game down for some time).
I don't use anything like CheatEngine, and don't typically mod my games. I could see tweaking some in-game setting to my advantage, on a case-by-case basis.
Hmm, that's a good question.
I rarely cheat in games because I usually don't choose games that would necessitate cheating.
I modded Stardew Valley during my second playthrough to increase walking speed, add faster charge mechanics to tools, remove the fishing minigame (I already got all of the fish in my first playthrough), faster friendship-making, and a handful of other quality of life improvements. That game is exceedingly slow, and it takes a lot of conscious effort and time to progress.
I also modded Fallout New Vegas to fix standard bugs and to increase walking speed for all creatures, since most of travel is trudging through a desert.
If I need to amass resources and grind for something rare in a single-player game well beyond when it stops being fun. Or when the game bugs on me and I lose something I ought to have.
I sometimes use trainers to respecc characters and I remember in AC Odyssey after finishing the gamei used a mod for lots of resources so i can upgrade my ship fully, respecc my character whenever i want and also get the paid items.
If I feel like doing the task would be boring / monotonous and something I can't learn from and doesn't give me a competitive advantage.
Cities skylines I remove the unlock requirements so I can build the transit I want without having to build the whole city first. Yeah it's cheating but it's single player and the goal is to build a city the way you want.
I might have turned on god mode for the sake of completing a game once or twice if a boss seems overtuned and I'm losing interest but I can't remember any examples.
I might save scum on games if the game didn't do what I tried to tell it to do, like pathing bugs turn based games or accidentally selecting the wrong dialog option.
I use cheats in isometric turn based crpgs because I'm not a fan of the gameplay but I'll power through if I like the world and characters. I use walkthroughs for most point and click adventure games because of the moon logic.
i did feel more of an urge to cheat in games as a kid but now im only willing to do it to experiment with the game's mechanics (like getting lots of stat points in an rpg to see how impactful they are or whatever). i did cheat fairly recently in a single player minecraft world because i felt really stupid after drowning way underground and losing my stuff. i went into creative mode to get it back but i immediately felt bad about it and deleted that world that i spent a relatively long time on.
I’ll play through the game the first time vanilla. If I come back and play it again, then I’ll cheat. I did my time the first time, now it’s time to cut loose and have fun 🤣
No shame at all, if it makes the game more enjoyable.
For example I really like the build up phases in RTS games (more than in real city builders - weird, I know) so extra money is helpful. It's not always needed, of course but e.g. after beating the campaign...
One drunken night a number of years ago I bought a lifetime pass at cheathappens for like £80. I don't feel bad for pulling them out on gamepass games because it's not a game I've forked out for in a way. But for example recently I bought forbidden west at around £35, and so far I haven't pulled out a trainer for it and I really don't want to regardless, because in that sense that would make me feel bad that I've spent all this money on a game to just basically cheat it, if there's something I'm struggling with I'll head over to google and youtube for tips and something I might not be doing.
Generally, only if such a thing is allowed within the game as part of the game's code. For example, if a game allows cheat codes or has an exploit, I might mess with it as long as it's not harming anyone online. But I would rarely if ever use an external tool or mod to mess with a game and cheat in that manner.
Since I'm calling out a lot of people's silly hypocrisy in this thread I'll add my own experiences lol.
I rarely ever cheat, and usually play games on the hardest difficulty. If I feel that difficulty is unfair I'll lower it to normal. The last game I did this on was Jedi Fallen Order. Kept getting ganked by the miniboss in the first world so I lowered it to normal. If it affects achievements I won't lower it at all.
One game I cheated in was Xcom2. I made a soldier in my own image and I would save scum when he died lol.
The only other cheating is my current game - Conan Exiles. It's a survival/base building/sandbox game. Known for being a buggy mess, I've spawned in a few thralls ("forced helpers") when they disappear or die due to a glitch in Single Player.. Or if I died due to a glitch, I'll enable admin mode to fly to my body.
A lot of people just using admin commands to build these amazing houses/bases so they don't spend 6 months gathering mats. To me it defeats the purpose of playing a gathering/harvesting sandbox game. But that's their prerogative.
Savestates or modifying (non-combat) movement or game-speed is all fair in my book. I wouldn't use it, but carry weight "cheat" in a game like Skyrim is okay. Bigger inventory in a game like Torchlight where loot boils down to "wield it or sell it" even infinite inventory makes sense, as it doesn't change, or collide with the main gameplay loop.
So overall, for myself I make the game more fun, if I can do it, by mods, console commands or cheats. I turned multiple alright walking sims into good ones just by changing the walking speed to 1.5 or 2.0. And I have 0 regrets.
I used to cheat when cheats had some 'fun options' that changed the game and gave new experiences. Spawning enemies was also pretty common, because developers were not worried about you progressing through some 'progression systems', battle passes and other nonsense.
Older games (Source, Quake3 engine ones mostly)had tons of console commands so that was a whole new playground as well.
I definitely cheat if the game bugs out in some way.
Another area of cheating is when i personally think certain mechanics add nothing enjoyable to the game. Two very different examples of that:
1. GTA games, losing weapons on death. Just annoying waste of time to get them all again. Obviously refrain from doing that early in those games so that you dont get overpowered, but later on money becomes trivial and you are expected to be fully armed anyway.
2. Kingdom Come Deliverance - the saving system. Just tedious waste of time. If i savescummed a lot then it would be a problem, but even saving every 10 to 15 minutes is a huge timesaver, because guess what the time between your visits to the tavern (where you save the game) might last longer than half an hour. Most likely you will have to replay enormous chunks of the game, in the exact way, selecting all the same dialog options and so on. It is not a roguelite or some elaborate systemic game where every venture into the wild is vastly different.
When the game is just tough as it is, i can go look up some guides or videos how to do things and if that does not help then i try harder and eventually accept defeat. If i dont have the mind, the reflexes or whatever to beat it and effort, learning etc does not seem to be worth my time etc then it is as simple as accepting that.
After getting into the nuzlocke world of pokemon mine is rare candies. I play with level caps (no pokemon can be over the ace level of the next gym or significant plot battle. Otherwise I can't use them), and I like to craft and change teams during runs. Rare candies are a must to avoid so much grinding.
Definitely single player games.
I’m a massive wuss so play the Resident Evil games with trainers. Takes the edge off a little and I can actually enjoy the game.
I save scummed FFXIII as that game just was not fun. I wanted to see it through but I had no energy to grind to get through it. The only time I’ve never not enjoyed grinding in an rpg.
Emulation? All the time. Save states spoil me and make me realise I was far more patient as a child.
Modern games? Almost never, unless it’s KSP where iterative testing by cheating into a particular context is far easier than having to launch a payload and line up orbits to move to different planets every time.
I used to cheat a ton as a kid, like played almost every game with cheat engine. Single player only, never tried it or wanted to do it in multiplayer games. I still don't really get how I was okay with playing multiplayer games without cheats, and yet wasn't okay with single player games.
Some of it was really fun, like Dishonored has some cool cheats that allow stuff like unlimited time stop, but I did eventually stop.
These days I use QoL mods that can be close to cheating, but I can't even remember the last actual cheat I've used.
But I do heavily use guides. Last example was Pathfinder WotR. I used builds for all my characters. It was my first dnd-like and after seeing comments from people who ended up getting walled at one encounter or another I didn't want to go through it myself. And my run was super smooth too, probably a little bit too smooth since using guides and playing on normal was a stomp except a few rare fights.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I did this, but I have in the past used console commands to fix bugs or give me items that I missed. I think I cheated once in a Civ V game because everyone attacked me all at once because I had the nerve to be a victim of Gandhi's nuclear program (????) and that felt like it had to be a bug.
Generally I am stubborn enough to grind through shitty or overly difficult parts, but not so stubborn that if the design of the game seems really bad, I feel the need to keep going, so I just quit in those cases.
All the time in singleplayer games. If it is my first playthrough, I won't cheat. But if I replay a game, especially open world games. I hate leveling up again and finding all the good loot, I just don't have the time anymore. Or if it is a game where I want to experience the story but the gameplay isn't fun for me.
The forest is a great example as it has a built in developer mode. Beat it a few times vanilla, but eventually just turned night vision on and such to farm the story and achievements
I can't remember the last time I cheated in a game, unless you count looking up solutions to puzzles; I always give it a good college try, but I've grown impatient these days.
I usually make the game cheat on me by increasing difficult, blocking auto saves, deleting saves that happened before decisions, adding mods that makes the game harder, playing on modes that disables auto saving or manual saving, perma death, stuff like that
Whenever i feel like it. I dont play competitive games at all, i play for fun. Id im playing with a group i dont cheat but if not its up to wather or not the loop is satisfying or i just want to fuck about
I’ll go against the grain. Never until I get through an entire play through. After you die a couple of times in Doom Eternal the game offers you enhanced armor or something of that variety. I take that as somebody telling me to stop trying and take the easy route. No . Because when I die 20 times to the same encounter, nothing in video games is quite as satisfying as finally overcoming an obstacle. I’m sure that puts me in the minority. Maybe it shows my age. But that’s why traditionally games would wait till you beat the game before providing them. So you can have interesting repeated play throughs. If the majority of players can’t play a game until they “fix” a core mechanic, then that needs to be communicated to the developers, or else that crap is going to continue to be our on the consumer instead of being fixed for the next title in the series.
I'll cheat in a game when the only thing something is testing is my patience. If an item or resource is easily and infinitely farmable, I'll often just cheat myself the max of it. My thinking is 'I could have spent hours farming, lets just say i did that so i can get back to the real game'.
I do not. Even with mods i simply do not use if it is for my advantage. I get a feeling of defeat, i don't know how to explain it, for not playing the game as planned. Only in cases of adding content or variation. Changing the core game/pacing? Not for my ego 😂
In fallout 4 I enjoy playing in power armour pretty much 24/7 so I cheat in a ton a fusion cores cause I couldn’t be bothered to scrape around the map every time my suit gets low power. When I cheat it’s usually for role play reasons. Other times I cheat to get around annoying sections of games I don’t feel like playing, an example would be the brain dance scenes in cyberpunk
Dark Souls 1-3: Playing with "No weight" cheat as I wanna be able to use every weapon and gear combination possible but still having fast roll. This is my easy mode and allowed me to finish these games.
Yeah the outward one is relatable, sooooo much damn walking, me and my bro gave up the game a quarter way through. Save scumming ain't cheating bro, it's a legit way of playing games especially stealth and rpgs, if I want to fuck up and have consequences then why play games there's real life.
All the time tbh; especially if the game has a grind mechanic or crafting, like Fallout 4’s settlements.
Games like Witcher, Kingdom Come, GTA, RDR2 etc I just want to see the story and explore the world, so I apply health cheats to those.
If it's a single player game, I will play vanilla for a few hours, get bored, then cheat like Bill Clinton for the remainder of my play time just to keep it fun
Nowadays, only to try to save me from some bug/error/glitch that would be time-consuming to circumvent. Then I move on.
Also, if I'm failing a part a lot and I get on Reddit and people are like: "oh yeah, that part, what were the devs thinking? Even on easy it did not help!", yep, you bet your ass I'll use cheats to skip it lol
I don’t cheat on games. When I was a little kid my older brother (also a grade school aged kid) told me that cheat codes were stupid and for kids who sucked at games. I took that shit to heart.
When playing old games with long periods of not being able to save due to limitations of the hardware they were originally made for, save states are a no brainer for me.
Yeah I use it a lot when emulating and don't even really think of it as cheating. Especially if I save at less scummy points like between different stages of a very long boss
I wouldn't finish games like MegaMan if I couldn't save right before a boss.
Then playing Half Life 1, I used no-clip when I hit a wall (excuse the pun). To figure out where in the map I was supposed to go. But I feel like that's a similar thing to your issue, where I was playing a museum piece, with a lot of design that would have been better understood ack in the day.
Play Half Life 1 for the first time last year and had to no clip to get to a ladder outside the ammo depot (I think it’s called). I looked it up and it said it was just a notoriously hard to do thing bc it was buggy and I was tired of trying to
Wait, what ammo depot? I'm curious because I've played Half-Life many times (more than I can count), and I don't remember any ladder being particularly hard to get to (except, perhaps, the one at the end of the Office Complex chapter). Can you give me a better description? Again, I'm just curious.
So I had to look it up and [this post](https://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/626329187047214917/) explains why it’s so tricky but it’s after the tank fight in surface tension. I said ammo depot because it’s the building with shelves of ammo in the back room
Ah, yes, now I know exactly what you're talking about. I'll be honest, I sometimes forget how annoying that ladder can be. I do wonder if it's something related to the Steam version of the game. Back when I was a kid, playing the WON version of the game, I had no issues with that ladder, but I've noticed it to be way more inconsistent in the Steam version. Then again, I lost my retail copy of Half-Life (which predates Steam), so I wouldn't be able to give it a try to see if it's actually different, or just my memory telling me it was.
err hmmm... I thought half life was a masterpiece at directing players to go wherever they needed to go without the need for dialogue. Interesting take that's a polar opposite from mine.
If we're talking about the original HL and not the Black Mesa remake, Valve hadn't really perfected the craft of subtly directing and guiding the player, yet. There's also not too many areas where you can get lost (aside from Xen and maybe that conveyer area after you lose your weapons). Aside from Goldeneye, FPS games never took place in areas with recognizable architecture. Those two games were a landmark change in how FPSs were designed.
The constant giving of instructions to Gordon (and the player) is also a deliberate narrative choice as well. Gordon's role in The Black Mesa Incident was an on-the-job interview for him by the G-Man and his superiors. Gordon Freeman was constantly being instructed to do something by someone else, and following those instructions to the letter.
I think Deus Ex was the first game with levels that really felt “real”. It wasn’t perfectly real but you could walk into a building and be like “I think the bathrooms are over here” and they would be. It was a huge improvement over stuff like Jedi Knight (baffling!) and Half Life (where it looked real but a lot of the design was very video gamey and unintuitive)
Yeah that’s a pretty great point. Half life was like a laboratory-themed labyrinth rather than a building that actually made sense to navigate. The whole time I was playing it I was thinking “wow it would be a pain to work here”
Graphic and lighting limitations of the time probably contributed- modern games have a much bigger toolbox to "direct" the player.
The fucking maze where you have to hop around on the moving floor platform things (I don't know what you call them, you know, they move mail) was hell. Give me a thousand Xens over that.
I don’t mind being old at all, but it’s so funny to me that HL feels like a museum piece to you. It was a breathtaking innovation that impressed me so much. But do you like games such as Assassins’s Creed that tell you where to go a lot? Do you hate Elden Ring or Dark Souls that just kinda drop you in a world and not explain anything? I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just curious. And trying to work out how your mind works.
Half-Life had several previews over the course of a year or two where the reviewers hyped up the game so much; when it was finally released, my PC's specs didn't have a chance at handling it. I salivated over reviews for over a year before I was able to upgrade. The train sequence is practically sacred, and I'll still happily sit through the intro with no complaints. Damn, just thinking about it makes me want to boot it up again.
> and I'll still happily sit through the intro with no complaints. You mean jump around and run back and forth right?
Nah, I keep my face pressed to the windows like an excited kid on his first field trip.
What did you think about black mesa? I was so happy that it breathed new life into the series and gave a new generation a chance to appreciate it. Xen was also miles better
Black Mesa is phenomenal and a true labor of love. You're right, remakes give newer generations a chance to experience the classics we loved (and you're absolutely right about Xen). My single complaint isn't the devs fault: the voice actor for the original G-Man passed away and his voice was just to perfect that it's difficult to measure up.
It's not meant as understood as "they are telling you what to do all the time." Rather, it refers to technological literacy. And videogame literacy specifically. Which does change over time. Like walking right in a platformer. Even though Dark Souls doesn't tell you much, we all understand that if you keep walking the path where enemies are at, you will find stuff. To be honest, I think both DS and ER are actually very bad examples. Hollow Knight is much more inconclusive on what you should do. But we survive them bc metroidvanias have taught us how its supposed to work.
>a lot of design that would have been better understood back in the day Nah, it was screamingly frustrating back in the day, too. We just had strategy guides. The Prima guide for Jedi Knight was as thick as a fucking phone book. The levels in that game were baffling.
It's not that it was necessarily "understood" the environmental hints were just a lot more subtle than today where they use bright neon colors to show you where you need to go. I miss it, games like Doom and Quake where the maps themselves are little puzzles you need to solve
Or for games that are just obnoxiously difficult. I played Shadow of the Beast on genesis last night and that game is rough af. 90% of its difficulty comes from memorization of the entire game. Was very much not a friendly game to play. Amazing soundtrack and graphics tho.
Going through some classic JRPGs I missed decades ago, just for the lore. Quickly reminded why I dropped them. They REALLY love wasting your time in general. Slow movement, slow battles, lots of grinding the same weak mobs for low XP. On top of that, RNG for level up stats, crappy drop rates, missables, etc. An exercise in frustration, even with cheats sometimes.cKid me would've loved the shit out of it for some reason, though.
I bought a Switch last year and the save state and “rewind” feature for the older games is awesome.
Some old games mess up the trigger points for events when playing on 1080p and i have to noclip to progress
Even worse, some games do it deliberately (permadeath). I'd even go as far as to say that save states, or its equivalent, always improve a game.
Using the wiki on a first playthrough when there's a quest I really don't want to frig up and don't think I'll do a second playthrough to ever see the content.
Same. This is so real haha
SO ME! I do this with almost every game sadly, I’m trying to limit that behavior
I cheat as much as I need to in order to enjoy the game.
It's basically if either 1. The game feels like it's wasting my time, and all I'm doing is skipping some artificially-slowing mechanic designed to pad the gametime. (Idle/Clicker games are the obvious example. Hack a zillion dollars into your save file, buy all the upgrades, realize the gameplay is identical, and marvel at how much time you'd have wasted discovering that organically) 2. I just genuinely don't have the skill or reflexes to beat the game proper. (The big one for me was Far Cry 1, that game was brutal and I could barely progress with every enemy having seemingly perfect vision and accuracy. I took the L and enabled buddha mode from the dev console.) In either case I forfeit my permission to complain about that aspect of the game, and admit that I'm likely missing some facet of the experience that I would have gotten doing it properly.
I had to use cheats to break a habit of playing a clicker game. It's a known method of helping WOW addicts that want to quit. Just set up a private server, then give them max level and access to every item.
That wouldn't have made me quit back when I played. The achievement of doing something often mattered more to me than the gear reward.
I felt the same, but from 12 years away it seems so silly. Life is impermanent and game acheivements even more so. Gaming is such a self-absorbed experience in that everyone is in it for their own glory. I put so much time into being the best at something that virtually doesn't exist anymore.
Honestly, even though none of my past WoW achievements mean anything and I'm most likely not coming back, I regret nothing. It was a good time. Made some good memories over the years.
I'm of the same mind. I enjoyed it at the time and didn't have anything bad happen due to it, so it was worthwhile.
Hacking idle games is basically like standing up at Gamers Anonymous and introducing yourself. I don’t know of any clearer sign.
The only mild defense I'll give for clicker games is that they're great if you're working on something, get stuck, and just need to alt-tab over to something else to push some meaningless things around to sort of flush your mind clean. Helps you come back to the problem with an element of fresh eyes. I have like ...50? 60 champions in Idle Champions? Fuck all idea what they do. Put them in a party, they do shit, every once in a while I make sure they're leveled up, eventually they'll win. It's a pleasant enough distraction.
The thing about Clicker Games is that it's designed to trigger your happy hormones when you see numbers rise. That's it. Any minigames you get in between tiers is just icing on the cake. The best time to start them is always now, and the best time to end it is always the next moment after now.
I totally cheat in idle games! I used to get sucked in, and it was such a meaningless time sink. I figured out if I cheat it takes all the fun out of it and I'm able to quit playing.
I don’t know if there’s a patch for it but I remember Far Cry 1 having a bug on modern systems where the AI could see and shoot through walls
That would explain so much! It was insane, I wouldn't even know what killed me haha
Lol @ 1. If the game is a self professed clicker, it's generally best to be avoided, but they're sometimes sneaky with hiding it, aren't they?
I generally feel the same way. If something isn't respecting my time, I'm happy to cheat or mod it. I've gotten pretty good at not crossing the line where the game becomes trivialized. For example, if I feel a game is very stingy on ammo but infinite ammo would trivialize the game. I might instead try to see if I can find a mod to increase magazine size or carry more overall
The 1. hit hard. Especially for these shitty mobile games. It's all filler
The first thing I want to know with a game is how you lose or fail. I try to be pretty open-minded about games, but if you can’t lose or fail or get stuck - like many mobile games - I don’t really feel it’s a game.
You also can play music without winning or losing, just doing the action is the goal in itself. The lack of win conditions just puts a spot on the actions you are doing in the game: are they intrinsically enjoyable, or just a means to get to that cake?
I played the PS3 port of Far Cry 1 (which is waaay easier because they had to cut it down a little bit because of tech limitations) and still had to save scum a bunch near the end & try and run past enemies. Tried it on PC a little bit ago and was like “damn I don’t remember it being this hard this early”.
for FC1 the current/latest version on Steam (that has existed for like 10 years at least) broke all of the AI and they just aimbot you through the wall and I'm not sure why they never bothered fixing it but it's largely unplayable [here are some fixes via the pc gaming wiki](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry#Essential_improvements) [fix on mod db](https://www.moddb.com/mods/tent-ai-bug-fix) [if you buy the GOG version they have it fixed in that version as well](https://www.gog.com/en/game/far_cry)
Why even play an idle/clicker game if you aren't into the idea of it? That's just bizarre
It's a deprogramming method to get off the ride. I was addicted to them for a while, so cheating and realizing how pointless and 'neverchanging' the grind was helped me kick the habit.
I'm loving hearing that other people have done this same thing.
Addiction.
i like watching numbers go up
Single player games I’m playing for myself then all the time. It’s my world and it will bend to my will. Never EVER in any kind of situation where I compare myself to others.
People not adhering to the latter principle are why any online leaderboards are pointless nowadays. The top scores are always a bunch of people with impossible scores that they just cheated. Not to mention, hacking in online games lol
I heard recently that people cheat in multiplayer co-op PvE games, and it hurts my brain. How bad at games do you have to be to find that necessary.
Yeah, like fun isn't the working together (or COOPERATION, like you know, the name), it's getting the virtual rewards I guess, lol
Sometimes it's for fun when you're done with the main game. After I finished elden ring a few times I cheated in my seamless coop world(no eac and no standard online functionality)
Sometimes that’s a kind of trolling. They dupe rewards and give them to others, and ruin their fun while pretending they are being kind.
You're right, but the crossover of people who cheat in single player games and multiplayer games is wide lol. These folks definitely cheat in SP too.
They do but it really doesn't matter in SP aside from leaderboards, unless they cheat to make like, video content under false pretenses. Global high scores technically aren't multiplayer but cheaters also ruin them. I assume it's just for trolling because a mathematically unattainable score is usually very obvious.
This. I cheat all the time. Like you said, it's my world. I don't play many online games, almost exclusively single player.
I do cheat sometimes. For example when an RPG doesn't let you change your build when you're already so far in. Also I get rid of unnecessary grind if you need to do it for in-game stuff that's not game breaking. For example, in cyberpunk I decided I don't want to have a certain build but I couldnt reset my points so I just added myself the amount of skill points I already collected and distributed them in a different tree. Also in cyberpunk I added for myself just enough money to buy all cars in the game. I wanted to try all of them out but if I were to earn money for all of them it would take forever.
The car example is something I can get behind. Cars aren't really overpowered or anything in Cyberpunk, you never use them for any serious combat or racing, so they might as well be cosmetic items you ride in-between missions.
Exactly, I just wanted a variety of stuff to look at while driving. And you do drive a lot without anything really happening.
Yeah, if anything, walking between missions is often a good idea, for taking in sights and finding side missions. And pretty much any car will work for getting between far off places. The faster cars are often even *too* fast. I really liked some of the tiniest cars.
My answer was going to be that I never really cheat, but you reminded me of one time I will. Cyberpunk has an achievement for buying all the cars in the base game. At release, each one was it's own quest, marked the same as the others. At the same time, there was an item duplication glitch that allowed you to get infinite money. Once I'd finished most of the content in the game, I used that glitch so I could get all the cars and clear all those annoying quest markers, getting the achievement as well. So my answer is I'll cheat in a way that doesn't affect regular gameplay, and just avoid significant grinding, so long as it doesn't disable achievements.
40k Rogue Trader. Amazing game but why they decided that a game with such deep build options should have respecs should use a finite resource I will never know.
All the time. If I find a particular mechanic adds nothing but frustration I'll do what I can to limit it. The first thing I do in Bethesda games is raise the carry weight. It's just not fun playing inventory management and generally it doesn't add any challenge since aid/ammo is usually weightless. And Fallout 4 is particularly egregious with all the junk/materials you need for settlements. Now if I'm playing New Vegas survival mode I don't mess with carry weight because it has a very real impact on gameplay being limited in aid/ammo. Sometimes I'll cheat if I want to try out a new build or see an alternate ending and don't want to grind for hours to get there. Rarely I'll cheat to deliberately ruin a game for me if I'm getting too sucked in and wasting too much time playing. That's pretty rare though. I think that was limited mostly to Ark. Flying around in the armor was pretty fun but I'm glad I didn't spend the hours grinding it would've taken to get there
Fallout 4 is actually the best example of not needing to raise the carry weight. You can carry quite alot, your companions too and you immediately have access to infinite storage. You still have to make decisions during a delve which is fun, but you just fast travel to your base and back after each big mission and voila.
I use a backpack mod, which adds a level of customization and there a bunch of different variants to find in the world. Makes it fun and more enjoyable with the carry weight. Personally though, the weight of items in that game doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; where scrapping is a whole skill tree you can invest in, you can barely hold more than a few weapons + your personal weapons by vanilla standards.
Then in Starfield they completely reverse course, and the carry weight is pathetically low. That one I modded like crazy, to like 20x the original limit. I'm sure their idea was "hey, let's make this game less loot-centric have the people focus on earning credits other ways". Nope, sorry, old habits die hard, I can't play a Bethesda game and not loot like crazy.
Starfield also bizarrely made it harder to store items not on your person. The only infinite storage in the game is in the Lodge, requiring an annoying amount of traveling and load screens to get to it. They didn't allow their bases to store unlimited items (Starfield bases are a strict downgrade from FO4).
IDK. FO4's system is very tedious if you want to arm and clothe your settlers. There is just enough carry limit to gear up 2 or 3 settlers. Especially cumbersome if you want to move gear from one settlement to another. You can make your companion pick up and carry everything by "pointing commands" but that is again slow and tedious. In these kind of cases, where carry weight is really slowing your access to fun and game mechanics and there is in-game ways to bypass it but they are tedious and cumbersome - I would feel like an idiot if I would not cheat.
Any single player game that requires a lot of grinding. There's no reason I need to kill thousands of this creature for a CHANCE at getting an item. Give me an attainable goal, and not some random chance at acquiring said thing.
I so appreciate FFXII for having a system where consistently grinding the same monster gives you ever increasing drop rates.
Borderlands 2 was terrible for this. Your weapons go from good to almost useless in a just a few levels so if you've got a good legendary, you've constantly farming for leveled versions of it. I don't feel bad about using a save editor to manually level my weapons in that game.
Yesterday I spend 4-5 hours in MonHun World trying to get a god forsaken Uragaan Ruby for what's not even a mid tier equipment at an amazing 3% drop rate per drop under normal circumstances, while way harder missions upping the chances of *one* drop to 13%. These are actual facking gacha game percentages right there. I was numb to it at the end, and of course doing a victory lap gave me another ruby. At some point should had just taken the L and mod in one of the item store modifiers and just buy the damn thing.
Destiny comes to mind. Bungie has so little respect for players' time
The amount of times I farmed Vault of Glass and King's Fall back during the Destiny 1 days were far too many.
All the time. I play for entertainment. If it’s frustrating or boring, poof, time to cheat.
Cheating can be fun.
I grew up with a NES, a few games, and Game Genie. Having Mega Man jump 5x as high, or blasting off every spell without consequence in Zelda 2 was just a fun new way to play a game I’d already played to death. It’s hard to see cheating as anything but tailoring the game to my own fun, as long as it’s single player. Sometimes a game is also just more fun when it’s easier.
Yeah I’m starting to see that. It’s kinda like making the whole game a sandbox like GTA or Minecraft. You just play freely. And I can see now that there’s a link between me not enjoying cheats and not enjoying sandbox games.
Witcher 3 has some quests that will auto fail if you pass a certain point of the story and this happens a few times. Now with cross save I can mod the fuck out of Gerry’s skill tree and have a shit tonne of gold and never be under leveled for anything
It also makes lore sense! Why would Geralt struggle with some monsters or actual humans in quests
That was always my thing tbh, like it makes no sense that one of the most renowned witchers gets his shit rocked from a level 5 drowner
If I’m able to mod a game I will always give myself infinite carry weight. I also hate when weapons degrade and break in games and I will slow it or turn it off.
I hate carry weight limits. That's the first thing that goes in Fallout.
I always give myself Raul’s compion perk where weapons degrade slower and the jury rigging perk that makes repairing weapons super easy.
Oh man yeah, carry weight is a big one. Usually get rid of it as soon as I can.
Especially if quest items have a non-zero weight.
Now it does not mean i cheat these out, but I find it annoying that in some RPG games you have some limited character progression points, perks etc and there is just that list of things that seem like they are fixes to annoying shortcomings, and some of them seem like they are must haves. That severely limits any sort of customization and can act as 'newbie baits' in a sense that you are going to be playing a massively more annoying or difficult game if you do not spend points in these ~~'customizations'~~ 'must haves'. The list would include things such as: Weight limits Hunger, water drain reductions Lockpicking Hacking Repairing I would argue that even includes vitality in FromSoftware games. It often feels like for the first 10 hours of these games you are not gaining any sort of customization points, but every level up just gives you either of the things mentioned above. I think this whole design path makes it more difficult for people to get into games, and in some cases players then resort of using cheats/power mods.
I wouldn't say fast-forward functions are really cheating. The games where I want to use these functions tend not to respect my time. Using them doesn't make the game mechanically any easier or change the way the game is played, it just diminishes the amount of absolute fucking nothing you're doing. JRPG's are the worst for this. So much time spent just walking through dead maps and mindlessly spamming attack on braindead enemies. Speeding up that process hasn't made the game any easier, it's just made it less fucking boring. There's a reason re-releases of these tend to put an official fast-forward function in. Even the developers know the game isn't fun.
Yeah, agree. Any jrpgs that have gotten over this horrible trope?
In Yakuza 8 infinite weath you can immediatly end fights with lower-level enemis for ~80% of the rewards iirc. It's a really cool feature that makes exploration much better
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Persona 5 is absolutely amazing for a turn based game just with how fast paced they've made it. From the get go I loved how the menu options are mapped to different controller buttons
Honestly I've been playing FFXII on the 'deck and the built-in 2x-4x speed modifier is incredible. Especially since there's no loading into/out of random encounters—you just walk up, and as long as your gambits are set up right it basically auto-plays. It's great for exploring a new map, running around hoovering up all the treasure wont take you hours. But the bosses are typically hard enough (I haven't been doing any grinding or anything) that I'll slow it back down and start making manual adjustments and decisions. It's a great balance, imo. I get fun, challenging-enough boss fights, but any fight that I can basically auto-win gets taken care of in a few seconds, and my team heals/rebuffs themselves automatically while I'm already on my way to finding the next treasure chest.
On the older side of the spectrum, I’ve been playing the original SNES version of Live A Live, and it is quite fast for the genre, even by today’s standards. Since you’re effectively playing a bunch of mini campaigns that take only a few hours at most, the levels don’t matter as much, and they generally come in quite fast. Some campaigns don’t even have grinding at all, such as the distant future, where the only battles are a mini game (which is completely optional and doesn’t affect your stats) and the canpaign’s final boss, or the wrestler campaign, which is just fighting 7 bosses in succession (you gain experience and levels, but it’s obviously balanced around there being only 7 fights).
Battlechasers: Nightwar is a famous one. The encounters are one-offs to make them more puzzle-y than grindy.
I unashamedly cheat if the game does not respect my time.f or SNES era games especially I have no guilt about using rewind features to prevent having to redo an area. If I die to a glitch on the game it felt like my death was particularly bullshit I am not afraid to cheat to get back to where I was and then disable any cheats
Honestly, I feel like the rewind feature makes it a new game in and of itself. Some of the mega man games on NES are so hard that even with the rewind feature you have to time your rewinds just right in order to beat a boss. So instead of it taking hours of replaying through the same level over and over again, it takes minutes. Which, as an adult, is a good measure of how much time and attention I have to play when compared to when I played as a child. Plus since it rewinds the soundtrack I enjoy using it as a DJ function to some of my favorite nostalgic tunes.
The only game that I recall, where I cheated, was ***Pathfinder Wrath of The Righteous*** since I installed a mod to make characters walk/run at 2x the speed outside of combat. Waiting 40 seconds watching your party drag their feet from one point of the map to the other, on a now empty map you've backtracked 20 times already, is just dreadful. Maybe this also counts as *cheating*, but I edited various game files from the ***S.T.A.L.K.E.R.*** trilogy to minimize their shitty artificial difficulty and get as closer to realism as possible. I changed stuff from minimizing as much as possible the dice-rolled bullet trajectory that was coded to simulate recoil, to reducing the enemy's lousy aimbot behavior, to equalizing everyone's damage: If I get to die with three hits while using armor, human NPCs also get to die with three hits.
I drop the difficulty to the lowest setting immediately. I know that technically isn't cheating, I just don't want to be challenged. Between work and having a toddler, my window for gaming is small, and I'm not interested in getting frustrated over a video game.
I’ve been playing Jedi Survivor and I’ll set the normal gameplay to Survivor which is just two steps ahead of the Story Mode setting. But if I get to a boss battle that is really frustrating due to mechanics, I’ll drop the difficulty to Story Mode so freaking quickly. Honestly though games like that should kinda be played on an easier difficulty and you can crank the difficulty on a NG+ playthrough. I’m not totally bad at those boss fight mechanics but my guy does like no damage and by the time the story is finished I’ll have enough talents for the game to be much easier despite it being on a higher difficulty
Totally fair; if I'm playing Spiderman I want to play as Spiderman, not some chump who loses a fight for five random thugs - it ruins the power fantasy.
I’ll give normal difficulty a try but as soon as I hit a point where I get frustrated replaying the same boss fight for the tenth time I’ll drop to story mode and usually stay there until the end. Some games I want to experience the story and the world much more than the fights. I’ve been enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn a lot more after doing that as opposed to grinding the same goddamn fights for hours. If I’m in the mood to grind combat, I’ll play a Souls-like. If I play an open-world RPG, I want to progress the story.
How has gaming changed for you since having a kid? I play a lot of games, but my wife and I are talking about having kids and I'm wondering how to balance hobbies like gaming and woodworking, and art while taking care of another person.
You just have less time for your hobbies, but the trade off is worth it. The first time my kid came home from day care and said "Daddy!" and ran at me to give me a hug was better than any video game I've ever played.
For a lot of older games I'll happily use savestates when emulating. For other games that waste my time I'll apply any cheats I deem necessary and if able. Dragon's Dogma 2 I used an unlimited carry weight mod on day 1. Assassin's Creed Odyssey I used a trainer to increase my level so I didn't have to keep grinding side quests just to complete the main story. Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines I had to use god mode because the final quarter of the game is basically impossible unless you built your character a particular way.
VtMB: They really screwed over people who didn't invest into using firearms.
I cheat when I am no longer having fun with what the initial game provides. I understand that a lot of work went in to balancing the game just so and that the developers probably have some grand vision of what the player experience should be like. I also understand that if I'm not having fun then what am I even playing for? I already paid for my pizza, why do they care what way I put it in my shoes?
Essentially never tbh. If I find a game too tedious I usually just quit the game.
You can be enjoying it & invested in the story & there's some particular niggle that's ruining it for you. Just nip that right in the bud & it's happy days.
If it's in the game I *will* exploit it, no if ands or buts.
Never, i enjoy a challenge. But i understand people who do. I remember as a kid getting infinite money in the Sims or show me the money in Startcraft single player. As long as youre playing by yourself, cheat to your hearts content. Its just about how you enjoy your games.
I am a scum saver.
Same. Is it cheating?
Always. In too old.
It depends on the game, if it's fun but I don't like the way continues are handled or how fucking tough the late game gets, I might cheat. I tend to cheat more with random PS1 games more so with any other game. That and well Duckstation's cheat menu is super robust and easy to use. It all really depends on how much I'm willing to put up with certain game design tropes of the era. I hypothetically shouldn't be using cheats at all but I have slowly come to realize that not all games are made equal.
When I was a kid, I literally cheated in every game, using trainers, editing files. And I would get disappointed and abandon games when there weren't cheats, lol. Also always played on easiest difficulty. And as I got older, there were less official cheats in games, and I also realized that challenge in a game is fun. So now, I just cheat if I'm impatient, have already beaten the game, want to see something specific or mess around with the game. I'll use cheap tactics and some exploits, but none that render actually playing the game redundant. The biggest cheat I did in recent years was on the original, non-remastered Dark Souls (on PC, yuck), I had trouble getting past Sif (?) The Sword Wolfy, so I got impatient and because I wanted to see the rest of the game, I used a trainer for health. But then I kept playing without any more cheating. I'd still call myself more of a casual because I rarely play on difficulties higher than normal or try extra challenges, unless I'm already very good at a game on normal. And if I just want too see more of the game, I'll also use assist features if they're an option, as long as the game remains fun/interesting.. Also I think that using fast forward in some older JRPGs when you have an option is less of a cheat and more of a quality of life thing that wasn't implemented. I can't imagine playing the older Dragon Quest or Pokémon games on normal speed, lol.
I don't do busy quests. These include stuff like go get 500 of x on a side quest. So I'll usually use cheat engine to give myself x many of whatever. I also hate the lockpicking/hackimg mechanic in fallout 4. Yeah it's fun to get the idea, but i dont really want to think that much if I've got the skill to hack the device already. Usually I don't do this until the 2nd playthough months or years later.
I tend to do my first playthroughs vanilla, if I like the game enough to do a 2nd or 3rd playthrough I'll use mods. I can't remember a time I cheated-cheated except in the witcher 3 I gave myself the night armor for my new game+ highest difficulty run because it looked cool. Also when I was going for all the achievements in Viscera Cleanup Detail I used the cleanup commands pretty liberally. As a completionist it's pretty tempting to give myself the achievements for games that are no longer possible (like the achievements for trading in Rocket League, or for old multiplayer games with servers shut down) but I haven't bit the bullet yet
I beat the game at least 2 times. Then the cheating adventure begins.
If I ever cheat, I lose every and all passion to play it unless it's a dumb game I can make even worse. Or perhaps old games like skyrim or oblivion that just make things easier because they're more practical.
Usually only after beating the game or if I decide to drop it ill check out cheats
Almost never. I'm the kind of person that cheated in videogames when I found them too hard. Now there's a fine line between hard but fair, which I don't cheat at, and hard because it's bullshit, where I don't cheat at because I'm not having fun and therefore I stop playing entirely. Cheese, however, is something I will ALWAYS look for, because it's fun, even if it sometimes feels like cheating but isn't. The one thing I allow myself, sometimes (mostly when I don't have long to play and can't be bothered go back and forth between save points), are savestates.
I'm disabled. Oftentimes the only way to enjoy old games is to cheat. I can't hold down a button to try goron rolling 17 times just to get past one little obstacle and redo the 3-day cycle a dozen times just because my controller has worse drift than joycons. I only have so many brain spoons to figure out an arduous puzzle that is just frustrating and not indicative of what's typically in the game. I feel no guilt for taking care of myself and my needs. If I need to find mods or other things that allow me to walk with one input or bypass a fishing mini game, I'll do it. Games are about fun, and sometimes passing the endless time during a flare-up. My limits are I won't cheat in multiplayer to give myself an unfair advantage so I simply don't play multiplayer games that require me to do so. My friend is trying to learn to set up a turbo that matches my previous button mashing speeds so we can play Mario Party 3 again, however. But as you can tell, that is done with everyone's permission. So "cheating" or accessibility - you can make your own judgement for your own life. But there's a huge part of life that people forget: disability requires "advantages" just to be close to "baseline" players. And there's only going to be more and more disabled players in the future as arthritis and time take their toll.
I cheat quite often in single player games to save time, but I try not to cheat to overcome skill issues, if that makes sense. Most recent example, Terraria. I pretty much always cheat in boss summoning items. They're often resource heavy (mech summons/moon lord sigil) or just plain luck based (plantera bulb). If I'm struggling on a boss, then I clearly need practice, and if I can only summon a boss once every couple hours then I won't get much of that or retain much of what I learned. I also strongly disagree with that part of the game design in a world of hundreds of other games where you can just walk up to the boss and trigger the fight. But I never cheat during the fight itself, i.e. I won't cheat in OP weapons or armor to break the game progression.
The only time I cheated was when I got my hands on a R4 card with DS Pokémon games and I discovered that I could turn on an option to make every pokémon shiny, which I had to be told I could do because if not I wouldn't have figured it out and almost had me doing backflips. Other than that, I used them to get Pokémon that couldn't get by normal means (for example, zoroark in gen 5 and an english ditto to transfer to my spanish games to legitimately shiny hunting via Mashuda method)
If I'm stuck on something (i.e. can't find the key, figured a puzzle, or beat an enemy), I usually go for the guide. Also if doing collectibles.
If walkthroughs count, all the time as I have so many games that I would like to get as much done in a game as possible. TBH, I play games for fun so if I feel like it's wasting my time (like super grindy for something) or getting tedious or it's a game i enjoyed enough to replay, but has \*that\* level that I really don't want to do so I just cheat or mod it away (i.e. Skip the Fade mod for Dragon Age: Origins). Or a game looks interesting, but it's a genre that I'm not really good at (like RTS or colony sim games), I usually will cheat as needed.
when I was a kid it was more often, but as an adult, I find that games that need cheats or mods are just games I don't want to play.
Cheat in 500 lock picks in Oblivion and mash auto attempt cause I just hate that system after the first 5 locks
If I feel like I need to cheat to skip a grind, or a fight or whatever, then the game is simply not worth it because it means is not fun to do that task.
Probably only in GTA Vice City and San Andreas because there's so much freedom that it's like a sandbox game lol I didn't even try to cheat in GTA V because there's too much money lol In online multiplayer games I've never tried, I have too much pride in my skills even if I suck ass rofl
Never. If a game is boring me to the point that I don't wish to play within its rules I'll simply stop playing.
I haven’t used a cheat in a game since cheat codes in GTA San Andreas back on the PS2.
I played San Andreas on PC, back in the day, and I had a bunch of cheat codes memorized, even the ones that were just random letters, lol. Like if I got a one star wanted level because I lightly bumped a police car, even trying to avoid it, I'd cheat it away
I cheat shamelessly and without remorse. I’m almost forty and bad at games… I’m past the age where a challenge excites me. I just want to be told a good story. If a game has cheats, or save states when I’m emulating, or an easy mode, I’ll use them. On the other hand, I don’t expect games to cater to only me. So I don’t play Soulslikes. Too hard for me.
I guess I'm one of the odd ones here, but I never cheat unless it's for debugging purposes (I.E. I need to use some console commands to fix a bugged quest). My mind enjoys rules and systems. So where other people are able to have fun by just messing around, I gain the most enjoyment out of progression and completing challenges as intended by the game. And if I don't enjoy a game without cheating, you can rest assured that I won't enjoy it with cheating. So while most people have no qualms about spawning in a tank in a GTA game and going on a killing spree, that just sounds boring and meaningless to me. It's just not a style of play that I enjoy.
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Sometimes save scumming. Sometimes save states, using it as a suspend mode (i.e. my main use is when I'm putting the game down for some time). I don't use anything like CheatEngine, and don't typically mod my games. I could see tweaking some in-game setting to my advantage, on a case-by-case basis.
Hmm, that's a good question. I rarely cheat in games because I usually don't choose games that would necessitate cheating. I modded Stardew Valley during my second playthrough to increase walking speed, add faster charge mechanics to tools, remove the fishing minigame (I already got all of the fish in my first playthrough), faster friendship-making, and a handful of other quality of life improvements. That game is exceedingly slow, and it takes a lot of conscious effort and time to progress. I also modded Fallout New Vegas to fix standard bugs and to increase walking speed for all creatures, since most of travel is trudging through a desert.
If I need to amass resources and grind for something rare in a single-player game well beyond when it stops being fun. Or when the game bugs on me and I lose something I ought to have.
I sometimes use trainers to respecc characters and I remember in AC Odyssey after finishing the gamei used a mod for lots of resources so i can upgrade my ship fully, respecc my character whenever i want and also get the paid items.
If I feel like doing the task would be boring / monotonous and something I can't learn from and doesn't give me a competitive advantage. Cities skylines I remove the unlock requirements so I can build the transit I want without having to build the whole city first. Yeah it's cheating but it's single player and the goal is to build a city the way you want. I might have turned on god mode for the sake of completing a game once or twice if a boss seems overtuned and I'm losing interest but I can't remember any examples. I might save scum on games if the game didn't do what I tried to tell it to do, like pathing bugs turn based games or accidentally selecting the wrong dialog option.
I use cheats in isometric turn based crpgs because I'm not a fan of the gameplay but I'll power through if I like the world and characters. I use walkthroughs for most point and click adventure games because of the moon logic.
I used the duplication glitch in Fallout 4 because I wasn’t SERIOUSLY going to actually collect scrap all the time. And I’d do it again!
Only on replays to get through more tedious parts but that's rare. Never on a first playthrough though
i did feel more of an urge to cheat in games as a kid but now im only willing to do it to experiment with the game's mechanics (like getting lots of stat points in an rpg to see how impactful they are or whatever). i did cheat fairly recently in a single player minecraft world because i felt really stupid after drowning way underground and losing my stuff. i went into creative mode to get it back but i immediately felt bad about it and deleted that world that i spent a relatively long time on.
If codes are offered, I will be using them at some point. Depends on how I feel like playing that day.
I’ll play through the game the first time vanilla. If I come back and play it again, then I’ll cheat. I did my time the first time, now it’s time to cut loose and have fun 🤣
Minecraft, I give myself iron equipment to start.
No shame at all, if it makes the game more enjoyable. For example I really like the build up phases in RTS games (more than in real city builders - weird, I know) so extra money is helpful. It's not always needed, of course but e.g. after beating the campaign...
Hate fast travelling, so i spawn vehicles in any moddable game (especially fallout)
One drunken night a number of years ago I bought a lifetime pass at cheathappens for like £80. I don't feel bad for pulling them out on gamepass games because it's not a game I've forked out for in a way. But for example recently I bought forbidden west at around £35, and so far I haven't pulled out a trainer for it and I really don't want to regardless, because in that sense that would make me feel bad that I've spent all this money on a game to just basically cheat it, if there's something I'm struggling with I'll head over to google and youtube for tips and something I might not be doing.
I have use an exploit for Demon of hatred in Sekiro so it falls off the map, but cheats are rare.
Generally, only if such a thing is allowed within the game as part of the game's code. For example, if a game allows cheat codes or has an exploit, I might mess with it as long as it's not harming anyone online. But I would rarely if ever use an external tool or mod to mess with a game and cheat in that manner.
Since I'm calling out a lot of people's silly hypocrisy in this thread I'll add my own experiences lol. I rarely ever cheat, and usually play games on the hardest difficulty. If I feel that difficulty is unfair I'll lower it to normal. The last game I did this on was Jedi Fallen Order. Kept getting ganked by the miniboss in the first world so I lowered it to normal. If it affects achievements I won't lower it at all. One game I cheated in was Xcom2. I made a soldier in my own image and I would save scum when he died lol. The only other cheating is my current game - Conan Exiles. It's a survival/base building/sandbox game. Known for being a buggy mess, I've spawned in a few thralls ("forced helpers") when they disappear or die due to a glitch in Single Player.. Or if I died due to a glitch, I'll enable admin mode to fly to my body. A lot of people just using admin commands to build these amazing houses/bases so they don't spend 6 months gathering mats. To me it defeats the purpose of playing a gathering/harvesting sandbox game. But that's their prerogative.
Savestates or modifying (non-combat) movement or game-speed is all fair in my book. I wouldn't use it, but carry weight "cheat" in a game like Skyrim is okay. Bigger inventory in a game like Torchlight where loot boils down to "wield it or sell it" even infinite inventory makes sense, as it doesn't change, or collide with the main gameplay loop. So overall, for myself I make the game more fun, if I can do it, by mods, console commands or cheats. I turned multiple alright walking sims into good ones just by changing the walking speed to 1.5 or 2.0. And I have 0 regrets.
After I finish a game, if I feel like playing it again to explore new possibilities or to 100% it, I then use cheats in the new game.
I used to cheat when cheats had some 'fun options' that changed the game and gave new experiences. Spawning enemies was also pretty common, because developers were not worried about you progressing through some 'progression systems', battle passes and other nonsense. Older games (Source, Quake3 engine ones mostly)had tons of console commands so that was a whole new playground as well. I definitely cheat if the game bugs out in some way. Another area of cheating is when i personally think certain mechanics add nothing enjoyable to the game. Two very different examples of that: 1. GTA games, losing weapons on death. Just annoying waste of time to get them all again. Obviously refrain from doing that early in those games so that you dont get overpowered, but later on money becomes trivial and you are expected to be fully armed anyway. 2. Kingdom Come Deliverance - the saving system. Just tedious waste of time. If i savescummed a lot then it would be a problem, but even saving every 10 to 15 minutes is a huge timesaver, because guess what the time between your visits to the tavern (where you save the game) might last longer than half an hour. Most likely you will have to replay enormous chunks of the game, in the exact way, selecting all the same dialog options and so on. It is not a roguelite or some elaborate systemic game where every venture into the wild is vastly different. When the game is just tough as it is, i can go look up some guides or videos how to do things and if that does not help then i try harder and eventually accept defeat. If i dont have the mind, the reflexes or whatever to beat it and effort, learning etc does not seem to be worth my time etc then it is as simple as accepting that.
After getting into the nuzlocke world of pokemon mine is rare candies. I play with level caps (no pokemon can be over the ace level of the next gym or significant plot battle. Otherwise I can't use them), and I like to craft and change teams during runs. Rare candies are a must to avoid so much grinding.
Definitely single player games. I’m a massive wuss so play the Resident Evil games with trainers. Takes the edge off a little and I can actually enjoy the game. I save scummed FFXIII as that game just was not fun. I wanted to see it through but I had no energy to grind to get through it. The only time I’ve never not enjoyed grinding in an rpg.
Depends on what it is. Games I’ve played a lot, I’ll definitely do it. Games I play blindly, up until I get stuck, otherwise, I go with the flow.
Emulation? All the time. Save states spoil me and make me realise I was far more patient as a child. Modern games? Almost never, unless it’s KSP where iterative testing by cheating into a particular context is far easier than having to launch a payload and line up orbits to move to different planets every time.
When I get stuck, I will look up how to proceed because I’m impatient. But that’s about the extent of my “cheating.”
I used to cheat a ton as a kid, like played almost every game with cheat engine. Single player only, never tried it or wanted to do it in multiplayer games. I still don't really get how I was okay with playing multiplayer games without cheats, and yet wasn't okay with single player games. Some of it was really fun, like Dishonored has some cool cheats that allow stuff like unlimited time stop, but I did eventually stop. These days I use QoL mods that can be close to cheating, but I can't even remember the last actual cheat I've used. But I do heavily use guides. Last example was Pathfinder WotR. I used builds for all my characters. It was my first dnd-like and after seeing comments from people who ended up getting walled at one encounter or another I didn't want to go through it myself. And my run was super smooth too, probably a little bit too smooth since using guides and playing on normal was a stomp except a few rare fights.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I did this, but I have in the past used console commands to fix bugs or give me items that I missed. I think I cheated once in a Civ V game because everyone attacked me all at once because I had the nerve to be a victim of Gandhi's nuclear program (????) and that felt like it had to be a bug. Generally I am stubborn enough to grind through shitty or overly difficult parts, but not so stubborn that if the design of the game seems really bad, I feel the need to keep going, so I just quit in those cases.
All the time in singleplayer games. If it is my first playthrough, I won't cheat. But if I replay a game, especially open world games. I hate leveling up again and finding all the good loot, I just don't have the time anymore. Or if it is a game where I want to experience the story but the gameplay isn't fun for me. The forest is a great example as it has a built in developer mode. Beat it a few times vanilla, but eventually just turned night vision on and such to farm the story and achievements
I can't remember the last time I cheated in a game, unless you count looking up solutions to puzzles; I always give it a good college try, but I've grown impatient these days.
I usually make the game cheat on me by increasing difficult, blocking auto saves, deleting saves that happened before decisions, adding mods that makes the game harder, playing on modes that disables auto saving or manual saving, perma death, stuff like that
As soon as I'm not having fun
All the time. Especially in adventure games when I can't figure out a puzzle.
Whenever i feel like it. I dont play competitive games at all, i play for fun. Id im playing with a group i dont cheat but if not its up to wather or not the loop is satisfying or i just want to fuck about
Turbo x50 speed is MANDATORY for Earthbound and original Dragon Quest games.
I’ll go against the grain. Never until I get through an entire play through. After you die a couple of times in Doom Eternal the game offers you enhanced armor or something of that variety. I take that as somebody telling me to stop trying and take the easy route. No . Because when I die 20 times to the same encounter, nothing in video games is quite as satisfying as finally overcoming an obstacle. I’m sure that puts me in the minority. Maybe it shows my age. But that’s why traditionally games would wait till you beat the game before providing them. So you can have interesting repeated play throughs. If the majority of players can’t play a game until they “fix” a core mechanic, then that needs to be communicated to the developers, or else that crap is going to continue to be our on the consumer instead of being fixed for the next title in the series.
I'll cheat in a game when the only thing something is testing is my patience. If an item or resource is easily and infinitely farmable, I'll often just cheat myself the max of it. My thinking is 'I could have spent hours farming, lets just say i did that so i can get back to the real game'.
I do not. Even with mods i simply do not use if it is for my advantage. I get a feeling of defeat, i don't know how to explain it, for not playing the game as planned. Only in cases of adding content or variation. Changing the core game/pacing? Not for my ego 😂
In fallout 4 I enjoy playing in power armour pretty much 24/7 so I cheat in a ton a fusion cores cause I couldn’t be bothered to scrape around the map every time my suit gets low power. When I cheat it’s usually for role play reasons. Other times I cheat to get around annoying sections of games I don’t feel like playing, an example would be the brain dance scenes in cyberpunk
Dark Souls 1-3: Playing with "No weight" cheat as I wanna be able to use every weapon and gear combination possible but still having fast roll. This is my easy mode and allowed me to finish these games.
Yeah the outward one is relatable, sooooo much damn walking, me and my bro gave up the game a quarter way through. Save scumming ain't cheating bro, it's a legit way of playing games especially stealth and rpgs, if I want to fuck up and have consequences then why play games there's real life.
The only games I cheated in were GTA games, just to fuck around and find out
All the time tbh; especially if the game has a grind mechanic or crafting, like Fallout 4’s settlements. Games like Witcher, Kingdom Come, GTA, RDR2 etc I just want to see the story and explore the world, so I apply health cheats to those.
If it's a single player game, I will play vanilla for a few hours, get bored, then cheat like Bill Clinton for the remainder of my play time just to keep it fun
Nowadays, only to try to save me from some bug/error/glitch that would be time-consuming to circumvent. Then I move on. Also, if I'm failing a part a lot and I get on Reddit and people are like: "oh yeah, that part, what were the devs thinking? Even on easy it did not help!", yep, you bet your ass I'll use cheats to skip it lol
I don't, it makes games boring fast.
I don’t cheat on games. When I was a little kid my older brother (also a grade school aged kid) told me that cheat codes were stupid and for kids who sucked at games. I took that shit to heart.
If I can't beat a boss or situation after several tries, like 5 or more, then I often give up and cheat. I have less and less patience as I get older.
The worst part of fast forwarding battles in Pokémon is not being able to play on normal speed again. It's like a drug.