I don’t find shame in cheating in video games. It was a stigma to hear about growing up, that cheating in video games meant you prefer the shortcuts in life or that you didn’t know what earning anything was. When, that was all just bullshit talk.
I cheat in video games, when available to on some games, to give me a little kick of fun. Sometimes I don’t have the patience to tediously go through the standard way. Other times, I feel I’ve earned it anyways, because of having undergone the stresses and frustrations or the time I’ve played of certain games to go through the normal way.
Like in Terraria, it’s a game I’ve clocked in upwards of 900 hours. I felt like I had done everything in the game prior to the content that added the Moon Lord and many other things. At that time, it was 850 hours.
So the point of the matter is, yeah I don’t find it that big of a deal to cheat in video games. If I cared to and want to, I’m decent enough to handle games without cheats, given enough time.
Multiplayer of course I never cheat in those.
Almost never. I’ve stopped even changing difficulties for difficult boss fights. Gives me more satisfaction and makes me feel better at games than I actually am. If I die 24 times and manage to get it on the 25th, then at least I was actually able to do it eventually. Just more fun imo. No shame in it though, just a personal preference.
The one and only time I “cheated” at Elden Ring was to spawn in some DLC weapons (hand-to-hand arts and perfume bottles) for a brand new character. Not because they were overpowered but because I hadn’t used them on any of my previous characters and they looked fun so I wanted to use them for a full playthrough. And they were quite fun. Better than I expected too, but certainly not top tier weapons.
Of course I could have just asked a friend to drop them for me instead but it was easier to just “cheat” them in :)
Yeah, I completely understand that. Sometimes you’re not trying to bust your ass for some cool items, just easier to do that (idk if this is how weapons in Elden Ring work, haven’t played it yet). I used to allow myself to lower the difficulty significantly in Fallen Order for one specific boss, which, imo, is fucking awful, even on medium (Knight) difficulty. I replayed the game about a week ago on the highest difficulty, and while some sections were harder than others, I only got hit once and beat it on my first try. It felt good to beat everything in the supposed hardest possible way that was intended. Having fun is the only thing that really matters, and I think that a decent amount of people have seemed to forget about that.
Same here. I’ll intentionally play on the hardest difficulty (hell, sometimes I’ll find a mod that adds even harder difficulties if there is one) and don’t mind running boss fights 50 times if that’s what it takes to beat them. Just makes it all the sweeter in the end.
Though some games take difficulty settings way too far in lazy and unfun ways. Like when Oblivion Remastered came out, I tried it on master difficulty and quickly noticed I was getting one-shot by enemies in the tutorial and was almost unable to hurt them because I was doing 6x less damage and taking 6x more. I tried it for a while but it just wasn’t fun in the slightest so I lowered it eventually.
Oblivion is pretty unbalanced imo. It was a good game, but designed strangely. I personally think that difficulty should just be about the player taking more damage, not enemies taking less as well. Leveling up making the game harder was also interesting. Worth playing though. I think I started on the medium difficulty and stayed there tbh.
I usually don’t mind enemies having more health or taking less damage, but there’s gotta be a limit, and 6x is definitely far, far above that limit. Oblivion Remastered in particular was funny, because the damage multipliers only affect you. Meaning your followers or summons deal and take normal damage from enemies. If your sword feels like a wet noodle but your allies are doing just fine, something’s wrong. The difficulty sliders in that game were just poorly designed.
I think I eventually swapped to whatever setting is right above 1x damage taken/dealt. Fights were a bit too easy imo, but at least every mud crab wasn’t practically a miniboss.