How Was I Supposed To Know That?!

[Moonface]

So I was finishing up my NG+ run of Dead Space Remake today and had a wonderful moment where I reached the credits to find a trophy I expected to earn didn't pop. The trophy is one where you get an alternate ending for finding all 12 marker fragments in NG+, so when it didn't pop my assumption was I must have missed one without realizing.

I reload my save file, and open a guide to check what one I missed. Turns out I didn't miss any. Instead, what I missed was backtracking to a room in the game where these marker fragments get placed, and I missed it because nothing indicated I had to put them anywhere. Needless to say, it ticked me off to redo the entire last chapter of the game for something I wouldn't have figured out by myself. 

It's not the only time this game has screwed me this way. There are two data entries you can only get by doing what is essentially a cheat code, the pieces of which are scrawled on walls throughout the game except you'd never notice them without prior awareness they are parts of a cheat code and even then there are two codes and so you have to then figure out what parts belong together and in what order. Another thing I wouldn't have figured out entirely by myself. 

So yeah, those are my recent experiences with things in a game where I ask myself "how am I supposed to know that?!". What moments do you guys have like this?

[Maniakkid25]

There's an achievement in Tales of Vesperia where you have to interact with every save point in the game to get it. However, there's one save point hidden off the camera at the beginning of the game BEHIND YOUR FACING, meaning you have to actively ignore what the game says to do and head backwards in order to reach that save point, and complete the achievement.

Been playing a lot of SMT Nocturne, too, and that game has special fusions that are only possible by fusing certain demons together, and the game just straight up doesn't tell you. Well, correction: it DOES, but only by the cryptic hints of demons you please by them randomly approaching you and asking for handouts. My favorite are getting the Fiends, because this requires doing a normal fusion with specific races at certain phases of the moon (Kagutsuchi -- whatever). Oh, and then there are specific fusions that require sacrifices, which can only be done on the full moon, when an accident is most likely to occur! As an example, Amaterasu can only be obtained by fusing Take-Mikazuchi with Yatagarasu and sacrificing Ame-no-Uzume. If you know a bit of Shinto mythology, you can get why Ame-no-Uzume is necessary, but god only knows what Take-Mikazuchi and Yatagarasu have to do with anything! Thank god someone preserved the Heretic Mansion app so that I can just search this crap up...

[Moonface]

There's an achievement in Tales of Vesperia where you have to interact with every save point in the game to get it. However, there's one save point hidden off the camera at the beginning of the game BEHIND YOUR FACING, meaning you have to actively ignore what the game says to do and head backwards in order to reach that save point, and complete the achievement.

I feel like I'd manage to find that save point by pure luck because of how many platformers I've played that will hide something off camera in the opposite direction you're intended to go at the start of a level. Unless I can see a clear wall/obstacle preventing me from going a certain way I never assume there's nothing there in games anymore.

Been playing a lot of SMT Nocturne, too, and that game has special fusions that are only possible by fusing certain demons together, and the game just straight up doesn't tell you. Well, correction: it DOES, but only by the cryptic hints of demons you please by them randomly approaching you and asking for handouts. My favorite are getting the Fiends, because this requires doing a normal fusion with specific races at certain phases of the moon (Kagutsuchi -- whatever). Oh, and then there are specific fusions that require sacrifices, which can only be done on the full moon, when an accident is most likely to occur! As an example, Amaterasu can only be obtained by fusing Take-Mikazuchi with Yatagarasu and sacrificing Ame-no-Uzume. If you know a bit of Shinto mythology, you can get why Ame-no-Uzume is necessary, but god only knows what Take-Mikazuchi and Yatagarasu have to do with anything! Thank god someone preserved the Heretic Mansion app so that I can just search this crap up...

This sounds like the sort of obscure experimentation FromSoft would do with the expectation players will share the info with each other as is the case for practically anything they put in their games that doesn't just slap you across the face with an answer or hint. Elden Ring alone has so much stuff I wouldn't know without looking it up that I feel like I'd be here all day just listing it all off.
Like, I get it, they're seeking out the sort of old school game mentality before the internet when everyone would share shit with each other in school playgrounds or whatever and you never knew what was true or not, but I wish they wouldn't make so much obscure stuff missable if you advance the game too far or whatever. I hate being constantly concerned that an NPC quest is going to fail because I've done something else that shouldn't have been done before advancing that quest, which is something the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC does to a horrific degree and even has a moment where you can fail quests just from exploring too far into the open world with zero warning it'll happen (and it isn't even from crossing a clear trigger point either, it just happens at a certain distance into the world).

I kinda wonder how a lot of the older games back when cheat codes were a thing expected players to discover the cheat codes without reading them up in magazines or whatever.

[Maniakkid25]

Well, that's the thing about cheat codes: most of them aren't meant to be discovered. Cheat codes (which is to say, codes that are either actively typed in on the controller or use a specific set of characters in a keyboard in game, rather than unlockables) are the remnants of debug tools meant to help fix a game. They're meant to help in testing certain aspects without having to go through the entire game to do so. They are then left in for players to find beacuse removing the code would mean having to debug the entire build again. This is the same reason why we see content that is "Dummied Out": it's simply easier to just remove the path to the code rather than remove the code itself. It wastes space, sure, but you could end up with a situation like Super Mario Galaxy, where a single mushroom being removed crashes the game without fail, even though it's not accessible.

[Moonface]

Huh, I never viewed cheats that way before and now in hindsight it feels super obvious they would be used as debug codes to quickly get to the point in a game that currently needs testing.


Also, your post last night reminded me of Crash Bandicoot 4 and some of the horrible off-camera shit they pull with crates and gems in most of the levels. One of the most egregious though was this hidden gem. You literally can't see the wireframe box outlines to know there's an ! crate to activate, and you can't see the ! crate no matter what due to it hiding behind a piece of level decoration you'd never think to go behind. I missed this gem so many times because of this garbage approach of constantly hiding stuff in this cheap manner.

[Maniakkid25]

Here's one that's sort of relevant to the topic, but it's a hardware problem! See, in Final Fantasy 15, Noctus is an avid fisher, and one of the key side games is fishing at random spots around the world. It's really cool...unless you have ANY kind of peripheral plugged into the console, otherwise the minigame just breaks and its impossible to fish anything, and there is no cue to tell you what is happening! I found this out the hard way with Guitar Hero Live control plug-ins, but it breaks for pretty much any kind of third-party peripheral. Nice! Good job, SqueEnix