Have you ever felt frustrated in a CoG game?

As much as I love Fallen Hero, there some choices there that just make no sense to me. But at least in that game, I have several opportunities to overcome those choices with ones that do make sense. There is one choice in particular at the gala as you are about to reveal yourself, where you have to decide what to do with your puppet. One of the choices is Who cares whether the puppet lives or dies. I chose it thinking it would increase my Ruthless stat, but instead it was a big chunk to Anonymity. After thinking long and hard, I saw what the author was going for, but I definitely felt it was a bit misleading.

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This is a pretty good example for you

Otherwise, I could mention a few more examples like Saga of the North Wind, where cunning isn’t always the intelligent choice and charisma isn’t always the choice which involves talking especially towards midgame, or Diabolical, where it’s pretty damn hard to distinguish which one is the tech choice when nearly all of them involves some kind of high-tech villainy.

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SOH is very frustrating with the attunement loss. Yeah theoretically you don’t need to have 100%, but it still feels bad to not get the message “attunement increased”. (Became nearly unbearable in book 3 just because it was so damn long. Do you know how often I restarted this game?) I can’t read minds and if all the answers are so similar I don’t know which supposedly should fit my character.

Heroes Rise: Hero Project is in many ways frustrating, from the actual mechanic with the roles (again a case of shouting at the author: I can’t read your mind! That there are guides needed to stay in role is not a good thing!) to the story and MC’s forced passivity…oh and that terrible forced love triangle with BM and Lucky. That was so annoying. I hated that game really. (Now guess how much I liked Redemption Season Spoiler: Not much ).

I love Community College Hero but in this case too the role system frustrates me, in this case it’s at least obviously which answer fits which archetype, but damn I want to roleplay that character, not just stubbornly hit the same kind of answers everytime, people have different facettes and adapt their behavior to fit the situation… I just headcanon that my MC is bad in pretending to be somebody else and hope I won’t miss too much stuff. (I know in my main playthrough I missed much because my intuitive way to play doesn’t seem to fit into the expectations unfortunately, but it certainly leads to much replayability, so still a win somehow.) ^_^"

Game that frustrated me the most however is Wayhaven for varius reasons, most being that I just can’t get into the MC and that no matter how I play them it really makes no difference. I honestly think the game would have benefit from just not having any stats. That way it would have been much more easy to ignore if MC is “ooc”. That was more frustrating for me as just feeling like I can’t relate to the MC (I really wanted to gift them some brain…). I really was interested in seeing how the romance with A and F would have played out, but not enough to ignore my annoyance at the MC. So I stopped playing. Don’t think I will try again if I don’t know that the next parts will make it hugely better (and in that case I still probably will just skip part one).

And that was in no particular order the games that I remember as annoying me the most. Possible that there are others, but those are the ones I remember right now the best.

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I wouldn’t say angry, but I sometimes lose interest and can’t really explain why…something about the story getting confusing, and feeling like I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to be doing. I got like this with Samurai of Hyuga - loved the first game, but the second game, I stopped playing partway through because I just lost the thread entirely! I might give it another try at some point. (I was also mildly creeped out by a potential underage love interest? or something, but again, just couldn’t figure out what was going on with that.)

I’m ok with a game being kind of novel-like but if it doesn’t really capture me and I feel like I’m not “playing” a game where my choices make huge differences I tend to kind of passively lose interest - Fatehaven is a good example of that. I can see why people like it but it wasn’t really for me.

I’ve never been like “Grrrr why does this game exist, I don’t like it therefore it’s trash” the way I’ve seen, cause pretty much everything that hasn’t worked for me has its fans, and taste is super subjective.

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2xs: If one of my playtesters had mentioned that during the playtesting, I definitely would have had a ruthless/anonymity split. I see your point how it could be seen that way. That was a mistake on my part.


One of the things I find the most frustrating in games is short demo chapters. Most of the ones I have tried have been so short I have not had time to get pulled in, and thus I never felt the need to continue. Also, it makes me suspicious that the game itself is short, and that’s why they won’t dare to show too much.

I think there are probably games out there that I would have bought if I had been able to keep playing longer before getting the payment option.

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That example was just fresh on my mind from playing your amazing story. But really my biggest pet peeve is when RNG is used, second to that is when you can’t successfully complete story if you don’t follow a precise decision tree. One thing l liked about your story was I didn’t feel pigeon-holed to follow just one path to success.

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When the phrasing is misleading on top of the game being railroading.
If I see stat that make thing ‘oh, if I had this higher, maybe I can do this thing instead’ but nope, it will always fail cause the plot demands it… gtfo.
This doesn’t include greyed out choices greyed out to increase tension and atmosphere building. Those are frustrating too, but they’re okay.
No, I mean choices/scenes that play out the exact same no matter what you do, even when the choice-bodies, the stats etc make it sound like it.

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I just started playing The Lost Heir, and christ it’s hard to pass the stat-checks… :cold_sweat:

Kind of irritating me atm.

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For me it has to be choice of rebels it just feels like a chore to play for me anyway and a few other games.

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Happened to me too. The first ending I got pissed me off so much I stopped playing for a while

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Yes, mostly mandatory appearance custom that never even comes up later. Especially annoying when you have to play through a game multiple times, because there’s no save system, and you want to explore a specific path.

That tends to irk me rather quickly.

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Do you mean the persona stat? (Like jokester/charmer, etc?)

I really didn’t mean for that to be limiting in any way; it’s not like there were any penalties for having a high or low persona. Can you elaborate a bit?

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It wasn’t really limiting, but it felt a bit like I was supposed to min-max it and that was a bit “meh”(I think I remember being worried about this more when trying out the demo for CCH2 however, because - I think - where was at least one scene in which min-max was needed to get some flavor text, instead of it just being orientated on the highest stat, what annoyed me a bit. I very soon after that dropped from the face of earth and the forum basically, so I don’t know if that did change or not, but it was mostly a minor thing tbh). It also was the easiest thing for me to pin point. I think it’s a bit a personal preference for me to dislike this kind of approach to personality stats, too, so it’s the one thing I mentioned first.

The missing stuff with my intuitive playstyle part was mostly separated from that issue though, I think I may should have clarified that and is mostly based on the choice deciding which of the three main branches of the game the MC ends up with, also because I don’t think there was a way to change it after that one decision and influenced hugely which characters the MC would end up interacting with what could lead to the curious situation in which the MC rarely sees anything from 90% of the characters that end up building the main cast and still could end up getting pursued by a character that in the mind of the player had two conversations tops with the MC. That was pretty weird and let the MC feel very isolated from anything that happened and - worse - the part of the cast that was involved in it.

:thinking: Thinking about it more in depth (and replaying the game to make sure) I guess the way the branching got handled actually was the thing that frustrated me the most with the persona stats being only a bit annoying, but while writing the first post I did only remember that I was frustrated while playing, but not about what exactly, but the persona stats seemed like the most likely culprit. So, my bad. Sorry for that.

“A wise man once told me you can never have too many mules @Eric_knight.”

“Sir, we lost 4 mules in the latest atta-”

“MY MMMULLLEESSS!!!”
weeps

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Well… I tell you a strategy , because that’s the one i use since i am leading a zero looting and zero robbing rebellion :wink:

sell one mule, and beg for more mules from the start, the selling of mules will brought you enough food…but of course you can only bring back moderate foods that will not attract the attack from authority , repeat the process… selling mules (depend on how many food you lacking) while begging for more mules, since i am also hunting the bears …it will help my rebels survive the winter without looting, basically it was smart merchant trading…beg for excess necessity so that you can sell it to finance other purposes :slight_smile:

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I just remember one thing, at the end of CCH 1… that Captain California who came to rescue us threaten to fail me if i don’t allow him to scan my secret… i chose not obeying him because i thought knowledge is power , i don’t want to expose my secret…but the scene made me feel that he used some device to force me reveal the secret anyway …and i still got a D… so i was like , what was the purpose since we didn’t have choice to alter the outcome anyway? might as well just replay and obey him in order to get an A since we won’t hide our secret from him anyway? :slight_smile:

but otherwise, i enjoy it very much…

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oh god, yes.
the first game for me was Paradox Factor. I loved this game. I loved my wife and two kids or one kid I don’t really remember. I didn’t cheat on her, I tried my very best to save them and no matter what I did I just couldn’t do it. So I spent nearly five hours trying to save them. I began to think that I was losing my mind. Seriously. But then I did one magical thing - I looked into the code of the game and oh MY GOD. I uncovered this ending with ‘Paradox is you’ thing and cried a lot, but still. God it was frustrating.
then there is, of course, Lost Heir Trilogy. I loved the game, genre, stats, characters - nearly everything… and I I lost every time in the second part, when I was taking city. No matter what I did - I lost this battle. Then by the miracle of God I saw guides in the forums and they kinda helped me, but some of them were outdated and stats were messed up and… so even with guides it was difficult for me to end this game. Also because English is not my native language it’s doubly difficult for me to understand the nuances in battles and… yeah. Hard.
Magikiras. It was insane. I tried time after time to save my partner who was taken by some aliens or whatever and I couldn’t do it. She blew up, or I had to kill her, or someone had to kill her, or she killed herself. For that game I lost… many hours. Four? Five? Ten? God, it’s painful to even remember this.
The Wayhaven Chronicles. Someone said it before me - I didn’t like my MC. Sometimes I could make a choice that I would have done under normal circumstances, but sometimes, it seemed, my heroine simply forgot about who she was and acted absolutely without looking back at her stats. I loved the story, but this is just… ugh. And I watched enough Japanese anime to find out the stereotypical harem. And it’s definitely a game on the list of such harems. I have nothing against people who like it, but … it’s not for me.
Empyrean, the Eagle’s Heir and Cannonfire Concerto. Oh hell yes I was frustrated by these games. Even if I didn’t want to save people, even if I was trying to usurp power for myself, my MC would still trying to do some noble and very stupid thing. I was trying to kill the traitor? Yes, of course I could do that, but what about my eternal soul? Could he be changed? Why, oh why should I kill the man who could be a new Einstein? Why would I want to kill my best friend? Huh? Wait, how could you not love your Heir? What? You want to kill him to save the country? But he is your best friend! How dare you! etc. Not cool, guys, not cool.
Demon Mark. oho. Well I was mostly frustrated because it’s kinda ridiculous to see american point of view for our legends. Ridiculous and… well, this game is just wrong about our folklore on so many levels I can’t even count them all. Good try, tho.
Choice of Rebels. It is a great game! A shame I can’t finish it. At all. Even with guides and looking into the code. Oh, but I am still hoping to do that… someday.
Tally Ho. It was surprisingly difficult for me to reach ‘good ending’ with this game. No wedding, of course, but the secret community did not want to enlist me in their ranks. Or dogs bitten me. Or I was put in jail. Or someone else was put in jail. Or the peacocks did not choose me at the end of the game. Seven hours I spent to achieve a more or less successful ending, but I’m still unhappy with my result.
So… yeah.

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In Magikiras You can only save Morgan at the end and get back together if you chose that she was taken by the soldiers instead of the aliens during the train fight. She will always die if she was taken by the aliens.

I don’t think revealing the secrets will have a real effect later. If you look at the code all it changes is your grade, there are no other variables that it changes. So unless the game is changed it won’t affect CCH2/3 in any way. And they didn’t force you to reveal them if you refused, you simply walked out.

As for the grade you get a D but there is an achievement for not revealing secrets so it’s something. I had 2 A grades and 1 B so I could afford to refuse and still get 3.0 GPA and the achievement at the same time. It won’t affect your relationship with Nil either so you could still get the Nil pet achievement without revealing any secrets at all.

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I have some A in the first test ( i think)… but did very bad in the final test …Lol, the only saving grace is that i had high relationship with Tess , i chose to reveal my identity with her and support her as leader