Watched a video recently, and one thought still sticks in my head. That we can choose our own path in games, basically building it.

Yeah, simple thought, and the video itself was about how you don’t have to beat every game to 100%, find every “question mark”, do all quests, etc etc etc. And also — don’t grind through hardcore secret puzzles if your head already hurts from the regular ones (note to self).

This is true, especially for modern big RPGs. You’re supposed to roleplay, and instead you end up doing literally anything but that. Or you drop the roleplay altogether and become a jack-of-all-trades. There’s also a game design issue lurking here — you’re supposed to be looking for Ciri, or finding a way not to die in Cyberpunk, and instead they throw Gwent and side quests at you.

What caused all this? Open-world mechanics, achievement-hunting culture for 100% and platinum, all that “oh, you haven’t really played the game.”

This makes me think of old games I played before the internet era: no quest markers, no hints, just play what you found, until some friends said: “Did you know about…”. Everyone can have a genuinely different playthrough.

Another example: sometimes you get to play as a different class, or you can only join one of three factions — that changes the whole playthrough. You can replay it and go a different route, and it’ll be a different game, even though a lot of content will be the same. Or you can stop and tell yourself: that was my character, and that was their path.

You could push this thought further by adding difficulty level into the formula. Want a challenge, want to feel your character weak and struggling to overcome — set it to hardcore. Want to feel all-powerful — set it low. The experience ends up wildly different.

Again, everyone does their own thing and picks the playstyle that suits them. But lately I catch myself thinking about it more. Because of that, I try real roleplay, rejecting some quests and more often choosing to follow the main story — usually the best written part of the game (though there are exceptions here too). I could ease difficulty to become a real god of war or just skip the whole act because I’m already overpowered.

I can drop the game with a feeling of having beaten it, because that was my choice.