Metagaming or going blind

As the whole Pandemic deal has left most of us stuck at home I decided to make the best of it and replay some of my old favorites and pick up some play throughs I didn’t get to finish.

I have played some Wizardry 8 (rolled a new party and did the Monastery) Grimoire (continued an old play through checking out the 3.0 update) and continued Might and Magic 6 (which I dropped when switching jobs and didn’t pick up )
But caught up in a bit of Nostalgia started a whole new playthough of Gothic (currently in chapter 4) and Morrowind (fairly advanced in the mage guild storyline and going to meet the Ashlanders in MQ)

Honestly of all I have enjoyed Morrowind the most and it mainly has to do that even though I have played it before (at release 2002 and then 2010) I have found out I had forgotten quite a lot of the game world itself and since I never did the Mage Guild storyline a lot is very new to me.

Gothic on the other hand I replayed a couple of years ago so I had some more meta knowledge to carry me through like the “hidden” area at the start, not killing anything until getting the hunting and skinning skills, going straight for a very nice cache near road to the new camp etc

While both experiences have been quite enjoyable and having such a fresh experience of Gothic I could have very efficient character development I have found myself enjoying much more “rediscovering” Morrowind... even going as far as using mostly vanilla resources and trying to go as originally intended (with unofficial patches and ease of life mods)

Both are fantastic games, easily in my top 10 favorite RPGs of all time and experiencing them this way has been very rewarding but for very different reasons

So what do you guys prefer, replaying a game with all this meta knowledge to know what to do and enjoy that kind of experience, where the fun is from being so familiar with the game
or going for a game you haven’t played in years or are simply trying a very different path so even though you “know” the game you somehow have to “relearn” it again?

Since I replay the Stalker games almost every year (albeit with different mods and overhauls) and Dark Souls I kind of thought I was the kind of gamer who enjoyed the meta knowledge but this experience with Morrowind has been so rewarding I might try replaying games like Arx Fatalis, System Shock 2, Half Life 2 or some old favorites I haven’t tried in years

 

I very rarely replay games so definitely blind. I replay rogue-likes until I win.

I read the manual, make a party which looks cool, choices in character building and in dealing with situations such as combat are important because that's the point, I'm going through my own story with my own party, choices need to be there which does not mean I want to explore the choices I didn't explore.

 

It really depends on what kind of game we're talking about here, when it comes to combat focused RPGs where the whole point of the game is to win and crush your enemies i don't mind metagaming whatsoever, it's what the game wants you to do after all; on the other hand RPGs like fallout that focus on roleplaying a character, making decisions and exploring the world i tend to stay away from metagaming as much as possible because i think it ruins the experience, so i try to play with a "i only know what my character knows" approach and make decisions only based on what the character i'm roleplaying would do, and it's generally quite rewarding especially in RPGs with high levels of reactivity.

 

Blind easily for me which is also why I rarely replay games. Knowing the recipe for success just makes gameplay rote and uninteresting.

 

Meta considered harmful.

Seriously, all the good games are better played blind, all the "replayability" features concentrate on making subsequent playthroughs as blind as possible.
Probably the only exception are competitive multiplayer and sandboxy simulation games where there is little or no content to discover but gameplay mastery is paramount.

 

Hommlet blind killed my run 2-4 times

 

Hence "good games".

 

I thought in general games are made for blind playthroughs. What's the appeal of metagaming on a first run? Efficient completion? Early God-tier?

 

Metagaming is the best gaming.

 

Depends on how much the game hates me. If the game is designed around letting me experience it well blindly I will happily do so. If the game is one of those with high challenge and super obtuse mechanics I will read the FAQs for a hour before even creating my party. I enjoy both gameplay styles for different games.

 

If you learn a lot of that game before even playing it, you perception will be already set. Therefore you won't learn anything new, because your brain will already have an idea of what to expect. So everything that you'll see, will be shaped to fit into previously prepared scheme, an outiline. But you play video games (or read books or watch movies etc.) to learn something new, to challenge what you already thought. So it's always better to go blind. Metagaming is for cowards.

 

Also, playing games blind offset impact of the breakage and complex games like cRPGs are almost inevitably broken.
Games with hand-made content also tend to be broken by mataknowledge.

For example playing Morrowind with wiki and forum threads VS blind is the difference between rather mediocre game (with good world and lore) and having the time of your fucking life.

 

I like new experiences and getting surprised by games, and experimenting with different approaches. So blind all the way.

 

Metagaming is my reward after beating the game, the feeling of being more powerful and crush the enemies that bullied me so hard back then have no price, even if the game becomes a bit easier I feel that I owned it. But in my case that only works in combat focused games like blobbers, and I still make new maps instead of using the ones I made the first time, so I guess I go blind in that.

In other games like, ie: Ultima IV, I would want to do it blind as possible, because the whole point is to solve the puzzle and interact as much as possible with the game's world (luckily I have a foggy memory). But blind playthroughs have limits, with the same Ultima example I can't forget the location of one of the virtue stone that was in the overworld or the final word you have to write before attain avatarhood. Now, games like Falllout get rid of that problem with all the choices you have, until you take all of them.

 

Single player metagaming is retarded. If you feel the need to meta or looking online for help, the game is trash. Looking at you, Dark Souls.

Role playing is not about having the best min max retardation. Role playing is about escapism playing a role in a fantasy world. Spergs and autists claim that Skyrim "is easy and dumbed down" because it doesn't sport a bazillion of stats to min max, while forgeting that stats are secondary to role playing. Yes Skyrim is easy, you don't need to play optimally and break the game mechanics to complete it. The point is to be able to wear whatever you like and make the character into whatever you like and still enjoy the experience....

So, all in all, meta gaming is counter-intuitive to role playing. Meta gaming is excel spreadsheets. Meta gaming is work.

 

I like going in blind but I get punished in games that reward meta-knowledge like Pathfinder Kingmaker and then it sucks

 

Awww not work! Next you're gonna tell me that I gotta think my decisions through!

You're really making it apparent how you're living off autism bucks here buddy.

 

Define going in blind, I haven't ever played a (good) cRPG where I didn't restart 1-4 hours in. Gotta get a feel ya know.

 

By tradition and preference I'd go blind all the way but my issue now is with finding the time to do so for any but a select few games I know will be worth it. Metagaming of a limited sort can ease that problem without - in my compromising opinion - wrecking the experience. It's closer to meta pre-gaming where I try to find the general viability of skills or weapon choices (e.g. if I play scythe, am I going to find three worthwhile scythes through the whole game?) without spoiling references to specific events (e.g. X conversation skill check gives you a certain item useful for whatever build). Which is likely still a cop-out for some but I'd rather play a full game than lose enthusiasm after a couple of restarts.

 

You should have made an anonymous poll.

Instead you have a thread full of liars and fake news.

Nothing wins KKKs like claiming you walked your way through every game 'blind' without any use of Google, or maps, etc. This is a small-dicked crowd claiming otherwise, nothing more.

 

Pretty much this.

I'd say that ironman playthroughs, NG+ modes, solo runs in party-based games and unlockable difficulty modes often qualify as well, as a sort of an ultimate test of mastering a game. It's still more interesting if there are some variables at play, though, and you can't just meta your way past every obstacle.

 

Internet spoils the fun. I remember powergaming in Fallout 1 and 2 in the times when I didn't have any internet at my house. I was forced to figured out shit all by myself! Good times

 

So true! Today that magic is gone. Sometimes I can't help myself, I get lost in a puzzle or something and I no longer have patience to try to figure it out myself.

 

I metagame:

(a) missable content, I rarely replay games and try to be as completionist as possible on a single playthrough. For example, if I feel that advancing a chapter will lock me out of possible side-quests, I'll take a gander at some walkthrough just to see if I missed something.

(b) boring, repetitive, "collectible" content, I don't have the patience or the time for these, so I try to collect as many as possible and if I feel I have to collect them all, then I look it up.

(c) obfuscated systems that heavily influence gameplay. These are more common in japanese games, they range from whole combat systems being almost entire obfuscated, like The Last Remnant or the SaGa games, to non-core systems that still provide powerful bonuses, e.g. the map-building system of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I look all of those up because I don't want to spend hours with trial-and-error on systems without clear rules.