Wiki Games

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[tobyk]

Rain World is an actual masterpiece it’s so so good. I am so happy I only searched things up like twice. I actually figured out the base hidden moves (sliding, rolling, flipping) by myself and stumbling upon the Depths before seeing 5P gave me the most amazing and intense sense of wonder ever. Favorite game of all time

[pixelcat_yt]

Rain World needs more recognition.

There's also a community aspect to those types of games. It's incredible to be in the community of people who are the first to play a game and watch and help them discover some of the more obscure things to be documented.

[prototypelq]

I certainly agree about the developers patronising players a lot (mostly in AAA games in my experience), but I don`t feel like the 'wiki' game-style is the needed countermeasure here. Wiki games are the different side of the same coin, except this time player themselves decides when to look up the solution to their frustration (and these games bring out a LOT of frustration)m and I don`t think this solves the problem, not really. The balance of letting player figure things out themselves and helping them gain new information is extremely hard to nail down properly, personally, I haven`t played a game that does this well.
Hollow Knight is not so much a wiki game, it just has a gigantic world map, and some things can be accessed with only one path available, so of course some things are very missable (I`ve never discovered the nail smith and upgrades on my blind playthrough and got fed up with Watcher Knights, then started a run with wiki help, also, I didn`t discover Cornifer for the longest time and was crawling around by memory alone) The solution here would be to make more routes to the more hidden content (perhaps multiple locations for essential npcs) or give some clues to them even existing.
Rain World is a.. difficult beast in terms of giving out information. Personally, I became interested in game because of the ecosystem structure and advanced AI of it`s characters and enteties, to me this is like an animal sim game. And the result very much satisfied me, I got the safari I wanted. However, I don`t think I would ever play it for more than a couple of hours because the game just doesn`t promise much to a new player, and feels very directionless. The fact that the world of the game does not care for the player is what makes Rainworld special, you can`t throw that out, but I think they could have made made Iggy more helpful, or the plot locations shoud have been more accessible. I would not step inside Shaded even for a second if I had the chance - and when you play blind you don`t have any incentive to go through those horrors, and, you can, in fact, just go back and never return there. Boom, plot of the game sucessfully avoided.
*on the note of Shaded, say it with me: Pitch Black locations are bad game design, because if the player has had no prior experience in the zone and it does not test their memory skills, it just makes you suffer needlessly and it is a very cheap and dirty tactic. The only good example of this is in Echoes of the Eye in Outer Wilds, because the player does learn the layout first, then their knowledge is tested in the dark (and with some changes of the zone)
On the note of Outer WIlds - even this masterpiece doesn`t fully success in giving out inforamation to the players in my experience. Some solutions give you right in the face clues in some cases (spells out a solution for the Giant`s Deep), and sometimes the solution is to just... stand still, even when the entire mechanic of the planet is a a huge and unexplained force of nature that moves everything around. I didn`t figure out 2/3 key place solutions without the wiki (the clue for the Deep - I went inside the room, just saw an icy ravine and went back, I didn`t even see that there was a clue). The fact that I couldn`t figure out the solution on my own is entirely my mistake, however, the way I see it is any game that makes me go to wiki has failed to give me out the relevant information, and that is a design flaw too.
I am a curious but not very patient person, so I have a tendency to go to wiki to understand the things I didn`t, and, as I said, that is my partially my fault for spoiling the decisions to myself.

In any case, a great video on some great games!

[joaoful]

Never thought about wiki games this way, even though I have played most of these and enjoyed my time reading the wikis dry, I always thought of the term as pejorative, and that I was the only weirdo that liked reading about the game as much as actually playing it haha

[HinnerkHesse]

Thanks so much for that topic!

I love to be careful and only read very few articles on wiki but get shown tiny mysterious keywords and then from time to time you "unlock" them by allowing yourself to read about it as soon as you encounter somethint connected to it..

It is so satisfying, I feel like this is so immersive somehow because it makes the games feel real, not like "just" games.

Also, my favorite wiki game is by far Terraria!

[Salmonwithfeet]

Fextralife wikis have so many stats on them it makes me so happy

[aarepelaa]

I actually got the howling wraith upgrade in HK on accident because i just read the thing for the king soul, and bruhho moment it didn't do what i wanted, but it did something even better.

[krakahar]

I don't know if people agree with this, but I'd personally consider Elden Ring to be a wiki game. Yes, there is the cave of knowledge that gives you a tutorial on combat and other things, but when you get into limgrave it stops holding your hand and never takes it again. There's so much ways to level up, so much bosses, so much areas, and none of it is explained one bit.

[davidko]

amazing game choices, amazing topics, amazing videos! one of the very few times i turned on the bell ^_^

[nat-rkzs]

i love how much your editing is improving from video to video!

also i like what you said @ 5:00 about games putting you in your character’s shoes. it’s such a common tactic used to form a connection from player to PC, but i think that very few games actually get it right. i wanna make a video about how gone home does this but i can’t write 😓

also also im going to pick up rain world cuz of you!!!!

[TKsh]

I love wiki games. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Fallout have a lot of information, characters and events between the lines and since I like lore, wikis are great for understanding more about it.

[TheMagicalNam]

Thanks for talking about the topic, have a good day

[hxy]

Amazing video, great points. I’m inspired to play Rain World as well. Only gripe: statistics disagree with your statement that players don’t like to be patronized. Unfortunatey, a quick look at the most popular games tells another story. The norm is 500 tutorial popups before letting you even try doing anything.

[Fractimago]

I love wiki games, the only one I find hard to play is terraria as that game literally has too much in it! I still don’t find that a bad thing, it just makes things super tedious.

[Fillanator]

I agree with this but not with HK. I got 99% completion on my first savefile (didn't use the wiki) but I very much agree with tboi (my friend with a dead God file would agree wholeheartedly)
ROR2 is sorta a wiki game but its not as bad as TBOI. I didn't find HK a wiki game at all and I'll die on this hill. (Some friends did give me tips tho)

[generalgrievous]

Hollow Knight is definitely not a wiki game. The Dream Nail dialogue for the Abyss Shriek area says, "our voices will cry out again", hinting at the use of Howling Wraiths. 2nd, no room is really useless, why would there be a pedestal in an empty room with several shrieking faces unless to imply that something must be done there

[carolinaschneider]

Hey my guy! Great video! And I don’t want to go around making accusation’s, but there is a video REALLY similar to yours by genbear that seems like he has plagiarized you

[tarquinioprisco]

for god's sake, don't play undertale like a wiki game lol, so many spoilers lay in ambush