I got you. Nowadays I would look at the UI of a game first before jumping in. If it looks too complicated I just pass. My job is already complicated enough, I don't need to make myself more stressed when I just want to have fun.

I like to just jump in and wing it, learn on the fly. Actually hate playing with people who expect everyone to "have done their research". Games do build on top of knowledge of previous ones, to an extent... but it's figuring out the rest what gives me a thrill.

As for complicated games, I think you forgot World of Warcraft... which I can repeat to you what I told someone who called it a game "for nerds": according to their IQ, 2% of the world population are "gifted", there are 8 billion people, WoW had slightly over 10 million players at its peak.

In an ideal world with equal opportunities for everyone, you could expect a potential audience of 160 million "nerds"... so yeah, some games are going to be more difficult that candy crush.

When you have a lot of experience with games, you find that most things follow common trends and tropes. Like if I open a new shooter it’s a safe bet that shift is gonna make me sprint and things like that.

In Baldurs Gate specifically, it’s basically Dungeons and Dragons in a video game format, so if you know Dungeons and Dragons already that is a huge head start.

I used to be into brainy games. When life gets busy, I tend to enjoy simpler games that are easy to put down.

MMOs require a lot of time and effort.

I think some games require you to be a bit ADHD.

Generally I just start playing. If the game keeps my attention and I keep playing at some point all the various character abilities, what is valuable or not and managing items just clicks. And some days I just don't feel like figuring stuff out so I play games I am familiar with.

Sounds to me like you just don't want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don't either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads

BG3 specifically: It's D&D 5e, so... yeah It's gonna be complex.

Complex systems more generally:

The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You'll never learn everything at once, so don't try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you've carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don't even need to care about whether you'll understand everything eventually.

First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it's almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.

A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the "Send to camp" option for items. Grab them whenever, they don't take up inventory space.

Destiny

When I first played I had a wiki open on my second monitor for about the first month I was playing.

Love the game. One of my favorites. And the artwork and music are second to none.

It definitely has the worst onboarding experience ever though.

BG3

It does have deep systems. But you can just pick what feels right to you and the game will accommodate you.

It's a masterpiece.

Yeah, I'm with you and it's keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It's a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That's not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that's less than a month for a full time gamer, it's about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It's frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I'll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I've got that going for me.

There are tons of games that don't require that sort of knowledge base or study investment. It's a minority that do. But you're on Lemmy. This is a self selected community of extra thoughtful nerds. This community is more likely to be excited about games with homework than your average gaming community. I do genuinely love the research part of complex games. I like crafting builds and planning battles. I loved both Divinity Original Sin games and will love BG3 when I get there.

But sometimes I do just want a game for my hands to play while by brain takes a break. That's why I spent most of the summer with Earth Defense Force 5, a 9/10 space insect exploding experience. Highly recommend it if you don't want to fuck with the details.

Games like Baldur's Gate assume you have at least some DnD experience. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time long ago and being really glad I played one session of DnD before it.

IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur's Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.

However, if you want to study the mechanics, you can also consult the D&D 5th edition rules. BG3 follows most of them. https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/DnD_BasicRules_2018.pdf

Insanely deep rpgs are a bit of an issue for me as well. And I generally do love rpg games, but I feel like the good ones should ease you into decisions a bit better than dropping you into a character creator.

So it's a mixed bag for me.

For me, it's a combination of "just jump in and wing it" and building on top of working knowledge from previous similar games. But I'm very much a "learning while doing" person, so if I tried to research how to play a game first, it's not like the knowledge would sink in. I build up a working knowledge by jumping in and trying stuff out, and a lot of knowledge has at least some cross-compatibility between games of the same genre, even if the game mechanics are a bit different. As I play a lot of games with my partner, we're often both learning a new game at the same time, and you'd be amazed how often we'll have a conversation that can be summarised as "I've discovered how to do X. It's like Y from game Z, except you do A instead of B."

When the game allows for it, I always play on the easiest difficulty setting while I'm learning, as that makes the game more forgiving of mistakes. There's no shame in playing on easy mode, even for serious gamers. :)

Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.

The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.

Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you've gained from prior experimentation.

Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it's an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren't particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.

A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.

Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.

Never played destiny and never will, but deep rock galactic, overwatch, and baldur’s gate all have mechanics rooted in other games. After playing a few other ability-heavy shooters with slower onboarding, OW and DRG make sense.

Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun. I get analysis paralysis pretty badly (I'm the guy who is always worried he will be out of consumables when he needs them so he never uses them in the first place!) so researching a little beforehand helps me enjoy myself more. I don't need to min/max the fun out of a game, but knowing I'm on the right track is really good for my enjoyment levels.

And this is very much a me thing, and that's okay. We play games to have fun so play the way that's the most fun for you. If you don't like doing research before you play, but the game seems to require it, then play something else. It's okay to not like a game. (I wasn't super into BG3... shhh! Don't tell the internet or they will burn me alive! Good game, but not for me.)

Personally, I really like rogue-lites these days. They're games where you are meant to replay them and every run will be randomized in some way so that each one ends up being unique. (Hades, FTL, Nova Drift, those sorts of games.) The randomness makes it so that there's no WRONG way to play, just better or worse choices for a given run, which takes that "stress" of making a wring choice away for me.

You gotta find what floats your boat and don't worry about the other games.

I think Larian Games do very little to explain their rules to the player. I, too, found it incredibly frustrating when I played Divinity: Original Sin and later, DOS 2. So while I didn't carve out time from my day to learn the ins and outs of Baldur's Gate III, I did have experience with the other two games that helped me navigate it.

I adore these games but it took many hours of training for me to understand what it was I was even supposed to be doing.