Videogames That "Require" A Wiki

hey everyone, thank you all so much for the positive reception and encouraging comments. don't take this video at face value, enjoy and have fun with how you play games. that's it. nothing more to it other than that.

Going through a wiki can feel like reading ancient texts to prepare for your adventure. It can also be just giving up because you can't stand trying to figure wtf you're supposed to do anymore.

You forgot one of the biggest victims of this. The entire Pokémon franchise. How the hell are you supposed to know without the wiki that my grass rat only evolves at 3am in real life at 12:00 am in game when there’s a full moon and im walking on a specific tile in a cave in the middle of no where

Games like Stardew could really benefit from easy to implement, immersive, lore-friendly ways to look up information. Like, where do I catch this fish? Look it up in a fisherman's almanac or something, but instead when you first play you either google it or you randomly cast in every area at every time of day, raining and sunny.

Wiki games like Terraria, Minecraft and Skyrim actually kickstarted the curiosity in my brain and made me so eager to learn and research everything. Knowing every mechanics without consulting Wiki or Google feels so powerful.

Remember how you had to pick the right dialogue choice 5 or so times in a row WITHOUT getting any wrong in order to not get the bad ending in Persona 4? That’s honestly a perfect example of this

This discussion never fails to make me think about how old games used to come with physical manuals that would explain everything about the game to you, even the basic story, because it wasn’t always included in the actual game itself

It's even worse when they just have a fandom wiki and it's 5x laggier per tab nowadays compared to independent wikis

The first time I played Stardew Valley I spent the majority of a year and a half growing wheat, thinking that I was doing well for myself because I was growing exponentially more wheat (when I ran out of energy I just went to sleep)

This reminds me of another video I watched awhile back. Someone ranked how feasible progression in Minecraft would be without using external information. One of the big things was, they deemed figuring out how to get to the Nether to be nearly impossible. The only information you had would be the advancement info and the ruined portal structures.

With the Stardew Valley example, I don’t think it was the dev’s intention that you’re supposed to know exactly what every NPC likes and dislikes, where they go, etc. Although this information may “help you,” I would argue that it doesn’t improve the gameplay. Finding out what the NPCs like is part of the intended gameplay. I heard this quote once that was something like, “players will always optimize the fun out of a game.” Another example of this is the debug screen in Minecraft. It was never intended to be used by players. Only by the devs to.. debug it. One of the most fun parts of Minecraft is getting lost and finding your way back again. There are items in-game that can help you with this like the compass, but why make a compass when you can just press F3 and know your exact coordinates?

Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter nights have caused my distrust of games to the point i keep looking stuff up. "Ooops, you killed one npc 8 hours ago and saved over it, have fun restarting the ENTIRE GAME"

I will never understand how people ever played Minecraft without a wiki. "Oh yeah, naturally you make fishing rods with this amount of string, this amount of sticks, and in this specific crafting pattern. I love how you can craft anything you'd need, like if I need a saddle, its just leather and iron! Right?

This is exactly how I go from "I wonder what stuff I can do with this thing I found" to "so now I know every single thing about this game but I haven't even beaten the first boss yet"

You could argue thst some of these games dont necessarily need a wiki, they're just extremely useful. Anyway good video

Aha, finally someone else talks about "The Wiki Trap". Some games it feels fine because its just looking there to easier secret hunt for completion rather than leaving secrets as a surprise or challenge to find, other times its kinda awkward to have a lot of missable content that doesn't feel like secrets. The worst though is definitely how Minecraft and other similar games used to be, before the crafting book and before ruined portals there was basically not a single idea in-game for how to progress at a certain point.

The problem if you want to "see everything" in one play through is simple: If you want a game where your decisions make an impact or a difference, you will end up with a game you simply can not see everything in one play through, if you could, your decisions clearly dont have any impact

Guild wars 2 has a wiki function in chat. You type /wiki followed by an item, quest, character, etc and it will display basic info for it and a link to the official wiki page. For an mmo with seriously more to do in it than most, its suuuuper helpful

9,999 hours in paradox games is when you figured out the basics of infantry combat and politics. Now it's time for the fleet.

Risk of Rain 2 has a logbook that unlocks info about items, monsters, bosses/etc. when you use/encounter them. it doesn't give all the info you need, so the wiki is still helpful, but it also has tooltips that tell you what items do so you really don't need a wiki. As a dev I'd rather give players every single bit of info on how the mechanics work in the game so you don't have to wiki-scroll