About a month ago at our friends' wedding, I was talking with Himo about Dark Souls II which in part got me into thinking again about blind playthroughs; thinking about how I played Dark Souls and watched "Dan Sucks at Dark Souls" over on Extra Credits' "Side Quest" series. I feel like this idea crops up every so often and with the recent release of the Switch game Octopath Traveler, the concept of blind playthroughs has gotten my brain churgling once again.
Over the last couple of weeks, especially on the Nintendo Switch subreddit, there cropped up at least every other day a post about the characters in Octopath Traveler, with headlines and links to find out all you could about each of the characters. Even the most recent demo that was released allowed for up to three hours of gameplay before it cut you off. I was reading about people trying to play through the demo as fast as possible trying to get to as many of the characters as they could before their three hours was up. In my opinion, this is no way to effectively play a story driven game, and kind of harkens back to my article about speed-running, or at least the aspects that I do not like about the reasoning why some people speedrun.
And it seems like it is not all about getting as far as you can as fast as you can in the game, but presenting that information first. This fascination with being the first to reveal information is far from new, especially in the video game industry (because I obviously know what I am talking about in regards to the video game industry), and when it comes to revealing that information about games that have yet to be released, that is something that while I fully recognize, is something that I do not fully understand. And it most likely predates the first "First!" Youtube comment too.
Maybe it is akin to min-maxing in that the more you know beforehand about a character, or a games mechanics, or the end game, the better your character can be. The first time this concept really hit me was when I was talking with TheSauce about character building in Diablo II. He had mentioned needing to restart the game after realizing that he had put skill points in the wrong tree/slot either late in the game on accident or realizing that an early acquired skill now has no purpose for the direction of the build of the character. The same goes true for leveling up your character in the Dark Souls games. When you are playing for the first time, trying to figure out what all of the abilities and stats do and how they affect weapon loadouts and armor type may not be figured out until after you have been playing for 10+ hours. I saw a number of articles about this same practice regarding PvP character builds in The Elder Scrolls Online. I am going to move on as I feel like I already covered this a bit 1,598 days ago.
So, if you have not been able to tell by now, I like to play games as blindly as possible. Sure I might watch a trailer or read an article about the development of the game, but I will try my darndest to stay away from articles or videos that go into depth with how to better play a game, a character's history, or really anything else that you might normally discover while playing the game on your own. Sure, with Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls, I have dived (dove? doven?) into the lore of the world after playing through the game because in both of those worlds, there is some information that is pretty far out there (thanks Kirkbride). And as recently as Fortnite, I have looked up where to find the treasure maps (after spending a couple of matches looking on my own) in Risky Reels and the Flush Factory, because looking for a map while trying to avoid being killed by other players and the threat of the storm can play havoc with my treasure hunting abilities
But in the end, I guess it really all just boils down to playing the game how you want to play. If you want to find out all the backstory about all of the characters in Octopath Traveler or determining how each and every one of your souls will be spent in Dark Souls II before even turning the game on, then that is what you are going to do and some Rando on the Internet is not going to change any of that.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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