"Wait, I can do that?"

[PatrickXD]

On my third play through of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I realised that you can simply activate Silent Footsteps and Cloak and sprint through any room. Yeah, it kinda stopped being hard at this point.

 

[thelonewolf266]

This was my friend actually, but he played through the entirety of Dead Space without knowing about stasis.

Aren't there some puzzles that you need to use stasis to complete and so you can't proceed through the game if you don't?
Unless he just didn't know you could use it in combat.

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

My friend genuinely thought portal ended when glados puts you in the oven

That's hillarious. It's not even like they give you a special ending there.

 

[wottabout]

Less extreme than other people's, but for some reason I didn't try to flee battles in FFX. I just assumed that there was some sort of consequence for fleeing, so I immediately put the option out of my mind and fought everything. I got a lot of experience, but I am sure that I would have gotten through things much faster if I hadn't gone through so many pointless battles.

 

[RamirezDoEverything]

I kept myself in the dark to everything related to Skyrim and sorta went through the game like a mad man granted I sank in over 200 hours and counting but it wasn't until 150 hours in or so I found out the game has fast travel, yeah so I quickly realized that my 200+ hours are easily brought down to 30 hours at most.
No wonder I wasn't liking this game like everyone else

I'm guessing you've never played the Elder Scrolls before?

I'm guessing he's never played an RPG before...

I kid.. I kid..


OT: Age of Empires 2:
I spend so much time sending raid after raid of battering rams at the enemy's walls, only to have them slaughtered by cavalry and towers, I found that after advancing to the imperial age, you could build trebuchets.
Trebucheting the fuck out of everything from far away is so much easier.

 

[FateOrFatality]

Dragon Age Origins, the final fight. I didn't realise there was a few ballista things sitting around you could fire. I died so many time before that...

Also, like others I didn't discover Skyrim's sprint button until many hours in. Only reason I did was because I'd just been playing New Vegas before, using a sprint mod mapped to the shit key. Was so excited when I accidently tried to sprint, only for it to actually work.

 

[iLikeHippos]

When I realized you can hold down SHIFT in Warcraft III to order units in a linear order. Such as, "Build that Farm now, than go back to mining."

It was such a pain to play Humans up until that point. And no, this isn't taught at any given point.

 

[irani_che]

My friend genuinely thought portal ended when glados puts you in the oven

That's hillarious. It's not even like they give you a special ending there.

I facepalmed myself into a coma
he thought he had done something wrong and re-played it wondering why glados was still mad at him

he thought it was done as karma for the companion cube

 

[feeback06]

I love playing JRPGs. For those of you who remember FF8 and FF9 and the like, probably remember the tutorials for weapons and equipment, various powerups and gems used to do this or that...And I remember when I was 12 when I got my first console. I got Final Fantasy 8 and barely paid any attention to the instructions, partially because I was impatient, partially because I didn't really get it (mostly because I wasn't willing to take the time to consider the meaning of the words I was reading), and partially because I didn't think it was important (12 year olds, think they know everything).

Imagine my surprise when I'd come up to a boss I couldn't defeat and I didn't understand why. Hmmm maybe it's the fact that you haven't upgraded weapons or powers dumbass. So imagine my further surprise when a few years later I'd replay FF8 and find that it's actually quite simple if you just read the tutorial and pay a sliver of attention.

I had a moment like that in FF 8 too, on my first play through I didn't know how to use the GF ability boost until I accidentally hit select during a boss fight in Ultimecia's Castle.

 

[Plinglebob]

Looking at this thread, I think the mystery of why FFVIII is such a love it/hate it game has been solved! Thankfully I had a mate who'd played it before I did so he helped me out a little re: Junctioning, but I remember in FFVII essentially making things up as I went along regarding Materia as didn't have much of a clue.

More On-Topic. I was playing World Of Warcraft for almost 5 years before I found out you could eat and drink at the same time. As a healer class I rarely needed to eat and if I had to do both, I just did it one at a time or used buff food (which restored both health and mana). First found out when it showed up as a loading screen tip. Not quite sure how I had not figured it out and be in 3 raiding guilds without anyone noticing.

 

[megamanenm]

Legend of Dragoon, I never figured out what a certain item did, whenever I used it on an ally it did nothing. It turned out that this was the revive function pretty much. So I actually beat the entire game without reviving a single party member. I had so much fun fighting bosses with insta-kill attacks

In my defense I was about 10, it was my first RPG, and I couldn't read English very well at all.

 

[Spy_Guy]

There's a sprint button in Skyrim! O.O

This blew my mind when I first realized.

IT BLEW MINE TOO!

I noticed that there was a blocking perk that mentioned sprinting, so I checked the control menu and nearly yelped. This was 50 hours in.

After finding it, like 20 whole minuets later were dedicated to running around the place in joy knowing I no longer need to mildly jog around the whole of Skyrim. X3

...or constantly getting mauled by sabre cats.

My bro came in and went "you know you can sprint, right?" and I was like "Bwaaaaaah?"

My first moment like that was in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I didn't know you could attack Queen Bean's arms in order to make her drop her crown and be vulnerable to powerful attacks... so I just used hammers for one damage per hit for the entire battle.
Then I saw the following video:


As I said back then...
Fail on me.

 

[Jonsbax]

When I replayed Silent Hill 2, only to discover that you can control the camera a bit by pressing L2... Probably would have helped a bit to end frustration, even if I played through the first time without getting close to dying, had enough ammunition to turn 50 elephants into Swiss cheese, and enough medicine to make 50 elephants OD.

On that note, it appears that no one realizes that in SH2 and SH3, pressing both sidestep buttons makes the character do a fast 180.

This is IMMEASURABLY HELPFUL on a low-kill run.

Wouldn't it be easier to just turn the movement control to "2D"? Since that basically makes the game control like any action-adventure game, meaning James just walks at the direction you press with the stick, allowing for quick and precise turns unlike the 3D (aka. tank) control scheme.

I used the tank controls only after finishing SH2 and 3 both at least 3 times, just to give the games a bit of a different feel and some minor extra challenge.

 

[Dys]

I kept myself in the dark to everything related to Skyrim and sorta went through the game like a mad man granted I sank in over 200 hours and counting but it wasn't until 150 hours in or so I found out the game has fast travel, yeah so I quickly realized that my 200+ hours are easily brought down to 30 hours at most.
No wonder I wasn't liking this game like everyone else

I'm guessing you've never played the Elder Scrolls before?

Morrowind never had fast travel (the silt striders/boats where, but they still forced a reasonable level of exploration).

When I realised that not destroying the AI eyes in AI war made me not die horribly it was a pretty big discovery.

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

I found out after quite a while in soul calibur 3 that you could actually guard against colossus' attacks. Made it much easier to fight him, though the experience felt somewhat cheapened...

A giant statue whose fist is larger than my body, yet i can block his attacks so that instead of taking damage I just flinch? No, something that big should plow right through my guard and give me a thorough smack down for even trying such foolish shenanigans >.<

I mean, you can dodge to the side and circle around his feet, so it's not like it's that hard without being able to guard, his attacks are even in slow motion.


... oh well.

 

[Hattingston]

Didn't know Morrowind had a main quest. Just explored, still spent dozens, if not hundreds of hours playing though (xbox). Never did find the main quest.

 

[Ddgafd]

I played through Red Dead Redemption and never noticed that you could buy ammo in stores.

 

[Ziame]

jedi outcast. pillars in last level. squashed boss. reaction of mine:

Spoiler

 

[TitanAtlas]

Half Life 2 Ravenholm....

The first time i played that section of the game... i didn't knew anything, barely had ammo, and the fast zombies scared the shizzles out from me.

But then i discovered i could hide under the saws for example... or make cars drop on zombies... or even shoot the fast zombies has they are climbing the pipelines of a building...

Ravenholm became much less scary... now i just do it has easy has everything... but in my first time passing through... goddam...

 

[illas]

Any new Mario Kart game yields the following revelation for some: "wait! you mean I can fire shells backwards?!"