Cheating has helped me enjoy gaming more
Justifying my poor steam purchases......
I’m a gamer with very specific tastes, mainly I like space games, but not horror, so I don’t get a lot of games that are made for me that often, and I’m fine with that, I’m quite a busy person.
But as someone who spends a lot of my time consuming media I can quickly fall for the hype of a game and on my weaker days or a steam sale, I end up purchasing games that I don’t end up enjoying.
Some key shout outs have been Elden Ring and Stardew Valley.
For Elden Ring, I knew it wasn’t my type of game, I don’t enjoy that type of combat and whilst I like fantasy, I don’t particularly like their darker take on it. However, the constant stories of the open world and hidden secrets and myriad of awards it got give me the major FOMO, so I added it to my steam Wishlist and when the FOMO got too much I succumbed to the purchase. Of course I tried to give it a go and quickly found that the mechanics were not particularly fun for me and put it down.
A year or so passed and the FOMO started to rise again, and I thought to myself, I think I’d like to just explore the entire landscape without the fear of dying and the mechanics aligned to that.
Next stop was Nexus mods and I found an invincibility mod, installed the mod on my SteamDeck (easier than I thought), started a new game and was able to easily sink fifteen hours of exploring and story without the fear of dying.
Stardew Valley is another one of those games that the FOMO drove me crazy and I must have started the game about five or six times and gotten bored and stuck every time, i’m not someone who can juggle the multiple responsibilities against the clock and trying to build a long list of things I must do everyday, it daunted me and I felt myself losing interest every time.
But with the press and launch of the 1.6 patch the FOMO kicked in again and I redownloaded the game again on my SteamDeck. This time, the power of a hangover helped me play the game for about eight hours straight, and at that point I got a better feel for the game and a greater understanding of what parts of the game bugged me.
Once I had that knowledge I shot on over to Nexus Mods again and got browsing for the right mods for me. Of note where mods that allowed me to have my crops be watered automatically, time to be frozen in the mines, relationships never degrade and have the annoying fishing game be skipped.
With those quality of life improvements in place, I was able to play at my pace and in a blink of an eye twenty hours went by.
Fundamentally games are something you acquire for your entertainment and I believe if you pay money for it, it’s yours to enjoy however you want, regardless of the developers intentions. Of course this should be for your benefit and not the detriment of others, I do not believe in cheating in multiplayer games (I turned off multiplayer in Elden Ring). Video games are the only entertainment medium where you can be prevented from enjoying a specific part of it because of your ability and skill, so I fully support cheating for your own benefit, and of course beware that all out cheating can ruin the experience for you, so its up to you to find that balance.