Put 30 hours into Skyrim, occasionally getting level up message, before I realized there was a skill tree and you actually had to go and choose a stat before you got any advantage out of your levels.
As a stupid 7/8 year old I couldn't figure out how to catch pokemon on red/blue. I just figured that if I kept playing the game I'd eventually acquire pokemon(similar to the anime). I wound up playing the entire game with a charizard and nothing else.
It was brutal. Imagine my surprise when my friend showed me his team of 6 pokemon.
I started playing Pokémon Red before I even knew how to read. I had no idea how to save and just assumed I would find a save point eventually like a bunch of other games. I have no idea how many times I dejectedly had to turn off the GameBoy halfway through Mt. Moon. I was convinced the save spot had to be on the other side.
When I first played I didn't know what Pokemon centers were. Everytime I needed to heal I ran all the way back to Mom's house in palette town
Skyrim. Was well into the game and was walking everywhere instead of using fast travel.
I played Valhiem early in its launch for like two weeks on my own server. Once I finally got my friends to join they were dismayed as to why I had dozens of broken copper pick axes in storage boxes.
I had no idea you could repair things and kept mining barely more copper than was needed to make a copper pickaxe.
The game got a lot easier after that.
I beat the original dark souls without realizing there were different weight thresholds for rolling. I fat rolled the entire game. Also didn't realize boosting vigor was important for hp. I did 99% strength/stamina and only as much dex as required to weild my weapons.
The stats like strength and stamina have a cap too after which they don't really add anything.
When I was a kid, I used to "play" Operation Flashpoint. I remember being too dumb to realise that the mouse was used to move the camera so it was basically me moving around with arrow keys and strafing to see a little to the left and right.
Ah yes, the transition point when video games moved to assuming people have a mouse. A similar thing happened to a lot of people when games assumed you have a soundcard.
One of the first computer games I've ever played is StarCraft. For context, the game is about human battle with aliens similar to Starship Troopers. The game story has three acts, each from different point of views. It is supposed to start from human pov, and then alien pov, and lastly another alien species. However due to English being my second language, I somehow started with the alien pov first. So my first impression of the game is that I play as a disgusting xenomorph alien species battling mankind. It's not until later that I realized I missed an entire human chapter of the game.
I played through a fair amount of Sniper Elite 2 before a friend saw some of my gameplay footage and was like "Damn dude, you don't even zoom your scope in?"
Turns out I'm just bad at reading instructions...
Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I was almost done with the game before I realized you leveled up in camps and inns. Game went from really hard to pushover easy in 5 minutes.
Really? I didn’t do it on purpose because I knew it’d fuck up my fun with the game. And I was right. Friends told me it was too easy for them and meanwhile I was micromanaging everything. This had the neat effect that, once I had the perfect setup, I even finished the superbosses easily.
It's extremely easy to entirely not understand a huge amount about that game because it outright doesn't tell you most things, at least not very well
Bloodborne.. totally ignored that the gun is there to parry attacks and stun enemies on my first playthrough attempt
oh damn, that's one of the most important gameplay elements!
Though I remember Bloodborne being super obtuse about teaching mechanics
I played through more than half of Red Dead Redemption 2 before I accidentally discovered there was a thing called dead eye for shooting. For some reason the game just assumes that you know the concept exist, since it isn't featured in the early tutorial missions.
I am pretty sure in Witcher 3 I missed like half of the combat features - flasks, signs, rolling lol.
I apparently fucked up my W3 playthrough by sleeping with the first person who wanted to fuck in the first act.
Not me, but a friend's mom, this was back in 97-98 and I had been playing the Diablo demo for hours and knew the mechanics quite good and the two first levels.
So I visited my friend and his mom had bought the game and was playing a lot, and she was quite deep down, I think like 15 levels down.. that's when I asked why she hasn't placed here last level up points.... Turns out, she hadn't placed any point at all 😱🤔🤣.
In LOZ: Breath of the Wild, I didn't think to check if you could use the Sheikah Slate on Eventide Isle (where they take away all your items and clothes). I'm proud to say I beat that challenge with ZERO tools!
In totk I wanted to explore as early as possible so I didn't know the glider was still in the game until I got to a tower without it. I just figured with all the new travel options they figured it wasn't needed anymore
Please tell me that instead of telling you that you need the glider, they just launch you and you realize it when you are in free fall.
I got to the point where Impa tells you to jump off the hot air balloon to check out the geoglyphs before I had the glider.
I thought this has to be the point where the game gives it to me because there could be no way they let me jump off the balloon without it.
Boy was I confused when I witnessed the hilarious first death in my playthrough.
Lol, I guess that part didn't make it through QA. Was there any water near by? That is the only thing that makes it survivable.
This is fairly recent, but I was playing through a good chunk of Zelda TotK after the training area without the glider. I thought going towards the castle was supposed to be towards the end, so I wound up crawling up the great plateau to the old temple of time hoping to find it.
I was trying to play without spoilers, but luckily a friend set me in the right direction
The glider placement was a lot less obvious in TOTK for sure.
Similarly, I was completely ignorant about what the chasms were for until 2 days in when my friend casually drops that she's been exploring [redacted because spoiler markdown isn't working for me] and I went "Wait, there's a WHAT?"
I'd missed a pretty critical side quest and I probably wouldn't have noticed if my friend hadn't told me.
Times like these are when our inclination to ignore quests for later really bites us in the behind...
I also ignored them for way too long.
When I finally decided to drop down and discovered the old mine with everything else that place has to offer (trying not to spoil), I was a bit pissed for not exploring earlier.
It also took me waaaay to long to realize the maps are "connected" and so are shrines/lightroots...
Just randomly noticed it after probably 50 hours in-game
If you follow the side quest introducing that area, I think there's an NPC that mentioned that tidbit. Though, my friend didn't remember that until I brought it up too, so you may have just not encountered it.
I played Total War: Warhammer a distressingly long time before I found out you could pause
As an 8 year old without much of a guide at all, I was a very proud Magician on MapleStory... one who dealt violence with her trusty magic wands and staves... physically.
I didn't understand what skills and hotkeys were until several years down the line when reading comprehension and life experience improved.
Not a game but some of the stories here remind me of the time I discovered I could draw stuff on the screen with Omicron Basic on my Atari ST and I painstakingly entered every square by hand dozens of times to make squares move across the screen...until days later I discovered the magic of the for loop. I must have been maybe 10 or so at the time.