10 Video Game Tricks Players Fall For EVERY Time
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a dozen times, shame on me.
By and large, gamers tend to be a perceptive and adaptable bunch who learn from their mistakes and know what to do or not do when engaging in specific genres. The more familiarity they have with the medium, the more attuned they probably are to certain video game tropes and tricks.
That said, even veteran players can be continuously fooled by age-old clichés, deceptions, and the like.
Now, these treacheries can appear in any aspect of the experience – mechanics, storytelling, visuals, characterizations, etc. – and they can be crafted by developers or cleverly invented by a shrewd and sinister userbase. Either way, they routinely throw people for a loop despite becoming increasingly predictable as time goes on.
Just look at the nearly dozen examples we’re diving into below, as each and every one of them represents an all-too-frequent way players get duped while playing in some of gaming’s most popular virtual worlds.
Whether they’re ruses related to plots, gameplay, or graphics, they encompass 10 video game tricks players fall for every time (with spoilers)!
10. Out of Bounds Enticements
Tons of gamers know the feeling of walking, flying, or driving toward something enticing in the distance and then being blocked by an invisible wall.
After all, even the biggest open-world landscapes need to establish boundaries without breaking immersion. So, developers decorate the borders of their environments so that they blend seamlessly into the background but are totally inaccessible when players approach them.
At times, it’s obvious that these areas are meant to be seen but not touched; however, there are countless RPGs, action-adventure platformers, and first-person shooters – among other genres – that consistently make people think they can explore areas they can’t.
For example, there are bridges in Grand Theft Auto releases that appear usable but aren't. Similarly, there could be islands, mountains, and roads in modern Legend of Zelda, Fallout, and Final Fantasy entries that you spend a long time moving toward before getting stopped by an unseeable blockade.
What’s more common and cunning is when someone is blocked by a barrier that's within an already playable and populated area. For instance, suddenly not being able to walk across a street or go into the woods.
At least some developers do inventive things with their invisible walls, such as having an actual hand pull SpongeBob SquarePants back to the nearest checkpoint if he ventures too far off the proper path in Battle for Bikini Bottom.