Hello !
Today I'll share with you one of the worst thing that happened to me while I was playing a video game.
To introduce myself, one of my favourite type of games is RPGs. If you are making a game which has a skill tree and hundreds of side quests to increase you strength, then please give me a copy of your game right now because I'll probably love it ! ⚔️
That's a reason why I didn't play much classic games because since I'm young I mostly play to Bethesda's games, or similar, when I'm alone or online games like CS:GO when I'm with friends¹.
I never played to Halo for exemple, neither do I to any street fighter or final fantasy (I know it's a rpg but I needed to say it to someone) 🤐
In most of cases, I you can farm, it's for me :
The story I want to tell you takes place in 2016.
This year I was around 17, at that moment I bought my first LED keyboard. And now, I know that 50€ was way too expensive for that :
There was only 3 colors, so for me it was red all day long (in fact, it was mostly during the night, the rest of the time it was turned off).
But that was also the year, thanks to the sales, I bought and played for the first time to a Metal Gear Solid game, that was obviously the last one, MGS V, The Phantom Pain.
I really liked it, I has an open world, a tech tree which also works as a skill tree, the possibility to farm everything you want, from getting new "employees" to your mother base to stealing Tanks to the ennemies and obviously the most hardcore feature of this game, harvesting flowers and petting your puppy.
And the best of it :
Side quests, and they made it well because there is several types of side quests :
- The ones which aren't the main quest but sometimes you'll need to do it to unlock the main story. Which can also bring important new aspects of gameplay.
- The ones which only unlocks weapons blueprints or give high level staff or equipment.
- The ones which haven't even mission launchers, justs dots in maps and give you some money and ressources.
That is why I really love that game. You can do a lot of side quests to do main quests with a better weaponry, more abilities and with more experience as a player.
Now, let's start with my awful experience.
I was already playing the game for more than 50 hours. As I did a lot of side quests and spent a lot of time at just rolling in a car and visiting the Afghanistan, I wasn't really far in the game.
I remember that I unlocked the african zone and made some missions there. I captured some skulls, I may even have unlocked the portal fulton.
My Solid snake had a huge horn on his face and was always circled by flies. That's only after that story that I discovered that this is because I killed to much people..
At a moment, I thought it was because I installed mods. I know that sometimes it can corrupt the saves.
Normally, when you're dirty in the game, after you took a shower you're supposed to be clean², but here, after the shower I was still having the flies.
I was thinking that a mod did corrupt this and the shower wasn't working anymore. I was also thinking that always being circled with fly in exchange of a mod that allows the suppressors to have a better lifetime isn't a bad compromise.
A "second" bug came few hours after. Big enough to force me to remove all my mods. This was really destroying the game. 🤯
To move forward, I need to press "Z" (because I'm french). At this moment, when I pressed Z, it made me move forward. Then stop, then move, then stop, then move, to infinity.
I looked for answers to solve that problem as I always do, searching on the internet, but here, nobody never had the same problem. The problem may be something else than the game ?
I tried different things. Type "z" without lifting my finger of the key in anywhere I could type something, word, facebook m, Searchbar. It was ok, fluid, no pauses like it seemed in the game.
After all that searches I gave up, the save was corrupted. I just needed to create a new one. And obviously you can't have more than one.
I made it.
I came to my computer, launched the game and created a new save, and WOW... There still was the bug.
The first thing to do was to cry for sure. I just had threw to the junk more than 50 hours. That was really hurting.
After drinking a full gallon of water to compensate all the tears which I was now walking on, I started to look for more information.
I was really looking for answers for a week, I was at high school during the day, but at the very moment I came home, I started the research until I needed to sleep. I installed new drivers, some weird softwares to "clean" my pc. 🖥️✨
I'm really happy because I was so desperate that I downloaded anything that was looking that could help and I didn't download any viruses and didn't have to pay any bitcoin to get back my data !
When I discovered what was the problem, I just wanted to pass through the window. But I was in a house and at the ground floor. To be honest, my room was even few centimeter under the exterior flood. So.. it would just be stupid and will surely not let me hide from my stupidity.
Since the beginning, the problem was... The keyboard.
But, how ? Why now ? I played all the first 50hours with the same keyboard. How could that happen ?
With modern keyboard, there is always a "fn" key, that's useful for macros. On this one, if you pressed fn + T or N, maybe R, I don't really remember, that was changing the signal's latency. For just few milliseconds.
That really little change was too big for the game. So it was buggy when you are pressing a key for few seconds.
That mean that I just needed to press that couple of keys again, and it was ok. This problem, that could have been solved in less than a second, cost me 50 hours of my life.
Fortunately, that made me better, I'm not circles by flies anymore and the horn is now normally sized³.
Now I know that, sometimes, if someone says in a game that he's not shitty but his mouse is bugging, there is something around 0,01% chances that this is true.
¹ That also includes Mount your friends. Don't ask more please.
² This could seem obvious because, as I remember, I works the same in the real life. I'm sorry about that.
³ I know there is no normal size for a horn, you should not be ashamed of the size of your horn, they're all beautiful.