why kind of question is that? are you 15?

-Internet is dial up and pay per minute. Mom and dad get you 4-6 games / year. You don't have infinite games you could be playing otherwise
-A game that you enjoy takes 50 hours and still has tons of hidden shit to find if you want to keep exploring. Great!
-If a game is designed around giving every player 100% then there are no mysteries, nothing to reward curiosity/exploration, and nothing to make your playthrough *your* playthrough
Nothing was worse than getting a game that only lasted an hour and had no replayability unless it was specifically that kind of arcadey game.

>>12716034
>and nothing to make your playthrough *your* playthrough
My playthrough is my playthrough, I don't need dumb things to make each one unique. That's what leads to useless choices, contrived multiple endings and every game wanting to be a roguelike

>>12716013
>i saw the requirements for the Knights of Round Materia in FFVII and it feels like no one back in the day would have gotten it. Why do that?
Lol you're not understanding how easy it actually was to get. The game fucking tells you exactly what to do if you just talk to a dude in the mountains, it's then just pure grind to pull off everything you're told. It was barely 'hidden', it's like the devs thought up a bunch of bullshit, then realized that, yeah, barely anybody would actually find that, and then copped out by basically giving you an in game guide for it all.

Elden Ring is like, way, way more insane with all the obscure bullshit it has. From's post Demon Souls games make most older RPGs look lightweight.

You're underestimating how many hours were sunk into games before mainstream internet and video guides. Of course you had magazines, game guides and some scammy phone lines. But other than that, if you didn't know someone who already had the answer you were sinking potentially hundreds or thousands of hours into a single game. And it was more satisfying because hidden stuff took on a mythical status because of rumours etc.

If a developer is motivated by passion, and wants players to have the best experience possible, there's little reason to skimp on something so relatively inexpensive that can potentially have a large impact. At the same time, in-game tutorials were more of a rarity. There needed to be some method of motivating a player to not just stick around, but to put in effort, care enough to learn the mechanics, and maybe even read the manual.
The possibility of finding a little-known secret is compelling. If a developer was known for including such content, or if a playground rumor got around, it was that much more motivation for everyone - developer and consumer - to get their money's worth.

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It would take hours upon hours to stumble upon the gold chocobo through experimentation; the chocobo sage doesn't really tell you much.
KotR isn't even particularly useful because the game is so easy, unless you're doing Ruby and Emerald which weren't even in the orig JP release. The summon animation takes almost a minute and a half, It's just a cool reward for going the distance with the chocobo stuff. "Hey Timmy, look at this! I bet you don't have Knights of the Round."
It's convoluted and not particularly fun to get if you've gotten it before, all 4 of the reward materia are cool to mess around with, but not remotely necessary.
...If you want to do it quickly, use this to get the golden chocobo (required for KotR):
https://chocobo-guide.mikestomb.com/
and be sure to know the trick for stamina regen in chocobo racing (hold R2, iirc).

>>12716357
>thousands of hours into a single game
That's way rarer than you'd suspect. Online games give way more incentive to spend that much time with them, random single player console games weren't getting close to that amount of play time.

>>12716396
I'd always assumed that Yuffie has a prosthetic leg below the knee and I still have no clue what is actually up with the sleeve or why she has it.

>>12716568
People spend all kinds of hours on those type of competitive online games like Dota and CS. On the other hand, if you were a poor thirdie shitter like me you might have had 10-15 minutes to play a game per week between your multiple jobs. So it took me years to beat some games legitimately. That was some good value for money. But it would have taken me weeks to beat these games if I had more time, and I would have felt it was not a good deal at all.

Things like knights of the round is achviements before achviements existed
It only exists as a cool reward for doing a side quest

>>12716417
>the chocobo sage doesn't really tell you much
The amount of information he *didn't* tell you is minimal. He even talks about the hidden island and how to locate it. Yes, it takes hours, but that's mostly because of the chocobo races and all that involved.

It’s always fun to unleash it on Sephiroth when he’s in full One Winged mode.

>boo hoo why put something only 0.1% would see
That's exactly how you end up with ONE difficulty level setting (extremely easy) and a corridor simulator with yellow markers everywhere and developer tears that the playtime is sub 2 hours so refund policies in stores should be reviewed.

>there is no incentive
>think of the shareholders
More secret content, more non-linearity, more rewards for exploration is how you make the game have more playtime, and how you incentivize people to buy strategy guides or call consumer hotlines for extra bucks or leverage collector obsessiveness to buy multiple pokemon copies.

The death of this was the advent of achievements not tied to ingame, so the act of buying the game is now buying achievements, and the customer is robbed if the achievements are not "easy".
Then there's the modern audience that thinks buying the game is buying the entitlement to experience all of its content regardless of skill level, mistakenly conflated with consumer rights to experience a game without on disc dlc to give it the veneer of a noble demand, so then they parrot shareholder points about how much content per dollar they should get. For these, secret content, ultra hard optional challenges, substantial story branches requiring effort (modern audience hates that) is now "robbing" the modern audience of some of their $60 percentiles, and all of the content should now be exposed in the main playthrough. Alternate play styles that rewarded exploration are only allowed as puddle-deep open worlds instead of iceberg-deep towns and fields.

tl;dr fuck off with your modern audience plebian tastes

Knights of the Round is so bad ass. Man, I really loved a lot of the summon animations in the game. My last playthrough, around 2012, I committed to 100% it and getting everything and taking down the weapons. As much as I love the game, I haven’t replayed it since 100% it but damn did it feel good. Fuck ff9’s extra content tho, I’m content w just playing the game on that one.

Think only 20% of players make it past the first level in any game, they should just only make the first level and maybe the second level for completionists. This way nobody is at risk on missing on the content, you can get 100% achievements faster, and we can move on to the next game! Imagine all the games we could claim we have beaten!

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>>12716574
I thought it was a wooden leg AND arm, which was kinda cool, like a crippled secret ninja. Would've fit her as well, being a mental cripple already.

>>12716013
The number of people who played through FF7 completely blind in the 90s would have been the minority of players. People bought guides, read magazines, and looked up FAQs on the internet.

>>12717387
T.wasn't there

You can get KOTR without doing any chocobo racing you know

>>12716013
Games were made by real humans with passion, not by a committee.

the main hump of game development is the scaffolding and major features, once you have that done iterative content falls into place or at least in the time of low fidelity assets. trying to scam people with unfinished games is just going to create marketing headaches. also arcade style games were borne out of multi thousand dollar business investments so extra content on top wasn't an unreasonable expectation..