Simple things you didnt find out until much later.

[shortylickens]

I played Age of Mythology for a year before I learned the Colossus can heal simply by eating wood or gold. I used to hate having to heal them slowly near a temple.

I read the manual for Morrowind so I already knew this but I am amazed at all the people who never learned how to delete learned spells from their book.
Thats important as the game goes on and you need to clean up crap.

Of course with Oblivion you had categorized pages so it wasnt as important.

[Fanatical Meat]

Mine was Anarchy Online, I played it for about 9 month's and always struggled to find missions. The coorinates were super difficult to follow. Then I discovered that if you right(?) clicked on the mission summary it loaded it into your map and made it much easier to find the location. Pain in the ass but I kind of miss those gaming days.

[aaksheytalwar]

I didn't know this till now

[lavaheadache]

I didn't find out till I was 100+ hours into Skyrim there were "hot keys" that you could assign for weapons/spells/items. I knew you could in Oblivion but I thought they moved the feature

[shortylickens]

Originally Posted by lavaheadache

I didn't find out till I was 100+ hours into Skyrim there were "hot keys" that you could assign for weapons/spells/items. I knew you could in Oblivion but I thought they moved the feature

You arent the only one, a lot of folks were thrown off by the interface changes in Skyrim.

[Northern Lawn]

My first online game was America's Army 2. Even though you have to go through training to play on a server I was wondering why everyone could run faster than me. I thought maybe you had to level up. After like a week I asked in chat and they said you had to hold down the Alt Button to run LOL.

Oh, and then in Bad Company 2, I was getting real frustrated dying and having to run back to the front line over and over after a couple hundred hours my brother told me you could spawn on a squad mate. F***!

[Red Storm]

After 13 years of playing Age of Empires II, a month ago I discovered that you can have multiple players control the same civilization in a game.

[cmdrdredd]

Playing skyrim yet again I went back to the thieves guild to fence some stuff and I did not ever once think to go directly through the tomb. I always went through the ratways. Now I feel kind of stupid.

[Geosurface]

Originally Posted by Fanatical Meat

Mine was Anarchy Online, I played it for about 9 month's and always struggled to find missions. The coorinates were super difficult to follow. Then I discovered that if you right(?) clicked on the mission summary it loaded it into your map and made it much easier to find the location. Pain in the ass but I kind of miss those gaming days.

[Barfo]

Originally Posted by Northern Lawn

Oh, and then in Bad Company 2, I was getting real frustrated dying and having to run back to the front line over and over after a couple hundred hours my brother told me you could spawn on a squad mate. F***!

lol, I saw people doing this yesterday.

[Sable]

Accidentally pressed capslock while playing Skyrim and didn't know it made you walk. Had no idea wtf was going on.

[Ricochet]

When I first started playing COD4 on the Xbox360 I didn't know the zoom or auto-aim feature.

I knew some people didn't even know that you could fast travel using the overview map in Oblivion. That must have been exceedingly tedious.

[shortylickens]

Originally Posted by cmdrdredd

Playing skyrim yet again I went back to the thieves guild to fence some stuff and I did not ever once think to go directly through the tomb. I always went through the ratways. Now I feel kind of stupid.

That is weird.
Any time you had a quest the shortcut should have taken you through the back door.

[Zenoth]

I literally just learned yesterday about the "Search for similar Items" feature in Diablo III (right-click items to compare to similar ones at the GAH/RMAH). I literally searched similar items manually from the moment I started using the GAH (about two weeks after the game's release or so) until yesterday, filling up filters one by one and hitting "Search"... every. single. time....

That's the most recent one, but there's a good number of such "discoveries" I've made from older games even though I played most of those for months if not years. I have to say however that most of those cases are console games which I used to be renting many years ago. Because to be honest when I owned games myself there was very little that escaped my attention over time (but it did happen anyway).

One such "discovery" was way... way back (man I'm feeling old) when I bought the PS1 version of Command & Conquer (Gold). I had never played the PC version prior, and anyway... English not being my native language back then the manual (in English) wasn't helping me to learn about the game so. Yeah anyway, I learned pretty much everything over time, but there was one exception. I later found out (later... I.E. so much later that RA2 had been released and found out about it in RA2, but it worked in C&C1 or RA1 as well) that I could force-fire my units... not only that I could STOP an order I had just given my units (and also stop the force-firing).

Another one was in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. I've played that game to death from start to finish a good dozen times back in the N64 days. Then years passed (try something like a decade or so). Then back in around 2006 or 2007 I bought the PC version from eBay. I played again for nostalgia's sake (and was still fun anyway). At some point I saw some grenade launcher rotating on itself, up in the air near some pillars. I believe it was in the second level. I recalled at that point that during all those years I had never figured out how to get there.

Anyway, long story short... I played again (that level), walked around and eventually "discovered" some relatively hidden way to get there but it wasn't that difficult (and I did try all those years ago). It involved walking onto a barely-visible platform of energy or something like that, and that energy was visible (barely) only around your feet when you'd point the camera down, so you had to look down while pressing forward to see if the energy started to fade out to the left or right, so you wouldn't fall down.

But these examples are nothing compared to the list of most likely hundred such cases I'd have to share (especially in action-adventure games or games with lots of exploration and little spots and secrets to discover).

[cmdrdredd]

Originally Posted by shortylickens

That is weird.
Any time you had a quest the shortcut should have taken you through the back door.

Yep and after I finished all that I forgot you can enter there too.

[AlexAL]

In Deus Ex Augmented there's a keyboard combo that let's you do a fancy move from one cover spot to another. I forgot about it until near the end when I saw it in a youtube vid.

[Carson Dyle]

Loud music and loud sounds destroy your hearing.

I have tinnitus now. It's loud and it never goes away. Imagine hearing an annoying siren in the distance or a stuck car horn from a car parked out on the street. Constantly. When you wake up, then all day and then as you fall asleep at night. You can't turn it off, you can't yell at anyone to fix the damned thing, and you can't go anywhere to escape it.

Game related? Yeah, probably.

[waterstain]

I was 76 hours into Fallout 3 before I thought to look-up the flashlight key.

And it certain would have been handy to use a couple hundred times! …

[KaOTiK]

After around 110-120 hours in Guild Wars 2 I found out that you can hit R to autorun, I had been hitting NumLock before finding that out (Numlock seems to be autorun default in most MMO's)

[Kalmah]

Originally Posted by Carson Dyle

Loud music and loud sounds destroy your hearing.

I have tinnitus now. It's loud and it never goes away. Imagine hearing an annoying siren in the distance or a stuck car horn from a car parked out on the street. Constantly. When you wake up, then all day and then as you fall asleep at night. You can't turn it off, you can't yell at anyone to fix the damned thing, and you can't go anywhere to escape it.

Game related? Yeah, probably.

That sounds miserable. (I think I just accidentally a pun)

[shortylickens]

Originally Posted by waterstain

I was 76 hours into Fallout 3 before I thought to look-up the flashlight key.

And it certain would have been handy to use a couple hundred times! …

That makes no sense.
It comes up in the opening tutorial.

[waterstain]

Originally Posted by shortylickens

That makes no sense.
It comes up in the opening tutorial.

Due to my advanded decrepidness, I tend to rush through most tutorials.

… Surely, I can't be the only one who does this?!?

[arkcom]

That guardian stones on Skyrim are permanent. Didn't even bother clicking one until about level 20, because I thought it was a temporary effect.

[CuriousMike]

Originally Posted by waterstain

Due to my advanded decrepidness, I tend to rush through most tutorials.

… Surely, I can't be the only one who does this?!?

You're not.

Angry Birds Star Wars gives you these simple cartoon-images to describe the new feature of the bird.
I rushed thru the first new "power" ... and couldn't fucking figure out how to use it.
I had to re-install the app so I could get that tutorial again ( no starting over, no 're-show me what i need to know about this')

[ApexBoost]

Originally Posted by KaOTiK

After around 110-120 hours in Guild Wars 2 I found out that you can hit R to autorun, I had been hitting NumLock before finding that out (Numlock seems to be autorun default in most MMO's)

Yeah, I was doing the same thing until about 30-40 hours in. I got to level 30-40 before I knew you could deposit your crafting materials and have them stored in your bank. I had been putting them in my own vault and selling off tons that I couldn't fit.