I worked at a pizza place in highschool and one of our delivery drivers was an elderly guy who drove your typical delivery driver beat up old Honda Civic type car. He was a super nice guy, but never talked much about himself. Then one day he shows up to work in a Maserati because apparently his Civic wouldn’t start. Turns out he was a crew member with freaking Jacques Cousteau and was very wealthy. He just delivered pizza for something to do and because he liked meeting new people.
He eventually sold the Maserati to one of my coworkers for a couple of thousand of dollars because it needed a new fuel pump and he didn’t feel like dealing with it. Yet, he kept that sun bleached Civic for as long as I worked there.
No probably about it, the new car somehow already had a broken fuel pump 😂
I went to graduate school with a guy who turned out to be from a super-wealthy family but we never suspected because he drove an honest-to-god fucking Yugo. I rode in it once and pulled the window crank off the door before he had a chance to stop me. He drove the Yugo because he wanted to fit in with us poors - we should have suspected something was up because not even the poorest of the poor graduate students drove Yugos. He finally blew his cover when the Yugo died and he had to come to school in his other car, a brand-new Range Rover.
It looks like a shitty kit car.
It does. Applying the video game logic, it looks badass at first glance, but once you play a little bit and learn more about what’s out there, you find out it’s kinda a noob trap.
Which really sucks because getting a good item early in the game and carrying it with you the whole time feels really special. Bilbo picked up sting as a level 1 Hobbit. He didn’t upgrade his sword two or three times during his adventure. He got something cool and passed it down to frodo.
Item scaling just makes everything seem like temporary trash, disposable.
I used to dream about getting a fiero and kitting it up in my early twenties. Seemed like such a cool project and achievable way to get something my broke ass could never obtain otherwise.
I grew out of that phase but it still doesn’t sit right with me to shit on someone else that might have lived out that dream. I hope the dudes happy and enjoying life more than anyone who has the real thing.
And then you later find some common item with way better stats
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nor heard of a game where this situation could even apply…
Forza Horizon 5. The game literally throws hypercars at you within the first few minutes. It’s fun, although many people complain that it ruins the sense of progression (nevertheless the game has hundreds of cars, unlocking them all would take forever).
My third or so wheel spin got me the Lambo Forza Edition that comes with some massive XP boost for when driving around
Even though I liked driving my other cars around the fact that they couldn’t go half as fast or earn the XP nearly as quickly made me use almost exclusively that for the open world bits. Felt too wrong not to unless I was specifically going off road or something
Usually I have come across this with poorly done DLCs. They offer some bonus item in game.
So if you buy the game with all the DLC in a sale then when you start the game you have all this extra stuff you wouldn’t normally have. I can’t recall the game but there was one game where I actively had to not use the DLC items otherwise the first part of the was way too easy and bordering on boring.
The Witcher 2, though it’s more of an exploit.
If you get the sword from the Lady of the Lake in the previous game, you start the prologue of TW2 with two silver swords, one being the Lady of the Lake sword. Unequip the Lady of the Lake sword so you don’t lose it to the dragon.
You now have a mid-tier silver sword that is good for half the game. You also don’t need to find a new silver sword at the start of the game.
Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.
There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.
it would have to be a fairly atypical sort of game I imagine, most games with a premade tutorial world are not going to have anything too extreme in that world to find, unless its some sort of hidden easter egg. I could see it if its a game that uses procedural generation, but those kinds of games usually dont have much of a tutorial beyond maybe some short instructions.
I guess it could kinda apply in a very mild sort of way in GTAOnline, if you happen to be at the point in the very beginning where youre getting your first car and get free insurance on it, and happen to find one of the pre-customized npc cars that spawn rarely and are still cheap enough to keep after stealing, but those arent really all that rare or special.
