Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.
And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.
So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.
Victoria 3, still the undisputed king of world economic simulation. I had a blast with Vic 2, but I just can’t bring myself to support Paradox Interactive in their current form with ridiculous monetisation of DLC…
Silksong. My muscle disease has progressed too much to physically play it. That really stings because Hollow Knight was one of my favorite games ever.
That fucking suuuuuuuuucks. I wonder if there’s a mod that could accommodate you somehow. I’m not trying to spawn a big debate about difficulty in games here, but I really wish you’d be able to play it for yourself, somehow.
I’m sure there’s a cheat engine invulnerability hack or something I could use, but it would kinda take the fun out of it.
Have you considered the Xbox Adaptive Controller? I know Microsoft designed this controller with different extensions an such to assist people with disabilities while gaming.
Here’s hoping for a healthy recovery chief!
I agree. I was imagining maybe a time dilation mod that you could toggle on/off to make your inputs less physically demanding, but I don’t know if that exists. That’s how I’d do accessibility in this game personally. I don’t know anything about your condition though, so really I’m just spitballing and daydreaming simultaneously.
Daggerfall.
It has the most elaborate character creation and most freedom of choice of all the Elder Scrolls games.
You can walk, ride or fly through an open world that’s as large as Great Britain, with thousands of realistically modelled towns and cities, and enter any house in them. You can turn into a vampire, werewolf or were-boar, buy a ship, make deals with the gods, invent your own spells, and commit bank fraud.
First time I played it, it took all night to download the 140MB installer from Kazaa.
But actually playing it now, after so much development in game mechanics has happened, is a chore.
When doing quests, you just go through the same loop of “talk to person, clear an absurdly huge dungeon, kill dozens of enemies that aren’t scaled to your level, die a couple dozen times unless you cheesed the game to become invincible, solve a text riddle, find the McGuffin, return, repeat” over and over again.When doing quests, you just go through the same loop of “talk to person, clear an absurdly huge dungeon, kill dozens of enemies that aren’t scaled to your level, die a couple dozen times unless you cheesed the game to become invincible, solve a text riddle, find the McGuffin, return, repeat” over and over again.
That’s pretty much all Elder Scrolls is. What’s particularly impressive is that they’ve been releasing the same game since the 90s.
They really favored being a lycanthrope in that game. It’s the most OP transformation, especially when you get a special ring that takes away some of the negatives of being a lycanthrope. All of your stats get maxed, you can instantly heal between transformations, you are immune from what the guards try hitting you with.
Being a vampire in Daggerfall, isn’t as fun.
World of Warcraft. I’m honestly at my happiest when all I have to worry about are dailies and raids. Unfortunately, that’s not compatible with family life, my work, etc etc.
Myself, I miss the memories I could form playing with friends on WoW. Not the game that much.
I miss Night Shift on the WoW forums.
I quit my job and dropped out of college to do nothing but play WoW for 8 solid months. It was worth it
Even if you don’t mind the online only part, ignore this abomination. They botched the D4 campaign. It’s too easy and almost impossible to die during the regular campaign. It takes roughly two minutes to beat a world boss on the first play through.
That doesn’t bother me. What made me gravitate to Diablo was how they did the story. The plot of evil vs good and angels vs demons in a eternal conflict is cliche and overdone. But I liked how Blizzard handled it and I’ve been glued to it for a while. Mephisto is my favorite character overall and damn they’re having an expansion coming soon, that revolves around him, so my temptation will be even greater.
So no it doesn’t bother me that it’s “too easy” or “almost impossible to die”, because my idea of fun is not to have a very frustrating experience.
The Dark Souls series takes place in a fascinating universe and I’m sure the lore is enthralling… I just refuse to play games that are made artificially hard for the sake of it. If it’s single-player, the devs shouldn’t have an opinion on how much time each player is comfortable wasting on it. Give me “story” difficulty, cheats, etc., and let me decide what to do with them. All you’re hurting are your own sales.
Part of what makes Souls games fun is that you can work together with others.
I pretty much only play them co-op.
Agreed.
I love dark fantasy as a theme. But I can’t enjoy the theme if the game is going to be padded like that. That’s how you make games not fun and there’s nothing fun when you’re killed in one or two hits. There’s challenge and then there’s not fun and all soulslike games fall into the not fun part.
rust,
- i’m on linux
- its rust
Can’t you do
rustup updateand go from there?
The Talos Principle 2. The micro stuttering makes it unplayable for me, and it will never get fixed.
Cyberpunk 2077 - it still doesn’t go on steep enough sales to justify buying when I have hundreds of unplayed games on Steam. But I’m keeping an eye on its downward progress. Maybe when it reaches £10-13…
I’m also waiting for it to hit a low-enough price to justify the amount of time I will lose just trying to mod the thing into a playable, enjoyable state.
That’s my strategy as well. Whenever Witcher 3 is on sale i think to myself “Can’t wait for Cyberpunk to get that low”. Same thing for Elden Ring +DLC, except there i would be willing to pay about 30-40 bucks.
It’s still a buggy mess, but it’s usually very pretty and occasionally fun.
buggy mess? not at all. 100+ hours, i don’t even remember a single bug. I’m sure i must have encountered some but clearly the nothing memorable. could be buggy but buggy mess is a ridiculous overstatement.
giving you the benefit of the doubt it could be related to hardware difference or something.
I encounter some kind of bizarre NPC behavior or graphics glitch about every ten minutes.
For example NPCs panicking for obvious or not so obvious reasons, trying to flee but nearly or actually hurting people by driving or running away, which incites the ire of NCPD, which results in them gunning down those civilians, which causes more to panic and flee, and suddenly the cops are just dumping lead at everyone with a pulse but no badge. I’m sure you’ve noticed the random screaming and cops shooting but I guess you never bothered to figure out why.
Another common one is people missing textures, their limbs (especially heads) wiggling chaotically or missing entirely, and then of course the classic A-pose. The latter is much more rare than on release in my experience, but I often catch someone just barely coming out of it as I turn to look at them and the game freshly renders their animation.
None of the above is game breaking, but it’s plenty noticeable if you’re paying attention, and it’s not the kind of thing you expect to see from a full priced AA or AAA game years after its release. Snaps my immersion in half every time.
that’s wild. never encountered such noticeable bugs myself, I guess I was lucky.
It’s probably a matter of framing as well.
If you go into a game expecting a buggy mess, you’re going to notice bugs more often.
Whether or not the objective amount of bugs present meets your criteria for “buggy mess” or not is of course highly subjective, even if you noticed 100% of the ones you encountered.
Do yourself a favour and get the Ultimate Edition. Phantom Liberty is the only real reason to put yourself through it.
I played before phantom liberty and thought it was a neat enough game. Maybe I should give it another shot.
Make sure to make a save at the appropriate point so you can do both paths.
I wish I could go back and never experience it before PL. It’s what it should have been at release, took me ages to get around to trying it after the broken and underwhelming early versions because the main story was long and linear. I’m glad I did though, it’s an entirely different experience
I think the base game is really a testament to the fact that CDPR have a lot of success with open world games, but don’t really do them very well… They make really solid campaigns, and then pad them out with utter nonsense that kills the pacing stone-cold dead.
“Oh hey, here’s something really urgent. We cannot stress enough how urgent it is. By the way we’ve also just unlocked about a hundred side quests. Enjoy!”
I’m still salty that I missed one of the ending achievements because if you follow the instructions it gives you, it will cause a fail state on that particular ending.
I bought it this winter for 25. Solid beginning. Haven’t finished it. But it’s there. I hop on when I want to veg out and the story is pretty damn good.
Rdr2. I’m not making a damn account just to play the game offline.
I couldn’t get into it. I’m not a fan of westerns to begin with, so even the environment couldn’t pull me in
I would create ten different accounts to play a game that’s the quality of rdr2.
Ya maybe one day. I also morally don’t want to support that behaviour.
Elden ring is the gold standard for me in multiplayer. It’s optional. It just requires you to be online. No account creation bullshit. And it’s a quality game also.
@cyberpunk007 @Abundance114 that is if you play on PC. other platforms might require subscriptions of some kind in order to enable multiplayer feature(s).
And that’s what you get for buying a console.
Honestly I might pirate it instead and avoid the whole account thing all together lol.
Most anything PvP.
I just can’t do anything with games that don’t allow me to pause (or go idle) as I just have constant interruptions.
It doesn’t help that many PvP games also have sweaty tryhard metas that put you on a different level if you’re not reading up on forums or discussions.
I’ll straight up admit that I can’t compete in most pvp titles; and I don’t want to be a loot goblin for the high school kids who are going to 360 no-scope headshot me from across the map and then tea bag my corpse.
Shooters might need some kinda leagues where old farts would play with each other. Some sim racing games have topical leagues/servers like that.
Though matchmaking is supposed to solve this problem, but idk if it succeeds.
Arc Raiders took this trope and turned it on its head. The game is entirely about being a loot goblin around other people in a no-rules environment but if you don’t pick fights, you will gradually get matched to servers with other people who don’t pick fights, and you start to meet people and have adventures together, it happens very organically and pleasantly, and if you ever DO run into a PvPer the game doesn’t really give a huge advantage to sweaty try-hards, a newb with a basic gun can defend themselves just as well as some well-equipped player hunter.
That’s because Arc Raiders ISN’T a PVP! It’s supposed to be a PVE.
About 100% of shooter/survival games made with open PVP turned on all the time become kill-on-sight instantaneously, and those games usually give players a PvE mode for people too scared or annoyed with PvP, the segregation has been normal in gaming since the early days of online gaming. So it’s not as simple as saying it’s “supposed” to be PvE, it’s that they tuned the mechanics and themes to encourage more cooperation in an unprecedented way.
Factorio, I might legitimately starve to death.
Clair obscur.
It looks so good, and the music is great, and story is apparently fantastic, but I just can not get the hang of the counter/block mechanic in combats, and without it the battles are pretty much impossible.
I came to depend less on the visual cues which are often deceptive and more on the audio ones or counting in my head for dodges/parries. Also invest heavily (basically all your points) into defense/vitality which makes Dodge/Parry misses much more forgiving.
Eventually, even if you only do a smattering of side quests/areas, you’ll get powerful enough to basically ignore the timing mechanics altogether.
Also set it on story mode + auto QTEs. I did that on my first playthrough and had absolutely no regrets. The mechanics of the game are definitely secondary to the experience of the story.
I haven’t played since I beat it. But I did look into this after I did…
In general, every time the screen zooms in, you need to act. What type is something you learn, but that cuts down on the timing aspect There are also audio queues, like a sort of woosh effect. I don’t play a lot of fast response games like this, so I never noticed until it was pointed out.
I found it rough near the start, but it gets a lot easier as you go on, once you get more of a feel for when attacks are coming. Eventually you’ll be dodging things you’ve never seen before just on instinct.
Dodges are a lot easier than parries, even if you don’t get the extra AP from it. Fights last a bit longer, but you can definitely plough through most of it even with bad timing. Explore thoroughly in act 1, otherwise you’ll probably be underlevelled for the last boss there. Not really any need to grind mindlessly, but you can if you really need the extra levels.
Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.
They didn’t sneak anything and they never will. Looked into it deeply. They used AI assets as placeholders during development. But everything in the shipped game is human-made. No further use of generative AI is expected, since the game awards controversy the company’s management published a statement of banning AI use entirely in their company.
The whole controversy around indie game awards was also blown beyond proportions. A company used a new technology at a time when the tech was new and the debate around it’s use was still inmature. Then dismissed it for it was not good enough. They failed at quality assurance and a couple of textures weren’t deleted. They replaced them as soon at they found out. By all intents and purposes, this controversy does not qualify sandfall as an AI using company, and to affirm so is ignorant of the context of all that went down in reality.
You said a whole lot of words, but the fact remains that they did use AI during development, released a game with AI textures, and told the award organization they never used AI at all.
They, and you, can make excuses all you want, but for some of us they simply have lost some of their good reputation. We will see what they do next though, and I’m hopeful.
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game
That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.
They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed as soon as they noticed it. We have the advantage of judging four years later with new info something they did back then and have since corrected. Ethical considerations must include intent and context, and here there was definitely no intent to harm.
I ended up using the auto-parry/block mod, but it means you’re practically invulnerable, you only need to do the jump and radiant attack counters
https://www.nexusmods.com/clairobscurexpedition33/mods/478
There’s also a mod to increase the block/parry “period”
https://www.nexusmods.com/clairobscurexpedition33/mods/28
I still hope there will be a mod to have the dodge/parry based on your stats (agility/luck), to feel like it’s a RPG and not a souls-like game
I’ll have to look at the mod to increase the block/parry period, to see if that is my issue.
cheers!
The one that upped it by 30% worked for me on a Steam Deck. I can’t parry everything, but i can at least hit the parry now.
I did the same thing. The 30% increase felt about right to make parry difficult without being frustratingly hard.
I respect that parry is supposed to be hard but the timings felt absolute bullshit to be honest.
I love the story of Final Fantasy XIV, but it can easily categorize as “One of the most expensive singleplayer games of all time”. On top of buying the expansions, you’ll need to pay for each month you play; and unless someone’s really speedrunning, that will start to add up. Worse, for a first timer setting up their account, their website and payment system is really stuck in 1998, making giving them money an obtuse task. And, while the story has its great moments and excellent side content, a depressing amount of it is extensive polite dialog with just simple quests where you move to a location and right-click on someone. I’ve finished Dawntrail, and am glad I experienced it, but I can’t blame anyone who sees it all as beyond them.
Counterpoint: Someone can play up through Stormblood without having to buy anything.
But, yeah, I agree. I don’t really want to think about how much I’ve spent on this one game over the last 12 years. But roughly spitballing:
- ARR, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail…I’ll say that’s 6 x $40 (not accurate since I bought special editions for some and moved from PS3 to Pc so that’s an extra cost there, too): $240
- $13/m for 11 years (I’ve played ARR since launch but there have been some times where I turned off my sub for a little bit so I’ll just knock off 12 months): 13 x 12 x 11 = $1,716
- Various Mogstation purchases, roughly $40?
- Total for me with this napkin math: $1,996
Woof. But, I do love the game and spent all weekend playing it just now. So there’s worse things to spend money on.
This expac broke me. Played for a decade. Decent ranked tank. The new raids are more of the same and PF has no healers. Tried to play Sage to balance it out and no one could make it work.
The game lost touch with what made it great. It’s no longer innovative. The story is ass. It’s just a whale hunter.
Alan Wake 2, I loved the 1st but I’m not using Epic’s shitty store. Especially with Epic’s general anti-linux stance.
Just pirate it. It’s a cool game. Great story too.
