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.
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.
May I ask what part of playing makes it difficult? Duration? Dexterity? Specific motions, etc? If it’s too much, please feel free to ignore me.
Doing anything repetitive with my hands causes quickly worsening nerve/muscle pain in the entire arm. And something demanding like a platformer will get it going in less than a minute.
And the really crappy thing is, the longer I try to push through it, the longer the pain lasts. If I stop when I first notice the pain, it’ll only last an hour or two, but if I keep pushing it can last for days.
Fortunately, I can still play turn-based games for the most part. But even then, I prefer low-APM ones because problems can still arise. I’ve had to learn to love games like Into the Breach and Chess. Zachtronics games are good, too. Any game where you spend the majority of your time thinking.
https://thinkygames.com/ is a godsend for discovering new games of this sort.
Oh man I’m sorry to hear that. Is it limited to just your hands? While not for me, I’ve been interested in alternative control models (head, arm, feet, XBox adaptive controller, etc). I hear it’s a challenge to learn the muscle memory, of course.
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.
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.
I quit my job and dropped out of college to do nothing but play WoW for 8 solid months. It was worth it
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.
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…
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.
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.
Make sure to make a save at the appropriate point so you can do both paths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AC Shadows
I want to play it but fuck Ubisoft
Sail the high seas. That way you don’t support them and get to play it. I haven’t pirated a game for many years but some game houses deserves what comes to them
Nah, pirating is not worth the effort. I just don’t play it
rust,
- i’m on linux
- its rust
Can’t you do
rustup updateand go from there?
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.
The newer Anno installments. I’m not buying another Ubisoft game unless they get rid of their stupid Launcher, and I’m also not buying anything with Denuvo and similar BS.
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.
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.
I’d love to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a diverse group of real people and share an adventure together, but have no friends who enjoy games that aren’t mindless slop.
Same with other slow-burn games like Project Zomboid and other survival/crafting games.
I learned to do slop to hang out with others, I even got good at slop like Rivals just to keep social contact alive. But I can’t drag anyone into a game that doesn’t have 2-minute matches filled with flashing lights and colors and gambling mini-games.
I’m in this boat with you. A few months ago I restarted my Valheim server for friends… And only one person joined me, for all of about 30 minutes. I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a Zomboid server, too, but I know it will be the same. We’ll play as a group maybe twice, and that will be it.
I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.
I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.
I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a server where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order high level gear from discord bots in chat.
Sorry you’ve been through that.
I’ve about given up on chasing multiplayer, even including friends. It never fails. Because, there would be times some friends I know are playing a multiplayer game that is big and they’re all involved and I want to be involved. Then by the time I get it, they’ve moved on to something else and it would be a chore to have tried and get them to come back to the game I just got so we can have some of our memories poured into it.
It would never happen, they’ve grounded their footing into that next game and I would be a little begrudged and eventually I’d get that game, only for the cycle to repeat.
So, I’ve stopped doing that. Now I have a bunch of all of these games that were fun to have played with people on, just sitting and collecting dust because I tried playing with people I know and cared about. Now most of them play FFXIV, Escape from Tarkov or some other MMO-like game and they know I won’t go there to them because I’m not a MMO player, but I was always open to play something else that was multiplayer, but they never bit.
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.
My thing with FFXIV is that, so much has blown by me, that just trying to get into it now is so overwhelming. There was a friend I knew that was into FFXIV and he was one of those people that spoke about it like it is his second language. He had his friends too that were into it and it was like they’ve built this in-depth chemistry through FFXIV and I even watched some of his livestreams of it.
But anytime I tried playing FFXIV, I really stuck out with this empty feeling because I never had that.
Elite Dangerous. Extremely beautiful, especially impressive in VR - but way too time-consuming for me.
Holy fuck, “Space logistics simulator with some casual space piracy” the game.
For the receptive kind of brain that’s some premium crack.
why did they skip VR compatibility for the on foot sections of the game? seems insane
That expansion ran like shit and was full of bugs when it released (maybe it’s better now), so I wouldn’t be surprised if they couldn’t get it to run well enough for VR.
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.
There’s like a boatload of really classic Xbox 360/One era games that I’d love to play on PC.
Problem is they were made by Ubisoft or EA. Repurchasing them is already dubious from the get-go, but chances are the versions in Steam, if they’re still there at all, are old neglected buggy builds. And things are not much rosier on the Uplay or Origin! They may have gotten a patch or two, but old shit’s janky. These need the GOG treatment.
I did get the Mass Effect trilogy rerelease for a pittance. Also found out I somehow had Dragon Age Origins already. These should keep me occupied for a while, as (to paraphrase a certain video game villain) at this very moment, EA burns.
Hollow Knight. I watched someone on YouTube play it and I just don’t want to spend that much time playing that kind of game. I’m someone who grew up playing Mario 64, Mario sunshine, Mario Galaxy and I just recall spending so much time playing those games as a kid. So much time wasted. Cannot bring myself to do that again. I’m pretty stubborn and so I know because I wasted so much time on those Nintendo games that I would pull ridiculous amounts of time on another game like that. Not worth it anymore for me.
