All of them? There’s several that I can name off the top of my head that are just fun to play: Valheim, the forest, subnautica, ark: se. You can even include some that aren’t completely the norm, like terraria, satisfactory, or avorion. Hell, several of those even have really neat stories as part of the gameplay, like subnautica and the forest (and maybe valheim if you like the sort of narrative that’s crafted).
Like I said, not completely the norm. With its first person emphasis though, it plays a lot more like a survival crafting game that has the food/water cycles turned off.
I’ve been getting back into Palworld these last couple days. I love the game, the pals have such personalities and there are so many and I actually want to collect them all.
However some of the world settings don’t really seem to be working right for me, so that’s kind of annoying.
ARK (and Palworld, which directly copies most of its mechanics) was actually the first game that came to mind when reading the OP. Higher rarity blueprints require hundreds of times the resources as their basic counterparts just to increase the amount of busywork you need to do in late-game. Why does a shotgun that deals 50% more damage require enough metal to build multiple skyscrapers? Or in Palworld, that plus the drops from a dozen boss battles to make one item?
If you didn’t experience a magical feeling the first time you saw some of the stuff you see in Minecraft, I dunno what to say. Maybe you’re young and that level of 3D procedural generation has always been there, but once upon a time it was unusual. We called it “multiplayer lego” except you can fight zombies.
Semi-joking there; dysmantle is a breath of fresh air imo. It’s not as survival-focused as some games; you don’t have to eat, for example, and the crafting that you do is… actually worth it, and usually dead simple to unlock because if you’ve been progressively destroying literally everything like the game wants you to do, you have plenty of stuff shortly after unlocking the thing. And yes I do have a save file in which I am attempting to clear every breakable item in the game, which is almost everything. Because why not.
The game is mostly just explore, break shit, kill zombies, build a base if you want (there are some quests but you can destroy everything after if you don’t want it. It serves no real purpose beyond a creativity outlet), and eventually escape the island. After you learn all the story through finding random scraps of information because that’s right, all people except you are zombies! You don’t talk to anyone! And that really enhances the game imo.
That one has a magic I’ve been looking to get again with another game but no, it’s too unique! The horrors! The studio is working on another game called dysplaced which is going to be drum roll an open world survival crafter!! I’m actually excited to try it because of dysmantle, though! :)
I generally like the sandboxy gameplay and exploration, but what I dislike is that nearly all of them have some BS design flaw that the devs double down on, and a lot of them tend to rely on padded grind as ‘progression’ which often just feels awful.
A friend finally convinced me to try out Dark Souls. I'm not too far in, and I'm not having a bad time per se, but I am having a little trouble getting into it and caring about why I'm hacking and slashing everything. Maybe I just haven't got enough lore yet. Though I do like seeing the other players' messages and their "ghosts" running around, that's fun.
No, hear me out. Start by hitting this rock 50 times. Before you know it you’ll be moving on up in the world, now you can hit this other rock 50 times!
Can someone explain the appeal to these games to me?
I did play several hours of Skyrim with some mods last year but the combat felt clunky, the loot felt like a pain in the ass to manage, and there didn’t really seem to be a good story and the world felt a bit hollow.
I do realize their age, of course, and this is an unfair comparison but I had a much greater time with Elden ring and the Witcher 3. Both those games are so dense with vast beautiful worlds.
It’s not for me either, but i guess not being strung along by the main story line and instead being able to just go anywhere and do whatever is appealing to people who just want to immerse themselves in the games world.
The appeal is that these games were made well before Elden Ring and Witcher 3; before ‘open world’ was mainstream. Every single NPCs had daily routines, quests were dynamically generated, and what you do in the game had consequences beyond pissing one character off. This made triggering specific quests or events difficult if you were just going ‘off the hip’, and made replayability a big feature. Because of these systems, there were several interesting “game breaking” issues, but these things were charming in their own right due to how new all these systems were put together with almost nothing like it.
In retrospect, not all the “game breaking” issues were truly understood at the time, and most are a consequence of several factors - the most common being that some quests activate behind the scenes and prevent other quests from starting, even if you haven’t picked them up and added them to your journal. So it is possible to do mostly everything in the game with careful planning. But at the time, it really did seem like each playthrough was unique.
It is/was also highly moddable for its time. While it took a long time to detail every aspect of the game, today there is nothing mods can’t do. Even Witcher 3 mods can’t do a bunch of things that Skyrim mods can. And it’s a good gateway into learning how to mod, and modding can be just as fun as playing. Some mod guides are so long it takes days or weeks to implement. It can get quite insane, with some people maintaining multiple ‘mod versions’: one to play (most playthroughs won’t let you add/remove mods mid-play), one to test new stuff, and one to keep up-to-date with whatever mod guide/group they are following (you know, for fun…and the next playthrough).
But mostly it’s nostalgia, like how some people like older Zelda or Final Fantasy games. Or how you might play that pointless cozy game you played a million times because it connects you to something deeper to what was going on at that time. We know TES games are pretty bad in a lot of regards, but graphics, gameplay, or story isn’t what we are after. Hell, there are now adults booting up Minecraft because it’s just the game they grew up with.
Nostalgia is a hard drug. I replayed Pokemon Red easily 10 times over the years. I tried Pokemon Gold (an objectively much better game) probably about the same amount of times, but I could never get through it, because I didn’t play as a kid and thus have no nostalgia for it.
I have more nostalgia for Keitai Denjū Telefang, which I played in bootlegged form mis-labelled as Pokemon Diamond (that was before the real Pokemon Diamond was released), and even though this bootleg is horrible in quality, it’s easier for me to play than Pokemon Gold.
Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).
The Seinfeld effect. Today they seem clunky, janky, unpolished or uninspired. Because you have way better modern examples to compare them to. The catch is that when they came out, they were the first. People have said the same about the Beatles, the rolling stones, the og legend of Zelda, counter strike, etc.
This is exactly what they are doing, too. They are comparing a game from 2011 to games that came out 4 years later (Witcher 3 in 2015) and over a decade later (Elden Ring in 2022)
Skyrim released alongside the OG Witcher and Dark Souls.
Did you play it at the time it was released or did u try to go back later? Skyrim was and is a legendary game for a reason, to each their own but in its day it was undeniably the best RPG game in existence and it held that title for years! The story is excellent. Games like this and enshrouded will also never achieve full enjoyment in those that don’t bother reading the game lore. If yo skip all the books and never read any I cans see why you wouldn’t get as immersed as say in the Witcher 3 story where you have more cutscenes fed to you. And don’t get it messed up, witcher 3 is a legend too and probably my all time favourite. But it did not offer me the same replayability Skyrim does. And the last point to Skyrim is it runs good on my potato spec laptop so I can play it on about anything!
This. The game only seems dull on the surface but the more you dig into the text and the background the lore is just sprawling.
And yea, Elder Scrolls are as replayable as your imagination while Witcher is only as replayable as the different dialogue options you pick from. Every game you still play “a Witcher” and there is only so far that can take you
For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.
I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.
The openness of it. I can play as I want and go where I want. I’ve played Skyrim since its release and never have finished the main story. It’s not the main attraction. There’s so much lore carried through the games since the 90s , it’s endless.
If you’re talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don’t think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.
Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to “adult zelda” but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it’s expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.
Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.
After ignoring the TES games my whole life, I first played Oblivion a few years ago, and for once in a very long time, I felt the same feeling I did when playing GTA San Andreas for the first time as a little kid.
I spent the first 10hrs or so just stealing stuff and fighting in the Arena, didn’t even touch the main story. In Oblivion, there is soooo much stuff to do, and I didn’t even mod it.
Elden Ring is definitely a great game, but it’s pale in comparison to Oblivion when it comes to “freedom to do anything”. Even Skyrim couldn’t top that for me. Don’t know about Witcher 3 though, I have yet to play it.
Comparing Witcher 3/Elden Ring to Skyrim is just doing it a disservice. Skyrim released in 2011 alongside the original Witcher game and the first Dark Souls.
The first witcher game was released in 2007. The second one was released in 2011. The witcher 3 was released in 2015. Witcher 2 was definitely more polished feeling to me. I found it felt very similar to The Witcher 3.
I personally am the over prepared type but that’s why I get mods that extend the end game and put me through my own optimization and automation personal hell that causes everyone around me to question why I’ve never seen a therapist for my clearly neurodivergent behavior.
Sweet! My closed headphones isolate even the sound of the doorbell, so people kind of need to text me if they plan to visit while I’m gaming xD
Which model/maker of the 3080 do you have? I have the Asus TUF Gaming OC version and while it sounds like an inspired fan, it’s not quite a jet engine… But then again, I only game at 1080p (but with ultra settings) because with my 24 inch monitor I kind of have a good pixel density anyway ^^
It’s an unlikely scenario, but if you have a doorbell that can be “connected” to, like ring or aqara you could set a light (hue, inner, generic ZigBee etc) to flash when the doorbell rings. I had a rube Goldberg setup for the time before I discovered open back monitors 😀
I’ll be real, I don’t know the manufacturer because it was a second hand pre built. An old hp omen that I replaced mobo and CPU (and somehow I didn’t take note… getting lazy on my old age)
I do roll 1440p and whatever settings get me 120 FPS. Nothing competitive
This alone is one thing that makes Grounded stand out so much. Why do they make me suffer? Shuffling my equipment in and out of chests is not fun. I want to organize it, and then fill it up.
These two indie games, both set in a nature park, are more about enjoying their worlds than actually completing quests. With no quest tracker or map, you’re free to roam around and talk to characters. Or just pick up sticks and swing them.
I guess it depends on how you want to screw around. In A Short Hike, you can go fishing, which has no gameplay function. Or gliding around in air currents.
Nice we have been talking about the device in the retro gaming corps discord channel. Looks like a lot of fun. If my miyoo mini plus ever dies this will probably be my next handheld.
I was just about to say that I usually trust Russ will all my retro gaming handhelds, but I’ll gladly take a second opinion. Glad to see that you follow him as well and aren’t afraid to put your own thoughts out there. Nice work!
We regularly joke that Anbernic comes out with new devices every couple of months in every way shape and form factor. Not exactly a bad problem, but they often have issues with quality control. But if you get a refund and new device it usually works out.
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