I wish someone had taught my friends and me how to play D&D when I was 10, but my parents were part of the “satanic panic” generation, and had zero interest in anything to do with fantasy or improv. Once you get out of highschool, finding a night that everyone can meet up for D&D gets exponentially harder, let alone finding someone who wants to put in the time to DM.
Oh yeah, DnD is a great idea, and if they aren’t into dragons (but who isn’t) there’s all kinds of variations of rpg games. Mutant Year Zero, Vaesen, Alien, Pathfinder, Starfinder, etc. The list goes on and on. And since you have mentioned you have a pc, you can use a virtual tabletop like Fantasy Grounds, for them to play where you don’t have to get them all together in the same room. I play a few different games each week with people I have only met in game. You could buy the FG Ultimate license for one pc, whomever is going to be the DM, and all the other kids could connect with the free beta license, and only the DM needs to own the books. Everyone else can just get on and read the manuals, or play the game with no expense.
Personally I have played dnd with those virtual tabletops and… they’re pretty bad. You spend about 3x as much time fiddling with it than you do playing. Plus you then get distracted by electronics when you should be getting into your character.
Well I guess it all depends on the dm and the material. I play a couple of games each week, and one is a 4 hour session and it’s pretty immersive. We have a few hiccups now and again, but it’s not anything that bad in my opinion. There is some work on the dm side, but since we are all spread about the planet, it allows us to get together and run a campaign. Even my local board game peeps use FG to play. We talk about playing local, but when we get together it’s usually to break out some board games we have and want to play, and one person playing our dnd game is a couple of states away. We joke about putting him on an ipad and facetiming him with his head sitting on the table. LOL.
Dnd (and tabletop gaming in general) is really fun, but I can foresee problems when you try to replace the electronic gambling skinner box of Roblox with a game where the core features are math and imagination.
For immersiveness, I recommend miniatures to use on a grid (can be just paper with 1”x1” squares drawn with a pencil). One thing I can say for doing it cheap and quick is to buy a bunch of those small game piece holders (1”x1”) and find monster art online to print, cut, and put in the holders as your minis.
[For example](LLMSIX 24 Pieces Game Card Stand Clear Card Holders Plastic Place Card Display Stand Photo Card Holder DIY Board Games Stand for Business Cards Price Tags Labels Menus Party Favor)
You can get basic rules online for free and you could probably pick up books used.
Honestly, I could see a new Soul Reaver game being a Souls-like if anyone was actually serious about resurrecting the franchise. I mean, between the ruined world and characters who can come back from death you could definitely market it as "Dark Souls, but vampires" towards newcomers. Shame the rights are with Embracer, meaning we aren't likely to ever get a new entry unless someone buys it off them.
Post made me wonder where the IP ended up, Eidos published the series and owned the IP, that went through SquareEnix after they bought out Eidos, then they sold the IP to Embracer who is currently going through a very slow bankruptcy.
So outside the thought exercise, this is mostly wishful thinking. The best we can hope at this point is that embracer sell their IPs to someone else who maybe publishers remasters?
From software probably aren’t a good choice though, they don’t really vibe super well with the more straightforward European mythologies, they like to weave more (intentionally) convoluted worlds that don’t super mesh well with the stories in the soul reaver series.
The closest I can think of would be the psvr exclusive Déraciné, which is a time travelljng story about faries in a boarding school, and it’s still pretty far.
So, yeah. THQ Nordic is owned by the aformentioned Embracer. They got no money. Everything they have is currently being shut down and will likely all be sold off to pay the bills in the next year unless they pull a mega hit out of their behind
I love Soul Revear and the cain series, but they weren’t even hits at their most popular ;) Embracer needs a huge injection of money just to keep going. huge
Unironically, that seems like a pretty easy game to remaster and turn for a profit. But also, they seem like they could ask Sony for funding in exchange for exclusivity. People don’t like exclusives, but sometimes it can fund stuff that wouldn’t normally get made.
The next step is becoming a better parent. That's a shit move and you can't stop your kid from playing it behind your back. You simply taught them to find and learn new ways to gaslight and evade you in order to keep playing with their friends.
I guarantee your parents did the same shit to you, and you perpetuate that toxicity.
Gaslighting, toxicity, oh come on. I’m supposed to expect my kid to lie to me?
Just giving my kids into the embrace of peer pressure isn’t love, it’s evading confrontation. Give them a place of trust and understanding, with clear rules they can understand and follow. If my kids are getting their way bending and evading the rules we set, then it’s way too late.
We often say yes, but sometimes we have to say no, and our kids are fine with that.
Videos I look at seem rather violent with a lot of guns. Are these included by default or addons? My son’s 6 and just getting into minecraft but I don’t want to turn it into an FPS for him.
Garry’s Mod includes various games/game modes but the most popular one is Trouble In Terrorist Town, where you have to shoot each other. I wouldn’t recommend it for a 6 year old, in a few years it will fit better.
Don’t do Minecraft when Minetest is open source. It’s not meant to be installed as vanilla per se tho as mods are for building gameplay and vanilla is just a sandbox/canvas to build Minecraft-like or addjacent games. Especially if you can get him on PC, I could be a hopskip away from creating his own open mods (as opposed to the content farm of underpaid “devs” for Roblox which have wild stories if you look it up).
Veloran is also a good alternative for free software with an adventure MMO aspect that might appeal to the guy.
Being projects without a profit motive & a strong community where the players are the developers is a safer route where you would never expect loot boxes, microtransacitions, dark/addictive patterns because those aren’t fun & money isn’t an incentive. With the source available your son is more than welcome to read it to figure out how games work, contribute ideas/code, & learn to make mods which are all great, real-life skills learned while accidentally gaming & trying to make the game better for yourself & friends—and if he’s not a future coder, there are assets & stories to build, or just playtesting a friend’s mod.
Sound idea. Additionally, it’s now possible to stream games to the tv quite easily. So pc is really the better alternative to get away from psychological abuse through console and game manufacturers.
Also, Minecraft on console is no better than roblox imo. It is a microtransaction pile of sh*t. You could argue that minecraft java works but I get the strong feeling that it wont stay like this forever since bedrock makes more money and allows for stronger manipulation through nonexistent mod support and everything is monetized there.
If it’s set up correctly. The biggest selling point of a console is that it boots you to “play game” mode as the default & games have better expectations since the hardware is standardized. That said, in the case of Steam, there’s nothing to say you can’t install Linux & have it boot directly into Big Picture mode (but you’ll still need to remember to get software updates for the OS as they aren’t integrated like a console).
I mean the IBM PC was standardized but you are welcome to install whatever video card or as much or little RAM as you want which means developers can’t specifically target your setup (with fewer testing Linux), but a lot of things not requiring the bleeding edge run just fine. Unattended upgrades is a good idea, but that is if the distro supports it—and that’s still a better experience than Microsoft Windows updates.
Minetest simply doesn’t have the content catalog of Minecraft, for a game that the appeal is the fact you can pretty much never get bored of it, that’s a massive drawback.
We’re already firmly invested in minecraft. I have the java edition on my computers - and he has bedrock on the xbox. It sucks that they arent compatible, but he’s too young for a pc.
Too young for a PC? My daughter got my old components with 8 years. Now with 10 years, playing Veloren, Minetest, Terraria and LotRO with me at her side on it…
If you create a Java server, there are mods that let Bedrock players join. One is called Geyser, and I think the other is called Floodgate, but I’d need to double check.
You can set up a free server online through Oracle too, and using the whitelist, you can make it private too. The article I used is here if you want to have a look
If shooters, beer visuals, and light swearing (think damn, shit, the voicelines are pretty rare and can be disabled with mods) are alright for your kid, check out deep rock galactic. its on steam as well as xbox, and is a 1-4 player coop mining and shooting game where you collect minerals and shoot the ant looking bugs trying to eat you. its incredibly fun and ive sunk over 2500 hours into it without feeling for even a second that any of it was predatory.
If the issue is having to go through Steam to launch the game, then GOG would be the better alternative, as it gives you a DRM-free version of the game that can be installed and run without depending on them.
My understanding is that in both California, where IndieLand occurs, and in the US, holding the money without directing it per the objectives of the non profit is fraud.
Jirard needed to lawyer and publicist up a month ago
Isn’t combat just so boring? While none of the games you mentioned are familiar to me, story focused games are my main interest. My personal favorite is definitely The Wink and Kiss Part 2 for Neverwinter Nights. Its an adult romance damsel in distress bard’s tale in which there’s almost always a social solution. Whenever combat is apparently unavoidable even the nicest and most harmless character can prevail with the help of her friends! Still though, it is all based on the 3rd edition of DND, so don’t expect things to be easy!
If an old DND game doesn’t interest you, then perhaps consider The Sims 1. Its one of the best selling role-playing games of all time. The Sims is just so awesome it doesn’t even need combat to be creepy, scary, and hard! Right now that’s the game capturing all of my spare time.
There is also a really good visual-novel with enough different paths to cross over into similar territory: Cinders! Its a contemplative retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale which focuses on the player character’s own agency and freedom in an oppressive world. Perhaps its best described as being a game about the true meaning of freedom and independence.
Since you’ve already received many excellent suggestions in this thread by now you hopefully won’t mind these more unusual options. Have fun with which ever game you choose and good luck!
I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!
The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)
Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.
Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU
The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs
Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE
Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M
There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo
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