Monument Valley 1, 2, and 3 (mobile games). An interesting set of puzzle games with good visuals. They only require single taps to work.
Also can get a mouse for the Steam Deck (or a PC if you have one). There are a lot of good games that you can likely use with a mouse if the hand/wrist motion doesn’t cause pain or discomfort for your thumb.
Might not be in your library, but mouse only game I’ve been enjoying is beat cop.
80s love letter to cop games, in the style of papers please. Reviews are a little mixed, it is a particular game, and it’s 80s warts and all. On sale currently.
Which thumb? If your left thumb is still functional, when I had a hand injury in middle school, I got to be really good at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. If your dominant/mouse hand is still functional, anything mouse-driven ought to do, and that covers a wide range of genres from CRPGs to adventure games to 4X games and more.
Never completed this, got the final boss down to like 1hp a few times. I never thought you’d get a real end sequence, I thought they’d find a way to shaft you to force you to try again.
Maybe he falls an inch short of the jump required to reach the exit or whatever
WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.
I guess Light No Fire has a good chance of becoming such a game. It’s gonna be No Mans Sky, but on one earth sized fantasy planet. I don’t think it will have large cities though. 🤔
I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.
But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.
traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to
They don’t work. Vanguard did it way back when, with their three continent world. Each one had enough content to get from lvl 1 to lvl 50, the max, and your starting race determined your starting location. It could take up to an hour to get to friends. Even on the same continent, with a mount (before they added flying mounts), it could take a half hour of running to cross the map… and players complained so vociferously that they were forced to add fast travel options.
I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne