Having a character of one main class and a secondary class that could be switched at any time between any of the 9 classes.
8-slot skillbar with one heroic skill that could only come from your main class.
400+ total skills in the game.
Plenty of room for you to make your own homebrew builds, and some classic builds that were outside the box:
The assassin that used a staff (assacaster), the ranger that used necro skills to touch people to death (touch ranger), and the 55 monk, which had almost no hp but so much healing it was hard to kill.
It will always be my MMORPG because of the character design.
If "Secret World Legends" isn't already on your radar, it might be up your alley.
Haven't played GW1, but SWL has a moveset similar to what you described.
It's set in modern day, with the premise that all myths, conspiracy theories, urban legends etc are all true - and frequently need to be contained. There are three factions: STRONGLY recommend you choose Illuminati (best faction story line by a long shot).
The investigative missions will make you feel like a moron, but in a weirdly good way. SUPER satisfying to figure them out without looking up hints online.
Not a game I hear mentioned much, but man Secret World had so many great things going for it. The best quest design in a MMO* I have ever seen, and a really unique setting too. Shame it was managed so badly, in an alternate world where TSW took off and was still getting content updates, I would be thrilled.
I just bought Sun Haven to play with my girlfriend. I’m enjoying it so far, we kinda lost track of time playing lol. Though it seems like whatever job the host has, the players that join will have that job too which kinda sucks. Maybe I messed something up though. It doesn’t seem to matter much because you can kinda just ignore your job and do other things.
I love when games use as few invisible walls as possible, and don’t stop you from exploring weird places or even out of bounds. There doesn’t even have to be a reward, just the feeling of getting somewhere where you’re not supposed to be is enough. Ultrakill and Anodyne 2 both do this really well.
I also love rich, responsive, low-restriction movement mechanics, which kinda ties in with the first point. I love when games let me chain all sorts of moves together for wild bullshit midair acrobatics, zipping and bouncing and flinging myself all over the place constantly. Good examples are Ultrakill, Pseudoregalia, Sally Can’t Sleep, and Cruelty Squad. On the flipside, Demon Turf is a game I hated and dropped quickly because of how artificially and pointlessly limited the movement felt.
You might like the Serious Sam games. The developers didn’t really bother with invisible walls and so on most levels you can go in any direction until either the level geometry prevents you or until you reach the point where the developers finally gave a shit and put an invisible wall. It even rewards you for this on quite a few levels with some really well hidden secret goodies.
Finished what is available in Techtonica, so went back to Dyson Sphere Program for a bit to work on missing achievements. DSP is definitely my favourite of the Factory-Automation games at this point.
I still have a Factorio (Industrial Revolution 3) game going too, but am feeling DSP more at the moment right now.
Don’t waste my time. That’s my biggest thing in games. Death Stranding was fun but holy shit. Everything had animations. Just sooooo many. It made even the most simple tasks take so long. Why do I need to see so much when I deliver a box? Why do I need to see Sam get in a truck? It irks me so much.
I mostly play turn based JRPGs. My main gripe with any video game is excessive interacting with menus and inventories. I want to play a game, not enter submenus of submenus to change minute things. So here’s some features to combat that:
Queues: lining up research or skills to learn, so I don’t have to enter the fucking menus after every battle/minute.
Skill/Equipment sets: let me save my setups. Give me a few slots, and a warning if some part of that setup is used by another character. Heck, give me a way to save whole party setups, so I can have e.g. fire-killer team of ice-themed abilities on all characters. Or just have a standard ability set for progression and a second, temporary one for skill learning or whatnot.
Chained Echoes and FFVIIR had some good QoL improvements, but how many times do I have to shuffle materia or accessories, just because I’m leveling something? Every second encounter, because something is maxed and I have to swap it out for something else?
And Inventory management, that can make or break a game. Some of those submenus take half a minute to enter before you even do anything. Astria Ascending (I don’t recommend) was awful in that regard and guilty of everything mentioned above.
Fucking menus man… Give me some elaborate customizable skill setup slots and queues, please.
Hate: Tapping, quick time events, looting animations, long loading screens especially when you’re expected to die often, game taking control away from the player or excessive input latency, long NPC expositions for fetch quests.
Love: addictive gameplay loops that are borderline checklists but fun (Far Cry, Days Gone hordes, Ghost of Tsushima camps etc.), environmental impact like in Death Stranding/reactive NPCs like in Bethesda RPGs.
QTE can be done well imho, for example in Yakuza series they are rare enough to not annoy you and not THAT important but if you can hit them when they appear, it makes your hit just more powerful
I hate games that don’t give any indication of when you’re supposed to do it. They’ll give you some tutorial on it and say “right before you’re hit” but good luck figuring out if you’re doing it too late or too early.
Lazy UI porting between PC and console. It goes both ways - radial menus showing up in a PC game or a joystick-controlled-cursor in a console game. M+KB vs controller are not comparable input methods, so trying to manage the UI with one that was built for the other is always a massive pain in the ass.
Inventory restrictions in games that throw a LOT of shit your way. Looking at you, Bethesda. Fortunately there's usually a mod of some kind to make items weigh like 0.01 lbs, or kick your slots up to 9999 or something. Sometimes realism adds to the experience... inventory management isn't one of those times.
Sluggish controls. I want to actually enjoy the Dark Souls games SO BAD - they look beautiful, I fuckin love that dark fantasy setting... but moving and combat feel like I'm driving a school bus with boxing gloves on my hands and diving flippers on my feet. I get that the cumbersome controls are a huge part of what makes it difficult, and that the difficulty is what a lot of players are after, but personally that's not a flavor of difficulty I'll ever be able to enjoy.
Love:
Good QOL features, especially involving the topics above. Like 'Hot Deposit' certain items to all designated storages in range, or AoE loot when a bunch of foes die in a pile. The quick loot style menu from Fallout 4 is another great example. Love that stuff!
Lore. Good story writing, believable/relatable characters, ESPECIALLY the antagonists. Hitting the sweet spot there is a quick ticket to my all time favorites.
Environmental challenges, with fun ways to overcome them. When I was new to Ark, one of the biggest challenges in my first play through was getting into the super cold zones and not freezing to death. My cold weather gear didn't cut it... the solution I came up with was to tame a paracer (kind of an elephant looking dino) and build a platform on its back: and made like 6 camp fires on the platform. So the I was, trudging through an insanely cold environment on a flaming elephant, cozy as can be. As a veteran player now, there are SO much more efficient methods to solving that problem, but the experience gave a unique sense of accomplishment, which is the kind of thing that got me hooked on that game.
Escorts matching the move speed of the player. 'nuff said.
Hot take, but I actually love well implemented radial menus on PC. When games bother to reset your cursor to the centre of the circle you can just quickly flick the mouse in a certain direction to make your selection, which is faster than most other mouse menus and a lot more comfortable than trying to reach for the 9 key.
Obligatory grinding. Like all those “retrieve my friends bracelet from the Torture Chamber of the Bloodseeking Ghouls”. You’re just running around doing the same things over and over again. Finding the place, killing everything, going back, talk to person A, get referred to person B, etc etc.
Starting with what I dislike: collectibles (or pickup upgrades). They spread these out over the levels and I find myself scouring the map to see if i didn’t miss anything. It ruins the pacing of the game. Some examples of my recent plays that do this are the Last of Us games and the Mass Effect trilogy. If the game is build around exploring your surroundings, it’s a different story of course.
What I really like in games is character building and i love it when a character improves depending on your playstyle. A very solid example is Skyrim’s leveling system. It just feels more organic.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne