Morrowind! Besides the wealth of non-story quests, the modding community is HUGE and lets you add EVEN MORE CONTENT. (To be fair, the modding communities for all TES games are massive.)
There are some mods for Daggerfall, but not what I’d call a massive community. Arena is mostly ignored, and it’s like Battlespire and Redguard were erased from history altogether.
You’re totally right, haha. I was just so excited while posting that, in my hasty attempt to include the later games’ communities, I just blanket-statemented the whole series! Thanks for catching that 😅
It’s understandable 😁, Morrowind is definitely when the series started to get more mainstream audience, and the older ones are not talked about a lot. I had never even heard of them before trying Morrowind, I rediscovered them later mainly because I can’t let a game drop a “3” on me without wondering what came before.
Doesn’t help that there was a big design shift between Daggerfall and Morrowind (more than anything between TES 3-4-5), and they’re very different games.
Daggerfall did have a bit of modding though. Most quests were procedurally generated using quest templates, like “[type of NPC] sends you to [type of dungeon] to find [McGuffin] for [reward]”. I remember a mod that added lots of new quest types for more diversity.
There are an absolute ton of games on Steam that cover the exploring and doing quests vibe and the amount of combat in them varies from none to some but not the main focus of the game. Here’s a few I’ve tried:
Oh man Astroneer is so good — but I don’t think it’s up OP’s alley. There’s no quests to speak of, or even goals really, besides the 1. tutorial stuff, and 2. overall “reach the end” — besides that, it’s up to you to be self-directed.
Context: my breath-of-the-wild loving partners didn’t much get into Astroneer, unless I specifically set them goals and they didn’t have to figure anything out for themselves. :P (Well, one of them, at least …)
I think the “map marker check mark” dopamine game is a whole different thing from ‘true’ open-world … well, that’d unnecessarily exclusionary. Neither one is truer than the other. But they’re definitely extremely different.
Anyway, OP, my suggestion in that vibe would definitely be the Fallout or Assassin’s Creed serieses. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn! Great sidequest-driven, exploration-heavy, gigaaaaaantic games, all of them!
No Man Sky definitely has that open world sandbox itch. There’s a lot of stuff to do it. Also go and pirate tears of the kingdom lol, it’s super fuckin good.
Sometimes I can’t keep it together when pikachu and Steve from Minecraft duke it out with music playing that makes me expect a giant healthbar to appear in the sky
What’s better than going to the main inspiration of Spider games? Insomniac already said that a huge inspiration of their games is the Batman Arkham Series. They play very similarly but with Arkham being more focused on stealth and puzzles. The first one, Arkham Asylum is more of a metroidvania than an open world, so I think you could start with Arkham City (the second one). As for Zelda, you could try one of its copycats, Genshin is one of them, the other one would be Fenyx Rising, a Ubisoft game. I have never played, but from what Ive read, it’s pretty good.
For Spider-Man, I guess the easy answer would be Miles Morales, huh? :P
But I know what you meant, its a game with ridiculously fun mobility though its hard to find a good equivalent. There’s few things that feel as good as webslinging. So on that front (Open world + Mobility) I’m going to suggest the Just Cause series. 2 is generally the one people are the most fond of, though I vastly preferred 3. 4 is a mix of both but it didn’t gel well with me. You are not quite Spider-man, but a grappling hook and wingsuit go a long way of providing a similar experience.
For Genshin, the one game with open-world and exploration I’ve swapped around with it before is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Large world, fair number of sidequests (I’ve actually never finished the game from how big it is) and a lot of climbing - with no stamina bars. The loot quality feeds the same endorphins as a good gacha roll, and its free.
I found Saints Row 4 a fun super hero video game and the powers of super speed and flight made traveling fun over conventional means. The side quests were something I enjoyed too.
Yeah, Saint Row 3 had the super powers only in the DLC. That is my favorite Saints Row. Although I’ve only played 3 and 4. The Genki side missions were my favorite in 3.
The genki side missions were great. I just remember going into SR3 not expecting a lot and then ended up finishing the game (rare for me) and actually enjoyed it a lot.
I don’t think I ever finished one of the GTA games, I usually got bored fairly quickly.
Sr3 was the Skyrim to Sr2’s Morrowind. Shinier but simplified. A good entry game to get to Sr2 imo.
(Personally I wasnt a fan of Sr4 because it felt like it was just a really expensive dlc. Didn’t really add anything to Sr3 imo, but since there is evidence of people liking it here, I’m not going to come after it too hard. It might be a great entry title for getting to Sr3 to get to Sr2 eventually, and imo that’s good enough for me to be happy about it getting mentioned)
Honestly, there are two mobile games I’ve really been blown away by: Night of the Full Moon, and Dungeon Boss Respawned. They’re very polished, very feature-complete games that are on the small and neatly contained side. For PC, Bastion is pretty damn good. Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 as well, but it’s difficult to get those running anymore. Raft, Ori and the Blind Forest and Stardew Valley are also phenomenal.
I’m sure there are other small games worthy of mention, but I’m struggling to remember them. I usually play large open world games. On that subject, absolutely try Valheim if you haven’t.
I’ll be happy to summarize each of these games if you’d like me to.
Maybe you mean Gamefaqs. Not all games have it obviously, but there is a saves category for some. Here Skyrim as an example. And to search for PC games: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc
For Windows I’ve used Game Save Manger for years, since it’ll auto find save locations that you want to select to be backed up.
On Linux you could use a program like Timeshift and specify the general directory your save files are located in and have them backed up on a schedule as well.
As for saves. I’ve had some luck finding them from nexusmods and sometimes steam message boards or guides.
That sounds like what I’m going to end up doing. I wasn’t sure if there was a general well known hub for save files I was unaware of.
Yeah, it’s where I seen lot of 100% complete save files. Used it to see the Arkham Knight true ending over doing the ridiculous amount of collectables.
Metro Exodus (I would recommend you play the 2 previous games before to understand the story. They are linear, so if you do not like that, simply watch a playthrough of both of them. BUT. I highly recommend you play and experience the atmosphere of the first 2 games, just my opinion)
Need for Speed Unbound/Heat (which ever one is cheaper, I prefer unbound, but they are pretty similar.)
And, if you have a good computer that can emulate switch games, I would highly recommend BOTW and TOTK as you’ve mentioned in the post. The best open world games there are.
The unpack process is usually single threaded, and a stock 5820k is slower than a ryzen 1600 in that case, so you’re probably just running out of CPU performance. My server runs a 6700k and it’s pretty slow to unpack even with nvme arrays
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