Breath of The Wild for me. The open world and exploration just blew me away. I wanted to just spend as much time as possible exploring that version of Hyrule.
Second is Majora’s Mask. It was so different than all the Zelda games before it and really dark. I loved the time element and really getting to know all the different npc characters.
A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.
Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.
Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.
My bottom three:
Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.
Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Perhaps you may or may not enjoy Space Asshole Red Faction: Guerilla. It’s a 2009 game that got a solid enough PC port that may run on weaker systems. There’s a remastered version but if you’re aiming for low-spec the original might be a better bet.
Anyway, it’s an open world set on Mars and you go around wreaking havoc and blowing up buildings with ahead-of-its-time physics/destruction mechanics. The combat is more like a shooter and you play with lots of explosives. It’s not a huge map by standards today but is a big enough playground to keep one occupied.
There was nothing quite like when your parents finally let you get another game so you brought home majoras mask and read the booklet thoroughly on the dive home, then after getting control of link again after what felt like centuries to an impatient child and seeing him do flips and shit up the tree stumps
You might really enjoy DayZ. The public servers are pretty brutal, but if you find a comfortable RP server you can settle in and really enjoy exploring the landscape. Once you’re used to the mechanics it’s so smooth.
Stereo headphones or even like monitors make hunting a lot of fun, listening to distant sounds trying to find a deer or boar is a lot of fun. And once you’re used to dealing with zombies and the sthough.l mechanics, crafting and all that, it really opens up.
Plus the ability to expand it with modding is pretty extensive. We’ve got some neat stuff on our own server (though not much pop atm), and I’ve seen others that do some next level stuff like player vampires and werewolves and stuff.
Even just the vanilla game is absolutely gorgeous though. If you like exploring, scavenging, and crafting, especially with friends, it’s kind of perfect.
Conan Exiles has a somewhat similar vibe but a bit clunkier and in a low fantasy setting. It’s also got a lot of D&D roleplay servers.
If the idle game is running at 100% there is no power left to also crypto mine. If the idle game runs at 10% you could use 90% for mining but then you would pay for 100% energy usage instead of 10%. You’d probably end up paying more than you’d mine.
Yeah I was mostly thinking of it as some clever way to mine. Somehow linking the mining engine into the gameplay itself. That’s a proper point though when just looking at the efficiency side of things.
My somewhat controversial suggestion is outward. Low graphical intensity PC game, very open world, and some incredibly unique and polarizing design choices. If your favorite part of breath of the wild was world exploration and korok finding, you may love it! If you like quality of life features though, maybe not.
Things like, you have a world map but no “you are here” marker so need to place yourself with landmarks. You need to drop your backpack to fight effectively and remember where you dropped it, the magic system is based on insomnia with the longer since you slept the more mana you have until you push it too far and just collapse. Really really weird game that I still think about all the time years later.
As I said, it’s on consoles too — including Switch. It’s just that it’s a secondary platform for it — meaning it may be a lesser experience than on the platform it was ported from.
I agree that having a AAA(A™) publisher probably shouldn’t get you classified as indie. It’s been increasingly common though to see large publishers back indie studios in recent years. Dave the Diver and Nexon’s relationship comes immediately to mind for recent example.
I watched the gameplay trailer and was so confused as to why Ubisoft thought it could get away with so blatantly ripping off Dead Cells.
Still confused why it’s in the “triple-i” showcase, though. I know the definition of “indie” has become more and more loose as of late, but I’d think the core concept of being self-published would have to be a pre-requisite.
An indie band can still have a record label backing them, but calling themselves that sets an expectation that their music will likely be outside of mainstream appeal. The same goes for indie films which can still have massive budgets and distribution channels thanks to major studio backing. They just tell stories that won’t follow the formulaic mold that big picture releases are beholden to.
You kind of have to disconnect the word “indie” from meaning “independent.” The industry has matured enough that indie refers more to an overall aesthetic and expectation for consumers rather than a fully independent game dev. Publishers are ultimately acknowledging the legitimacy of indie games as a part of the market and dipping their hands in them. I’d still expect the studios to retain most of the creative and design control, but they’ll have access to the marketing, analysis, and distribution relationships that publishers can provide.
Man, I haven’t played that since it was released, but I remember it being absolutely amazing. I should check it out again, but with the RimWorld release today I think I’ll be busy for a while…
Rimworld the game that I have over 500 hours and still dont know how to play it but I love it. I heard that the minimum amount of hours to get the game is about 1000 (/s).
So that’s why all my mods are out of date! I haven’t played in over a year and today I got a sudden urge to start a game. I thought it was weird that so many mods weren’t compatible but now I know why.
I quite like StarSector too. It clearly owes a lot to the Escape Velocity series which I love.
StarSector's focus on colony management is super fun though. The recent patch was also quite good and seemed to add more story elements which I appreciate. I appreciate the unique looking ships even though some of them end up looking very ugly.
I love working with the AIs. Smuggling them, integrating them into colonies, doing other spoilery things with them. I wish there were deeper mechanics there and more story too, but that could still happen.
I am currently playing my first save on vanilla with a few QoL mods but looking at the mods list there is a lot more amazing content to be had. I think I am going to enjoy this game for sometime.
I remember trying it quite a few years ago but it was too much work to learn to play it at the time, I knew how long it usually takes for games like DF, kenshi or rimworld to click and wasn’t sure if star sector is worth it when I had x3, factorio, m&b to occupy me.
I am always tempted to give it a try but the number of new complex games keeps increasing while the number of my brain cells keeps dropping xd
I am with you. On my first try I died early on and then I hit YouTube for a couple of lets plays. If you are interested, they are Big Brain Energy and Francis John
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