I would consider them a few different genres, but they are easily my favourite types of games these days. I cateogrize them in my steam list as below.
-Colony Builders: Games about building well, a colony, often from little to nothing. Often lots of You vs Environment friction, with the natural world. Tends to have a bit more focus on the individuals that comprise the colony. Examples: Rimworld (my favourite game of all time), Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Stranded Alien Dawn, Space Haven.
-City Builders: A bit broader in scope than a colony builder, working more on the macro level. Friction is often economic, sometimes adjusted with the natural world. Cities Skylines is kind of the prime exampe of this, but also games like Timberborn or Anno.
-Automation: Games about building a factory that…builds things automatically. Challenge tends to be logistical complexity but some games do feature combat as well. Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program (my personal favourite), Satisfactory, and Captain of Industry are the Four Horsemen of this genre to me. Techtonica is very early still but seems to have some promise as well.
For many of these games, there is a whole world of content to explore if you are interested in mods. Rimworld players regularly run hundreds of mods, my current game has about 350. Factorio has extensive overhaul mods that can take literally thousands of hours to finish in some cases (Py’s). Satisfactory has a surprisingly robust mod scene for an early access game too.
I see a pattern of games mentioned here! What do you call games like theme hospital? I’d love to skim a few recommendations for these kind of games that let you hire different employees to run parts of your business.
I do use that. I have a Series X but I play on PC as well. Some games aren’t available on xbox and sometimes the TV might be occupied or I might want to squeeze in some quick gaming while already at my desk.
One of my favorite things about the DS family was its pick up and play nature. Sure not every game would let you save and quit, but you could just shut the lid and come back later and everything will still be right where you left it.
New to the Deck, am afraid to do that since it screwed up with Cloudpunk the one time i did it, just sent it to sleep with the power button and when it came back it had issues (don’t recall exactly what right now, a black screen i think) and remained until i did a full Deck reboot, feel like it’s a classic PC issue which makes sense, now i don’t send it to sleep until i’ve saved and quit
I absolutely hate that concept, as even when, or especially if, it matters, it’s in the most cookie-cutter binary in-your-face kind of way, literally “(a) eat baby (b) safe baby”.
I don’t mind choice in games, but it should be actual choice, i.e. you do things because you want to do them, not because you think they will make the story go to the “good ending” or worse yet, be forced on you to stay on the good path, as the game is only build for good and bad path and everything in the middle is just mechanically broken.
The best choices in games are fully mechanics driven or just cosmetic, though that’s pretty damn rare in narrative games. In most games choice is generally just bad and annoying, as you aren’t focused on the actual game or story, but on what the writer might consider to be the “good way”.
That good old fragile “suspension of disbelief” gets shattered by choice systems very very easily.
I personally find the most important part of those choices isn’t the actual effect, but whether the game managed to immerse me enough so that I care.
For example, in Life is Strange, there’s a string of choices you can make that will get someone killed (or save them). The game invests enough time in the character before hand so when you come to the crossroads, the decisions FEEL very important. Do those choices have any big effects on the game? Not really. The character isn’t part of the main story line anymore after that, you only get some people referencing the difference. But if FELT important.
Think about the polar opposite: Choices that change the entire game, but you aren’t invested in. Would those be interesting choices, or would that just be 2 games in the form of one, and the choice is just a kind of “game select screen”.
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.
Time-limited consumables as buffs can be a huge annoyance. In a ton of games I just end up stacking them, waiting for an opportunity where I need them, but usually when I need them, I don’t have the time to stop and use them. I keep ending those kind of games with an inventory full of potions.
I really like minor stat boosting items instead. So rather than giving me an inventory full of potions, give me three or four slots for items that can have a huge range of different bonuses and penalties, and they are pretty minor, but they’re permanent. That way I get to craft a build instead of just being annoyed
I love fast travel, warp gates, teleporting and anything that makes it easier and faster for me to get from Point A to Point B.
“Scenery is pretty.” Don’t care.
“Look at the extra content.” I’ll look if I want to. Don’t force it.
While I enjoy casual and relaxed games, taking forever to walk to where I want to go is neither casual nor relaxed. I wanna be where I wanna be in game and don’t pad on the gameplay hours with slow transport options.
lack of class or profession decision (one character can do all sucks),
random generated weapon/gear stats
coop where process isn’t shared to every player. Requires a multiple saves system to allow single player, as well as coop play, saves.
enemy level scaling with player level,
fully breaking weapon without being able to repair them
bound items. Seriously, this needs to stop. I’d like to share my gear with guild mates or my other characters. I want to be able to sell a good item again if I don’t need it. But so far only Ragnarok Online managed to do this well, that I know of.
MMORPG with fixed marketplace, like fixed prices, build in price statistics etc. ruining a possible economy focused gameplay in favor of the lazy and dumb players, who complain… because they are not skilled enough.
non MMORPGS with NPC that don’t move or have daily activities. Gothic did this so we’ll decades ago, I thought this would be standard by now
any pay2win element
any pay2skip grind purchases
any quality of life wallet gated
Battle-pass, season-pass, fomo bullshit
What I love
weather and seasons
music instruments, music class or weapons
hidden treasures you need to dig for or find treasure maps
NPC that have activities and are not glued to their vending table
animal follower
jumpsuit/glider
destroyable environment/footsteps
weapon degradation and maintenance
professions and weapon/gear crafting
alchemy like in Kingdom Come Deliverance
NPC that tell you where to go, instead of a questmarker and path showing you where to go,
able to respec my stat points only
verticality in Level Design, like Dark Souls 1
fishing with a bit of a challenge other than just pushing a button in time
character customization, hair, skin, body size, height, voice
fashion slots, like Terraria and now also Cyberpunk2077
changing cities through actions I did in the game. NPC got killed, house destroyed/build etc.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back. If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
Slow grounded movement in open world games is so dumb. Why the fuck do you think I want to spend 5minutes walking across a plain or on a path I can’t that forces me to move slowly. I do appreciate how some games like this actively just take control for you so you can do a chore (Final Fantasy XIV autodrive, RDR2 lets you automatically move on a path while riding a horse) butIf your open world is that boring, can you just add a mode that brings me to my destination?
I’d much rather a more densely populated world on a smaller scale (Yakuza) some fun extreme forms of movement (Gravity Rush, Tears of the Kingdom). Heck even just have a faster option for mobility on basic terrain is better (Elden Ring). If there was a big desert and you gave me a dune buggy that goes 100mph, that feels way better then having to walk/trod around a hilly or mountainous landscape dotted with areas you have to move around or carefully move through.
Obviously if you lean into that mechanic as being intentionally frustrating, feel free.
In a similar vein for me, I really dislike cutscenes in a lot of first person games where you still have control of your character, but the only thing you can do is sloooowly move forward or move your camera slightly to the side. Just make it an actual cinematic so I can just sit back and watch instead of pretending it’s gameplay.
Death Stranding is a game completely about grounded movement, but it makes it enjoyable. Usually traveling in games is mostly about turning your brain off and moving forward. DS you need to pay attention to your environment and character and plan a path forward. It’s actually engaging. I don’t expect other games to do as well as a game where that’s 99% of what they were trying, but I’d hope they learn from it at least. I haven’t seen much, if any, of that yet though.
Death Stranding 100% gets this right, although it’s a bit weird in the end-game when your optimal choice is typically some combination of vehicles and ziplines.
Paying attention to the elevation, pathing around rocks and trying to stay level is a lot more fun than it sounds. Some of the best moments in that game it just lets some chill music play while you carefully walk from A-B and it’s a ton of fun the whole time.
Then you finally reach your destination and the story feels almost entirely detached from the walking experience and characters with the dumbest names imaginable explain some made up bullshit to you for 45 minutes.
This is one big reason why I liked Fenyx way better than Breath of the Wild. The Fenyx world is far smaller, but also more dense with actually interesting things to do. You have a horse in both, but the distances in BotW are still just pointlessly big, esp. when 90% of the things you can find are just the same two things: shrines and koroks.
I’m absolutely baffled as to why more than one game I’ve ever played had fishing in it.
I love the X series (despite the unfortunate name), but the literal real-time days you spend waiting for money to appear in your account are still more engaging than any fishing minigame ever.
I agree with fishing mini games, it’s almost never anything like actual fishing, but some sort of weird experience that requires a combination of precise timing, button mashing or both.
That being said I think it’s insane to me that Nintendo crammed a fishing mini game in basically every Zelda game except for BotW and TotK, the two games where it would actually make sense. I just wanna chill and throw out a line. It’s every other zelda game where I just did the minimum amount required to get a bottle or whatever I needed.
I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.
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