For me it’s not a bad game by itself. But I think it’s the worst recent CRPG by far, so it irks me that it’s heralded as the best game ever everywhere. Some details:
The character building is so incredibly shallow, this is mostly the fault of DnD5E, but Larian could have at least given us more Subclass options. Multiclassing doesn’t really help because some combinations are just so incredibly overpowered that it doesn’t make sense to play anything else (For example: adding 2 Warlock levels to your Sorcerer is always better than playing a plain sorcerer), this is exacerbated by the next point
Why is 12 the level cap? The game is long enough to go the full 20 levels. Level 12 is particularly odd because almost no classes get anything special at around that level (exception: fighter with the 3rd attack at 11). Going to 20 would have the advantage that all classes get a capstone ability which would make single-classing worthwhile.
The amount of companions available is laughably low, and all of them seem to be the creation of a 13 year-old with how uber-cool they are. We got: Vampire boy, Mystras loverboy, Tiefling badass, stuck-up Githyanki, Shar’s pet and Warlock superhero. Each and every one of them makes me yawn.
This also extends to the main character even when you are not of the defaut origins, you are an instant super-hero starting at level 1. Nice power fantasy, would have maybe been compelling to me when I was a teenager.
All conversations are voiced, whoop-de-doo. The flip side is that all conversations are extremely short. Compared with “real” CRPGs the writing is shallow, once again this feels like it was made for pre-teens. I’d rather have writing that rivals a good book.
Why in the nine hells is this game even called Baldurs Gate 3? It continues neither the story nor uses similar mechanics beyond pretending to be a CRPG. The familiar faces you can meet feel extremely forced. At the very least they should have allowed 6 party members.
It’s Baldur’s Gate in name only. They took Divinity and slapped a Forgotten Realms skin on it.
It’s still the same terrible Larian game: player-punishing gameplay (low hit chance, overwhelming enemies), traps/hazards fucking everywhere, shallow class mechanics, and rage-inducing camera and UI controls. I will finish the game once and never touch it again (like all the other Divinity games).
That’s the thing I’m not entirely sure. I expected the graphics to be better and combat to be more exiting I guess? Especially for GOTY. Voice acting was a bit basic too
Did you play any of the Dragon Age games? I’ve heard the combat is pretty similar, which is a bummer because that was the thing that kept me from continuing DA:O. I feel like I’d enjoy the story of both but can’t get past the actual gameplay.
So I got on that game and it was kind of fun up until the first town when my friends were like “we need to talk to people to figure out what to do.”
I don’t mind games having a bit of lore and story but … I want to be doing (read: typically fighting) stuff in my games not just talking to a bunch of people… And when I don’t even know what people I need to talk to, to most quickly get back to the action, I’m out.
The one exception to that is possibly RuneScape because I’ve been playing that game for ages. However, even there I use quest guides and sometimes just spam through all the dialogue.
Was it System Shock? Then yeah, it probably could use some love.
Was it Turok? Then hey, HD Dinos can be cool.
Was it Okami? Then why not, giving it some polish and getting it playable on PC is worthwhile.
Was it Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Spyro, or Crash? Then absolutely, again for having them playable on PC at the very least.
I think all of these are examples where it makes sense to give them an update because various controls or even systems of today just don’t work with the old versions. All of these examples were also done pretty well overall.
On the other hand, I’m more conflicted on games from the last 10-12 years or sooner. Especially if it’s like The Last of US Remastered where it just isn’t supported well.
But then again, I appreciate getting Spider-Man and Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC, and I believe we only got those because of the remasters? But I would not be buying another remaster of either for PC in even 10 years from today, because what point would there be?
All in all, I think there are many examples where it “is technically fine”, but if it’s not done well then there was never a point in the first place. The Tony Hawk ones kind of fit here, as they partly feel really good and partly feel really janky - it’s nice having them on PC but they are no where near as polished as the other games I mentioned
I get Minecraft probably played a huge role in your life, and that would explain why you feel so disappointed with it. I don’t think it’s as bad as you described it, and I don’t think it’s leaning towards children more than before, but you’re talking from a place of nostalgia and I kinda understand that.
I don’t know how long you’ve been playing it but… maybe you’ve just… outgrown the game? Or got tired of it. You’re talking about when Minecraft came out… that was 13 years ago. It’s really hard to not lose interest in a game (any game, really) after so much time. Not to mention… you got older, too, and your tastes evolved.
I can’t really recommend you another game from your post (your question is way too broad, just play whatever, you don’t have to stick to one single game). But maybe you should consider that Minecraft is fine, that you spent maybe too much time with it, that it’s time to move on, and to be at peace with it.
What I‘m somewhat weary of is the idea that there is a „way of doing things“ for a lot of folks. That way is not for everyone. playing a particular game over a long time (among others) isn’t unhealthy or wrong. Also, just because the gaming industry forces marketing down our throats doesnt mean a game needs to change or we need to be ok with it.
Think chess. How did it change in the past 10 years, or 20?
My point is not nostalgia but I miss a neurological bias called the framing effect. This makes me see things a lot different than a lot of folks. And from that pov, a great game changing and focusing on something else than it has in the past in my mind is perfectly reasonable.
I do get that people are upset with how I phrased it. I was frustrated and needed to talk about it. People didnt like that and I understand it.
Yeah I get it too, and I understand there’s nothing wrong with playing the same game for a long time. But a lot of people will get tired of the same game after 10 years. Even chess, not everyone dedicates a lifetime to it.
Nostalgia can be very strong when you have a very strong connection with a game. I miss the times when I ate pizza with my friends and played Rock Band together all night long. I could still play Rock Band, but it’s not the same anymore. What I miss is that point in time, the context, the friends who’re not there anymore. The game hasn’t changed. I did, and my life did.
I agree. Rockband hasnt changed. But minecraft has.
Had to explain this special situation with minecraft to my wife today and she gets it since she knows me for many years: I loved the challenge, the obscurity and being forced to learn new things without a lot of help.
If minecraft were catered for people like me, we‘d not have camels and allays but vastly extended redstone, new and complicated crafting recipes and definitely no recipe book.
People keep saying „dont use it“ or „use mods“ but thats a lazy answer imo. Obviously, thats giving me the responsibility to fix a game i used to love.
Yes, NMS was overhyped and completely failed to meet expectations. But it was also complete garbage on release. 7/10? Not even close. It’s one of the only games I ever bought on physical disk that I returned because it was so bad when it wasn’t unplayable. That wasn’t a problem with expectations, that was a terrible fucking game.
Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.
To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don't blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,
But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.
When people say it's shallow, I wonder if they didn't even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn't even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.
Because of that I'm also really looking forward for their new game.
Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.
Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.
Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.
If I'm rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they're heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from earlier than that. I don't think that's recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There's plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn't work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.
Old is relative though. Age doesn’t hit movies or books nearly as hard as it does to games and gameplay mechanics, and where exactly that acceptable limit happens to be differ for each individual - with no doubt a large correlation based on your age.
It’s just really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up with them and doesn’t have the appreciation and nostalgia of those times. Heck, back when I was a kid with my PSX, anything on the NES felt like an ancient unplayable relic.
Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.
I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.
There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.
You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.
Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.
PC gaming isn’t that expensive right now anyway, depending on the level of performance that you want. I have a computer presumably without a dedicated graphics processor that runs Fallout 4 well. It will run Fallout 3 at consistent 60 fps at 720p.
Depending on how new the game is and whether or not you turn down the graphics, it’s not that expensive to get a gaming PC.
Your comment remind me how many games just wouldn’t run on my PC or how install would break my OS. Maybe I had no idea what I was doing. But PC gaming back in the days was very tricky. It got better in recent years.
I really mostly play on PC. But PC master race people are very snobish. Console gaming is a very important part of the market for very good reason.
Civilization? PC all the way. Ratchet & Clank? God of War? I had a lot of fun playing them on consoles. IDK whether they would have worked as well on PC.
Knights of the Old Republic? I played on PC in spite of the awful UI port from console mode.
Detroit: Become Human generally has big overarching choices that are more obviously good vs bad, or rather pacifist vs violent and deviant vs machine, but a lot of the smaller in-between choices can make a big difference regarding who lives and who dies, and a lot of them aren’t obvious, especially in Kara’s story line. One in particular that I remember can seem like an obvious “doing the right thing” choice but it actually is a choice that can get several characters killed as a result if you do what seems like the “good person” thing. Getting to the end with everyone still alive can be surprisingly difficult without a guide, and there are a lot of different endings and branching paths depending on a lot of different choices. One character has I think somewhere around 26 separate chances of dying in the story at different points in the game. There’s an achievement for getting all of them lol.
Heavy rain is similar to DBH but less obvious about having particular good or bad routes iirc. Like it doesn’t do the “pacifist vs violent” or “deviant vs machine” style choices, but there are a lot of different choices that can affect the ending and who survives to the end.
Dragon Age Origins is an oldie but a goody with a ton of endings and decisions that aren’t strictly good or bad. The following DA games are good too but the first one fits what you’re looking for the most.
Those are ones I can think of off the top of my head.
If you’re looking for more like this, check out the Telltale games. In particular, I’m a fan of The Wolf Among Us. It’s based on a comic book series (called Fables, if you wanted to google it,) where fairy tale creatures are real and live hidden among humans; It’s a good old fashioned murder mystery where the lead detective is the Big Bad Wolf. I won’t spoil anything here, but there are a lot of decisions which can have a major impact further down the line.
The Batman telltale game is very similar; It’s less focused on “Batman the asskicker” and more focused on “Batman the world’s greatest detective” where you’re trying to uncover a plot by an unknown villain.
The Walking Dead is what put the game studio on the map for most people, but it’s ironically the game I like the least. Your choices do matter, so you may end up enjoying it. But I personally enjoyed the mysteries from the two latter games more than I enjoyed the interpersonal relationships in The Walking Dead. But maybe that’s just my autism talking.
If 7.1 isn’t necessary and you already have a mic, I would suggest you take a peek at just normal audiophile headphones. If you don’t mind Reddit, some good pointers and ideas in this thread reddit.com/…/has_anyone_used_audiophile_headphone….
I’ve been using Beyerdynamic DT880 pro for a few years and they’re amazing. Comfortable as hell and pads can be removed easily and cleaned or swapped. Great sound, zero regrets with these headphones. The entire DT lineup from them is very good as far as I know. Another go-to option is Sennheiser’s 600 series, but they’re a bit more expensive. There are numerous others but those are the ones that I know of.
I would suggest browsing what the /r/HeadphoneAdvice has to say, asking about audiophile headphones for gaming is a common question.
You can get some good deals on Audiophile Headphones (like the senheiser’ 650) on Drop.com. That’s where i got mine, since it’s a colab model they label it as a HD 6XX but it should be the exact same as an HD 650
The 880s are bulletproof, I daily drove mine for a decade (even back then recommendation was also audiophile headphones and a mic) before replacing the pads and modding them to have a detachable cable. I use a pair of DT1990 now with the same dekoni audio pads I used on my 880s, I keep meaning to get some other headphones for variety but I’ve honestly had no complaints with Beyerdynamic.
The premise is that the planet starts about (with default settings) thirty days away from beibg destroyed by a meteor. You and the other couple dozen or hundred people on the server have the obvious goal of stopping that meteor. But nobody actually makes you do it and since you all start with stone tools and wheelbarrows, none of you even have the means to do it in the beginning.
The idea is that you band together with other like-minded players and form a settlement and each of you specializes into a different set of professions (for example, I am a shipwright and logger mainly but also have a small pottery workshop going). In time, you find new ressources or ways to utilise already discovered ressources to eventually build cars, boats, larger settlements and stuff. While that is happening, you can (and probably want to) set some rules for what is allowed and forbidden in your settlements radius (you widen that radius by increasing culture, mostly via decorative items). The rules you set (and players actually have to vote for and come to agreements with) almost always follow a simple “If x then y (else z)” programming logic and can be incredibly creative. Once voted for, those rules are law and can’t be broken by the subset of people affected by that rule. Seriously, one town on my current server basically gutted themselves accidentally by miswording a law. They intended a specific player to be forbidden of doing anything in their town but the wording was "If {name} is resident then prevent ". But since, yes, that player on the server was a resident of something (another town or their own homestead, doesn’t matter), so condition true, every citizen in town was banned from doing anything meaningful, since it wasn’t worded as “prevent {name} from doing xyz”.
You’re welcome! I’ve played 46 hours of it in the ten days since I bought it and I haven’t played more basically only because we’re on vacation now and I have to work to afford living lol.
🤓 The Talos Principle 2 is taking up my tiny slices of gaming time. Tons of puzzles to solve, a really engaging story to unfold and the music is just beautiful. If you played the first edition (from 2009) it’s totally like that and more. I’m, only halg-way through it but yeah, it’s great and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.
But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.
It’s the story of a mother in a post-apocalyptic environment having to care for her daughter and village while doing the war outside.
Everything, art, music, is a masterpiece. The music is just extremely good.
Outside of special zones, there are 20 you have to find, and it cycles between them. All 20 are voiced, with words or humming.
The story is good, and is extremely anti-war.
The gameplay feels amazing. It can be hard at first, but I quickly learned how to control the bike and and to do backflips and frontflips at the right time to reload guns and the pary.
The main character laika is one-shot, but the game isn’t very punishing. The respawn points aren’t too far away from each other, and they are optional. When you die, you loose a pouch with the currency, and can get it back.
There are some little issues with the game tho. The ending seems to be a bit rushed. The ending boss isn’t that difficult, and there were some cuts it seems.
But overall these little issues aren’t that bad, and the game is still amazing for an indie.
If shooters, beer visuals, and light swearing (think damn, shit, the voicelines are pretty rare and can be disabled with mods) are alright for your kid, check out deep rock galactic. its on steam as well as xbox, and is a 1-4 player coop mining and shooting game where you collect minerals and shoot the ant looking bugs trying to eat you. its incredibly fun and ive sunk over 2500 hours into it without feeling for even a second that any of it was predatory.
I play Fortnite with my kid and some friends. We’ve configured comms so he can only chat with approved friends from RL.
Fortnite has a reputation for getting kids to buy cosmetics, but it isn’t justified. We’ve been playing for a year or so and my guy hasn’t asked to buy anything.
It’s very approachable, so your kid may be able to convince his friends to play too.
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