I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level… The one where you could jump outside the windows.
I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
I’ve played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It’s fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can’t optimize or support.
The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it’s a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.
Now with GOG, you don’t have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don’t know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.
As of steam i don’t need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.
That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i’d rather get it from them. But i’ve found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they’re offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic’s layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.
I’ve been playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and Automation/Beam.ng mostly but I’ve been severely addicted to the free demo for Half Sword. It’s the most brutal, jankiest medieval combat simulator I’ve ever played and it’s as frustrating as it is fun. I can’t stop playing it.
I would kill for my son to try to get me to play ANY video game with him, let alone BG3. I started playing D&D and video games over 40 years ago. He’s lucky to have a son like you. Hope you guys can figure this out.
Honestly, I could see a new Soul Reaver game being a Souls-like if anyone was actually serious about resurrecting the franchise. I mean, between the ruined world and characters who can come back from death you could definitely market it as "Dark Souls, but vampires" towards newcomers. Shame the rights are with Embracer, meaning we aren't likely to ever get a new entry unless someone buys it off them.
Isn’t combat just so boring? While none of the games you mentioned are familiar to me, story focused games are my main interest. My personal favorite is definitely The Wink and Kiss Part 2 for Neverwinter Nights. Its an adult romance damsel in distress bard’s tale in which there’s almost always a social solution. Whenever combat is apparently unavoidable even the nicest and most harmless character can prevail with the help of her friends! Still though, it is all based on the 3rd edition of DND, so don’t expect things to be easy!
If an old DND game doesn’t interest you, then perhaps consider The Sims 1. Its one of the best selling role-playing games of all time. The Sims is just so awesome it doesn’t even need combat to be creepy, scary, and hard! Right now that’s the game capturing all of my spare time.
There is also a really good visual-novel with enough different paths to cross over into similar territory: Cinders! Its a contemplative retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale which focuses on the player character’s own agency and freedom in an oppressive world. Perhaps its best described as being a game about the true meaning of freedom and independence.
Since you’ve already received many excellent suggestions in this thread by now you hopefully won’t mind these more unusual options. Have fun with which ever game you choose and good luck!
I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!
The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)
Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.
Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU
The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs
Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE
Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M
There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo
I mean, if credit card is the issue, you can buy steam gift cards with cash at most game/electronics stores. I know this will depend on your region, but he can absolutely have a steam account with no card attached. I sometimes delete my debit card info by accident trying to use a different card and have to readd the card entirely. There’s been plenty of times my steam account has had no payment method.
IIRC I’ve never given Valve/Steam payment info. Everything is processed through PayPal. But even then, you should be able to gift his account a purchase without him putting in payment methods if you can convince him to use steam at all
bin.pol.social
Ważne