I guess you’re looking to spend time with interesting characters.
Endearing party of playable characters:
Bug Fables — A big tiny adventure of three cute insects, with Paper Mario-inspired turn-based combat
Cassette Beasts — Creature-collecting with heart. You bring one of several interesting companions with you.
Moonlight Pulse — A metroidvania set on a planet-sized creature. You play as a team of planet-creature denizens fighting off a parasite infestation.
Encountering interesting NPCs:
A Short Hike — A very small but dense open world game. You encounter characters on your way to find a cell signal in a remote mountain park. With no quest tracker or minimap, you just wander and do what you want.
Inscryption — Card game with an immersive, spooky atmosphere. The game is hiding secrets from you, though, and you’ll meet plenty of shady characters before you can get the truth.
CrossCode — Action RPG set in a fictional VR MMO of the distant future. You wake up as a player character with no memories of real life, unable to log out. You quickly make friends, go do MMO stuff together and get to the bottom of why you’re stuck in-game.
Parasocial weirdness:
Hypnospace Outlaw — You are a janitor on a Geocities-like service in a simulated 1999 internet. You learn about all the users through their personal websites. This game expresses a large emotional range with just website updates (or the lack of them).
I was going to suggest CrossCode, it has some great characters. And while the game is balls-hard on default settings it has many adjustable options to bring it in line with whatever your skill level may be.
Honestly, my issue with it is that it gets mired in real MMO tedium when it didn’t need to simulate that. Stuff like running between NPC traders to trade your supplies up for good equipment and other stuff like having a gigantic pile of consumables.
And of course, I finish the final boss with all the best consumables still in my inventory. The game never pressed me to use them, so I always saved them for something more important. “Oh, that was the final boss. Guess I should have been eating more sandwiches.”
The plot and worldbuilding are still really cool. Just don’t get into MMOmaxxing.
Valheim and Satisfactory are masterclass. GOAT simulator is good for 6 year olds. Raft was kind of dull be entertaining with multiplayer. V Rising I didn’t really care for, but haven’t played since it was first available on Steam
While I disagree with how long they’re been in early access especially when other games are in early access and doing it better… The updates were still pretty impressive. The new biomes were pretty interesting.
They’ve gotten progressively more poorly thought out though.
Mistlands is glorious, but so fogged in as to be essentially invisible. I resorted to a mod to increase the value of the wisp.
Ashlands is just a brutal, unfun grind. Not hard, just relentless especially with endless pop-in of enemies. Not to mention even more horrendous performance… 20fps on a very high end system is abysmal (rtx 4090, nvme drive, etc).
I bought it the very day it came out for no real reason and fell in love with it. Put about 500 hours in it before any updates happened. Played a little since then but those higher tier biomes are pretty brutal. Gonna wait until it’s 1.0 before jumping in again. Best $20 ever
Palworld is a lot of fun. Much different than a lot of survivals since I was never into Pokémon. Enshrouded I played on release for a little bit. Gonna sound weird but I the building turned me off a bit and the combat i felt a little awkward. I know a lot of people love it so it’s like a me thing.
Icarus is really cool. I refunded it initially because I felt it was janky but they have released an update every single week since launch. Picked it up again at the start of summer and I have like 300+ hours in it. It’s so good.
I was really bad. So bad that I only played archery and even got archery class over level 30. My brother always tops the leaderboards and he came over one day and showed me how to play. Basically, make sure you’re in third person and we use either the battle axe or executioners axe. I’m now regularly at the top of the boards.
If you ever want to join up with us let me know. We do the 40 man mixed
It’s been a while but I remember I was annoyed with something to do with having to find blood. I know that’s really stupid considering it’s a vampire game. Also the top down view i have a hard time with these days since I played so much Diablo 1+2 back in the day
Companies aren’t innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.
I feel like the best you could possibly find is a game that uses a resource as payment that isn’t called “money,” but mechanically it would be the same.
But there is Minecraft. You can farm in that and you don’t need money (even though it exists in the form mentioned above). Or Project Zomboid which money exists as money but is only useful as toilet paper.
Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.
Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.
I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.
Fallout 4 wasn’t bad, it was a lot of fun for a few playthroughs. You can make some valid arguments about steps backwards from new Vegas, but it did a lot of things well too.
Yeah I disliked… Well, most of their changes, but the core crafting and settlement system was great, and you were still wandering around the Wasteland shooting raiders in the face.
Rabbit and Steel - Cross between a bullet hell and roguelite with raid style gameplay. Requires very close co-ordination with your team to survive (up to 4 player co-op). Punishing but rewarding.
Surprised to see the downvotes (by which I mean, I’m surprised so many people know this, I’d never heard of it at all).
“Roguelike co-op game requiring close coordination” seems like a mega-fail by concept since I tend to think of co-op games as more relaxed. But, looking at gameplay videos, it reminds me of FFXIV raid mechanics in a simplified game format. I can see how that would appeal to some people.
but they do have all the money in the world, no external pressure, no publisher to shit on them, it’s just their developers and artists and a vision.
I think that’s part of the issue. Supposedly they do have multiple games in development and a large percentage of their employees are working on them. But they are content to let the creative and technical processes play out, without announcing too-ambitious release dates which inevitably get pushed back and still have a buggy game released. And sometimes they even cut their losses if a long term project just isn’t working out.
Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.
See, I don’t really care that the player is referred to as “They/Them” in Deltarune, because it’s established that you are playing as Kris and those are their pronouns.
(and in Undertale, the monsters simply had no idea what Frisk’s gender was due to an unfamiliarity with humans so it’s kept intentionally vague… with they/them simply being the most gender neutral thing to call them and the fanbase having their own headcanons on what Frisk actually is. Personally my head canon is Frisk is male and Chara is female, which seemed to be the most common interpretation in the fanbase back then… my headcanon for Kris is that they’re intersex with they/them pronouns as I see them as being representative of both Frisk and Chara, but however you see the situation is just as valid unless the creator comes out and says “No it’s this specific way, everything else is wrong!” and to my knowledge Toby Fox has not done that)
Sidenote: First non-binary person I ever met used ey/eir pronouns, this was so long ago that ey called eirself “Genderless” instead of Non-Binary as the latter wasn’t a word. Ey was femme presenting, but very much not female. Sadly we’ve drifted apart and wherever ey is I wish eir well.
I always wished ey/eir had caught on instead of “singular they”, because personally I thought “ey” sounded cooler and was more straightforward than “singular they”. But hey I’m not non-binary myself so it’s not really any of my business.
On a similar note, I used to see shi/hir pronouns more often than I do now as well, though that was more for intersex individuals than non-binary. I still see some usage of shi/hir, though the people I see with those pronouns tend to self-identify as “hermaphrodite”, a phrase that is considered highly insulting by most. I guess what I’m saying here is that there are all kinds and it’s probably best not to make assumptions or assume gender to be a one-size fits all phenomenon.
I would like to thank you for taking your time to write this response. For some reason, I was feeling blue. Seeing the lenght of your comment made me feel heard and really happy. Thank you for sharing this with me, may you have a wonderful day/night!
I’m actually all for this as well, unless the game is some open-ended roleplaying experience just give me a character to play as and design the game around who this person is (I think the original Dead Rising did a good job of this with Frank West, the remake… well unless previews are from an earlier build than what we’re getting in September not so much)
And I mean a REAL open-ended roleplaying experience, not something like Fallout 4 that was blatantly designed for me to play as Nate, a lawful good heterosexual cisgender male military vet with predefined goals… with gay romance options and the ability to play as his wife Nora existing solely to give the illusion of choice… An Illusion I still appreciate because when I play I always wind up being Nora with Curie as my wifey.
(I feel like FO4 would be far less divisive if it was a spinoff about Nate’s journey rather than a sequel to a series that is known for player agency, and even then the Brotherhood of Steel suddenly being a bunch of Nazis is still stupid as hell)
Then we’d be going back to having the vast majority of games having a cis male protagonist. No thanks. I don’t mind playing as them from time to time, but I want a choice, especially if the main character is one of those blank slate types.
I’m not advocating for that either and I don’t necessarily they think they would these days. Ubisoft is steadfastly ignoring the dumbasses around the black male / Asian female leads for AC, no matter how loud they whine.
Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn made me realize I vibe so well playing as a woman. If I had had the choice I probably would have picked the masculine option since that’s my gender. I’m glad that game forced my hand, now when I have a choice I give it a real thought.
Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc… something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!
Super Metroid because it’s amazing, and Castlevania Symphony of the Night for the same reason. I may be biased because those are two of my favorites ever but I swear they legit hold up.
As someone who didn’t play them back in the day, I feel like SotN holds up but Super Metroid doesn’t. Just as another opinion. I couldn’t really get into metroid fusion either. To me it feels like the moment-to-moment action gameplay is too clunky in the early metroid games I’ve played, even if the exploration element is neat. I did enjoy playing SotN for the first time a couple of years ago though. It’s been a while since I played either, so they’re not totally fresh in my memory - I guess it’s possible that I’m just more forgiving of clunky melee combat than clunky shooting.
Tangentially related, always amuses me how “metroidvania” has become the genre name, when originally it was just a way that reviewers poked fun at the big change between SotN and earlier castlevanias. They were like “this isn’t what I expect from a castlevania, it’s a great game but maybe they should have named it metroidvania”, and the name stuck. Another odd fact about that terminology is that according to interviews, the SotN designer never played metroid - they were inspired by the non-linear exploration with different routes opened up by items/upgrades in Zelda games (although obviously adding that to castlevania’s platformer gameplay makes it more closely resemble metroid). So it should probably be considered a zeldavania.
Ummm do not know who would disagree with you about Super Metriod but that is my go to game when I am sick of the stupid shit that is being pushed out today.
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