I’ve been having a blast. I’ve played other survival games but they rarely feel interesting to me, I haven’t delved this deep into since Conan Exiles (which now that I think about it also has a mechanic of capturing people to work/defend your base)
There are a few issues I’ve had. The worst are when playing on a dedicated server, I often lose connection and I load back in under the world. The worst is when offline my pals are unable to care for themselves and they’re all weakened and depressed when I log back on, the only solution right now is to put them back in the box before logging off.
I couldn’t get into the souls games themselves but fell hard for Bloodborne and Sekiro. Elden Ring has been hard to get into. The open world really detracts from the game which is disappointing because everything else is really polished.
I also hate souls games and Bloodborne didn’t feel much different.
I think the key issue is that Hidetaka Miyazaki is a masochist and I’m very much not. I don’t enjoy fighting the same boss dozens of times being taken down in 3 hits. Even when I win, I feel more tired than satisfied. I’d rather play a more traditional hack’n slash or some other action RPG where if some boss is too much of a pain I grind a little then stomp them.
I enjoyed Dark Souls 1 and 2 a lot, having played through the first one multiple times. I never tried the others with the exception of Elden Ring, and the difficulty just put me off. Something about the first game made it much more tolerable for me. I think it was the overall speed at which enemies move and their combos being more predictable.
They are extremely tedious, needlessly arduous games.
I think that is in part why I loved them all. It brought me into a different mental state where I wasn’t going to be able to rush. I enjoyed that aspect.
My mind can often wander on to various subjects as well, so there was this perverse meditative aspect because of the tension of knowing that I had to constantly focus on the game or it would just kill me in one of its various, unfair ways.
I don’t know how they all manage to do it but EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar are all my most hated companies of all time. They can make some good stuff, but I just absolutely hate how they all force people to jump through so much hoops just to play the games you pay them for.
They force you to make accounts with them and use their stupid launchers which never work properly and are just advertisements. There have been so many times I just wanted to play a game and then forgot my password to the account and got locked out or the launcher needed an update and I had to wait like 20 minutes.
Any sort of fighting game if you’re planning to play online. It doesn’t matter how cheap Rivals of Aether or Street Fighter 6 is, if you’re not playing near release you’ll only be fighting against people with 500+ hours of experience.
I mostly agree, but I feel like Street Fighter 6(Going to throw Tekken 7/8 out as an option as well) has a good enough ranking system that you will be able to get people around your skill level years down the line. I didnt jump on Street Fighter 5 till Arcade Edition released, and never had an issue with learning and getting matches in Ranked, and I feel like that will be the same for SF6.
You will have to catch up with knowledge of characters, but I feel lower ranks are much easier in that regard.
However, the Street Fighter 6 Battle Hub is merciless and full of Master ranked players, and that is where turning up late is going to be painful and soul crushing(and I will be one of those people contributing to that).
This also highlights a huge advantage that popular fighting games have: the constant arrival of new players. You don't want to be the only person who picked up the game that week.
Thankfully, there are multiple really popular fighting games out right now (at least, really popular compared to how the genre was doing a few years ago), which is great.
It’s a FOSS voxel engine, so they can play multiplayer with their friends for free. MineClone2 is a Minecraft clone on Minetest, so even if their friends don’t have Minecraft, they can still play with friends.
For paid games, consider indie games, as they’re less likely to be micro-transaction bullshit. Raft, Stardew Valley, Two Point Hospital are good options. Not so much multiplayer, but Stardew supports it. Multiplayer wise, maybe Among Us if the parents are comfortable with that.
Categorically disagree. I am a grown arse adult. Splatoon 3 tilts me like no other game, due to some very deliberate FOMO game design decisions and a very poor matchmaking algorithm. Whilst there’s no real money store in the game, it has a lot of other problems that make it just as bad as Roblox imo
Can you elaborate a bit? I played Splatoon 2 until Nintendo started charging for the online but, as far as I know, Splatoon 3 only has a free battlepass.
Honestly it’s a combination of the battlepass system and the stage design causing constant, very fast-paced combat. The stages are too small, so players are funnelled into the middle of the stage. This also causes spawncamping if the matchmaking is even slightly unbalanced (which it is most of the time), as one wipe will allow a team to push all the way into spawn.
Previous Splatoon games were very good about this - most stages were abstract shapes, with a lot of terrain, meaning combat was rare, and the game encouraged painting over fighting as painting would net the most points on a per-match basis. Splatoon 3’s new maps are all thin, straight lines, which forces players into that central killzone.
The battlepass, along with some very poor decision making around the results screen, which shows the winning team celebrating, means that losses feel bad. The matchmaking similarly punishes winstreaks by forcing losestreaks, usually matching you against people above your skill level, but on a team with players below your skill level. Whilst this is very addictive, it makes losing feel genuinely awful, and a losing streak causes tilting due to the FOMO of the battlepass.
Hope this writeup makes sense. I view Splatoon 3 as a genuinely bad game because of these factors, and greatly prefer Splatoon 2.
Seconding splatoon. Very kid and adult friendly, and basically no micro transactions (unless you count amiibo). No other game has kept my attention like it has for the last year
Factorio is a great idea if you’re ok with school going to sh*t. I called factorio the „time machine“ since it could zap 12 hrs in one second. Cant remember any other game that I played till dawn in the last 20 yrs.
OP said their son in his friends use Xbox Series X/S, so that effectively removes Krunker and Minecraft Java Edition. That said, I believe Minecraft Bedrock Edition is available for XSX.
Stardew Valley is great, but the son’s social group has 5 people. Stardew Valley only supports up to 4.
Cities Skylines does not have multiplayer.
Can’t speak for Dorfromantik, because I haven’t played it, but the rest seem like great choices.
After that (assuming you have a CD/DVD Drive), you’ll need to do VirtualBox’s Machine > Settings > Storage > Enable Passthrough for the DVD drive; them just plug in the game disk.
Going to have to disagree on the second bit. Nearly every game that was released on XP or earlier has run better for me with WINE or DosBox in Linux than Windows. Proton and Lutris/Heroic have only made it better. I have the Might and Magic collection and Mass Effect Remastered on my deck and both run flawlessly with little setup.
Indeed. Linux, with WINE is known to outperform Windows, sometimes by a wide margin, for older games for some time. Win98 hasn’t seen any development in about two decades. Meanwhile, people who enjoy old software have been continually improving WINE, allowing modern hardware and OS advances to be leveraged and unpatched low-level issues to be fixed. Linux is very much a better Win98 than Win98.
I haven’t played many of the indie games on the list, but I’m glad to see Sea of Stars get some love. It’s probably the best game I’ve played in the last year
I just wing it at first, and figure stuff out as I go, even in online stuff. BG3 in particular, by the end of chapter 2 you’ll be pretty familiarized with mechanics. Inventory management is here, but worth doing sometimes. I just unload stuff from main character into someone else in the party.
Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you'll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.
BG3 handles failure better than almost any game I’ve ever played. Fuck around, find out. Be free of your need to always win and just play the game however you want.
Worst case you start over with a totally different character.
Playing out all the possibilities is half the fun!
Tell that to my TES: Oblivion character I picked only non combat skills as primary. Everything was fine when exploring landscape and forests, leveling peacefuly my alchemy, alteration or stealth and lockpicking. It was nice. Until I got to first oblivion gate and found out level scaling is a thing. Then I was f’d up pretty hard. Needless to say I never finished the game because of this.
It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it's a common complaint.
Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn't have the stats to do what you're wanting/what they're built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it's even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.
But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.
Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term "barrelmancy" is a thing.
I'm not gonna say there won't be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.
If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.
You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.
I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.
Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I'm saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don't work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.
If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.
That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn't require fighting.
Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You'll be fine.
It's a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I'm certain most people would be overjoyed to help.
Oblivion's levelling system was beyond fucked. The optimal way to play in terms of power is to pick primary skills that you know you won't use and then go out of your way to only level those once you've levelled other things enough to get maximum value out of the level up. Or, alternatively, just never sleep so that you never level up and play the entire game at level one.
I've been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I've found to be actually good.
I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:
Foreign (Non-American)
Indie
Small studio
Basically all of the good games that I've liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I'm sure if you think about it, the great games you've played have also been this way.
Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won't have fun, and it'll be expensive.
Go play EDF5 with some friends. It's jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.
Raft is great, too.
Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.
And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.
Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it's been solid.
But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.
It's like the loss of a union, except it's industry wide.
There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don't have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.
Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn't that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you're voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.
It's ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn't be supportable.
Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn't be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.
Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they'd: "be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all."
But remember:
Foreign
Indie
Small Studio
These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.
I have wasted a significant part of my life on two amazing games from (I’m pretty sure) indie developers: Factorio (Wube) and Satisfactory.(Coffee Stain) Both of these games have a lot of depth, and both are stable which is interesting becuase Satisfactory is still Early Access.
Larian (baldurs gate 3) is massive for being indie. I think where your misconception comes from is the term indie. The term comes with a lot of predetermined expectations and definitions, but in spite of this fact very large studios can be indie.
Of course it feels weird to label a studio as large as larian indie when compared to the likes of supergiant(hades) or two brothers of bay 12 who created dwarf fortress. None of the three are technically any less indie, but one certainly feels more indie, doesn’t it?
oh, i guess most of the times of heard indie, it was refering to small studios, where as i have never heard anyone call a large studio indie even if they are. thanks for the correction.
Thumper is the best rhythm game I’ve ever played, and it was made by two ex-harmonix employees who were disappointed by the direction of rock band and similar titles. It throws away all the wish fulfillment and commercial stuff and the result is amazing.
I can second Thumper. I bought it on a whim, and have since bought it several more times for more devices. It's such a satisfying game to play. I had no idea about the Harmonix connection, but it makes total sense now that you've said it.
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