Open-ended, sandbox sports games. SSX, Skate 3, Steep, are a few off the top of my head. I remember the Steep devs made a BMX game that was similar a few years ago. I tried it but I just didn’t find it nearly as fun as Steep was. They don’t have to be extreme sports either, I think more traditional sports would be fun too. I like it when they’re unrealistic and over-the-top too. I love playing Skate 3 and just listening to music and doing inhuman tricks. I’ve never played it but I’ve heard the NBA Jam series is like this.
edit: Wreckfest is also sort of in that realm. I’d love to play more racing games that aren’t constantly trying to be simulators. Trackmania is the only one I can think of that’s entirely divorced from being a simulator.
I didn’t even find the Steep game entertaining mate, maybe it is because I never played SSX to begin with, but hell the latter still calls my attention!
Checkout Distance on Steam. It’s definitely up there in terms of unique racing games.
Split/Second was also a really interesting take on racing, I wish they had released DLCs or something to add more maps, the way that game worked with the crazy visuals to open up new shortcuts and modify the track midrace was an awesome idea
Is it really 10 hours for other people? My game file usually says around 50-60 when I’m done. I think they said 10 hours is if you blitz the main story and do no side content… do people play any rpg that way? If so, I at the very least recommend a full playthrough this time. There is alot of great side content in this, and most other, rpgs.
Mario rpg is really a 20ish hour game for most people. Maybe a little less. I’m not even sure what you would spend your time doing for 3x the time. Even completionist entries on hltb are only 25 hours
It’s a shorter rpg for sure, doesn’t make it bad, my favourite rpgs are shorter.
I mean, I do tend to play around and have fun with video games. I don’t have a checklist and just run to the next thing on the list. I don’t use walkthroughs, so any puzzles or unclear mechanics are gonna stump me for a bit as I work them out. And any time there is combat based levelling, I’ll usually grind out a few extra levels, I’m always way too strong for the part of the game I’m at, but I still find it fun.
It was kind of the normal way to play games back when MarioRPG came out. The internet wasn’t super useful yet. And while walkthroughs and stuff did already exist, it wasn’t considered normal to use them to play a game yourself, just to look up one part if you got too stuck.
PS3 console has to be in the top. New enough that it brought out lots of diverse people. Perfect holiday timing as everyone wanted one and wanted to scalp them. Coupled with general violence it was a wild time.
I got mine camping outside for a couple days. Had to be police escorted to our vehicles. A few minutes prior at a location 15mins away, somebody was shot in the parking lot and robbed for their PS3. That was a typical American experience there…
Just because a game says it won’t work on Deck doesn’t mean it is true. They just haven’t tested thousands of games to verify compatibility. Sometimes it is as easy as getting and selecting a very specific Proton version, but other more involved fixes may be necessary. When in doubt, search “[game] + Steam Deck” to see if someone else has tried and succeeded (or failed).
Pretty much the 6800XT at a good price or a 6800. That is about it. A770 is good if you don’t play any older (like pre 2012) games and don’t mind some things breaking sometimes.
Maybe a 3070 16 gb version if you really really really need CUDA.
Super Mario Bros Wonder threads this needle expertly, in my opinion.
Each level has a difficulty rating from 1 to 5 stars with 1 being easiest and 5 being “Mario Hard.”
To complete the main story, you only really need to beat mostly the easier levels, like difficulty 1-3 stars. All other levels are really optional, but there are a lot of them, and they are the 4-5 stars level difficulty.
So the “main game” by default should be “easy enough” for most gamers, and for those who want a challenge, there are tons of extra challenges for them to pursue.
I think I prefer this to a “difficulty setting” because it allows both casual and hardcore gamers to approach the same game in different ways. It doesn’t make you feel like you are missing anything from either way you choose to play. It also allows you to practice the harder levels if you want to get better.
Some games like Halo, if I recall correctly, literally rewarded you with special cutscenes for the hardest difficulty in beating the game. That can leave players who “aren’t good enough” for such high difficulty to feel a bit left out.
I don’t feel the same about Super Mario Bros Wonder, it just feels pretty accessible to all and I think more companies need to attempt something similar.
Some games like Halo, if I recall correctly, literally rewarded you with special cutscenes for the hardest difficulty in beating the game. That can leave players who “aren’t good enough” for such high difficulty to feel a bit left out.
Those players can either youtube it or keep trying.
I beat Reach on SLASO (minus the skull that hides your gun and HUD after the first level) and it would have been less satisfying if the game made it easier when I died.
I have no issues whatsoever on a 2080, 64gb ram and an old Ryzen 7 5800x. Runs great. As always, the online noise about new game is excessively negative for no good reason, definitely worth a buy if C:S is your thing.
Ive been obsessed with The Witness for a few weeks now. Some puzzles are so damn tricky but figuring them out is so pleasurable. This is one of the few puzzle games im actually trying to solve on my own instead of relying on walkthroughs so the experience is very fulfilling
After you finish the witness, you should try The Looker. It's a free parody of the witness that's also pretty good as a puzzle game in its own right. Though, like the witness, I didn't finish it either.
Fully (or at least more) customisable controller settings. It’s not difficult. Let me bind what controls I want to what button I want. And adjust the stick dead zone, god damn. Why are you giving me pre set control schemes when we’ve had fully customizable controls figured out for decades? Fuck you game
Yes! To add to this, please let me invert the analog stick camera controls. Both axis! My biggest pet peeve is when a game let’s you invert the Y axis, but not the X… Why? You were so close dammit how much effort is adding the other really?
It makes sense for me in third person games. Imagine a stick stuck in the protagonist head from behind. You are the camera behind the character, imagine you grabbing the stick and rotating the head with that. You have to pull the stick down for the character to look up, and push it upwards to look down. By the same logic, you have to move it left for the character to look right, and vice versa. The stick is the analog stick on the gamepad.
Once you get used to this control scheme, it’s quite hard to re-learn non-inverted controls.
You should look into Steam Input (if you have a Steam Deck, you may have already messed with it), but it allows a mind-blowing amount of control customization for any game you’re launching through Steam. Most games will also have community presets you can easily use.
Inverting view or turning on gyro controls is trivial. It goes shockingly deep. You can create radial menus if you want, it’s wild.
For any RPG (especially one with multiple characters):
Highly flexible keyboard controls to manage inventory.
I want text-editor levels of search, move, drop, swap, open, and close. Give me regexes, custom filters, and macros. Give me unlimited tags for items, and simple interfaces to manage them (eg: sell all that have a tag, move all items tagged with a characters’s name to their equipment slots).
It doesn’t need emacs keybindings, but that would be a big plus.
I can't say I'm surprised. I was wondering whether I should jump in on day 1, since I played C:S 1 pretty heavily, and want to support the devs, but this definitely means I'll be waiting at least a few patches.
Conversation logs (for the games where they make sense). I loved having this available in Dragon Age: Origins and it helped me remember my rationale for doing specific things. Also was just fun to read back through.
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