Sandbox MMORPGs, like Eve Online or Ultima Online. The vast majority of MMORPGs since at least WoW (potentially even before that with games like Dark Ages of Camelot, etc) have been Theme Park MMOs. Which are fun; I’ve played plenty and still do play them. But I think the sandbox is more fun. Certainly has more possibilites.
Oh yeah? I haven’t played UO since 2003/2004, and I’ve largely stayed away from the free shards. Just had boring experiences in the past. But I might give this a try. Idk why, but I’ve been itching to check it out again. thanks!
Yeah I basically did the same thing. Got the itch about 7 months ago. Managed to get my original UO account back (you can open a support ticket and they’ll ask for info regarding the original, it was pretty painless) and messed around on Atlantic, the only really populated server. It’s just meh. They added so many stats to weapons it’s overwhelming and most are garbage. It’s so obnoxious having to look over each item to see if it’s worth anything. Also the classic and enhanced clients suck pretty bad.
Outlands is definitely the most polished and unique free shard. Check out their wiki, it goes over skill changes and lists some templates for starting out. Their custom ClassicUO client is excellent and has Razor built in. The one thing that may turn you off is it’s mostly open PVP once you leave Shelter Island. There is a sanctuary dungeon that rotates each week that doesn’t allow murderers in but it has reduced XP and gold.
sad that we’re at this point. when I was young I loved Pokemon and imagined where it could go in the future. was SO EXCITED to hear pokemon go announced. apart from a week or two of social interactions when everyone had got the game all at once, it had no longevity and that was that. it could have been so beautiful!
Honestly, a minimum viable product is entirely what Pokemon Go was designed to be. It exists to extract behavioral surplus from users and convert it into valuable action by inviting users to go to certain places in a community through placement of Pokestops and Gyms. Basically a tool to drive foot traffic, which Niantic can (and does) sell to businesses that want to drive that foot traffic. It worked brilliantly for years and still is a somewhat effective method of driving advertising and sales for real world businesses.
The prequal, Ingress, was even simpler, but that probably made it better as a long run game. There were portals to harvest and a simple system to create triangles between portals to claim territories. Nothing overly complex, and no expectations to bring gameplay mechanics from an other game.
Ingress was obviously dead as soon as Niantic launched the much more popular Pokémon Go. Of course fantastic for Niantic, but I just feel like Ingress would have been a game I would have played for a lot longer if Pokémon Go didn’t happen.
I hate the dumbed down battling system. Why can’t CP be a function of level and stats found in a regular pokemon game instead of one number to rule them all, and have the battles be like the mainline games?
There are numbers behind the scenes that correspond to attack, defense, speed, and hp which when weighted create CP. The weights are favoring attack and hp.
I played in 2016 and started playing again in 2023 and I was surprised at how little had changed but its par for the course for the pokemon franchise.
Almost all your other grievances are partly due to how mobile games are monetized and how much of it relies on fear of missing out (applies to regular pokemon events too). Pokemon Go is a constant stream of FOMO to try and get you to spend money when there’s barely any payoff. A pokemon you can catch in the wild can already be 87% of the way to a perfect pokemon you spend months (years?) getting stardust, candy and XL candy to max out.
Same here. I played in 2016, dropped it for ages because there wasn’t much too it (especially for those of us who don’t live in cities), and picked it up again in 2023. That was largely because friends were playing it. I got bored and dropped it again in less than a week. Apparently my Pokemon from 2016 are quite valuable because of… something that was added to the game that makes them very desirable? But given I didn’t want to keep playing, what would I trade them for that I’d actually want?
I mostly picked it back up to have access to the PoGo exclusive shinies (Mew, Jirachi, Meltan/Melmetal, Genesect and Deoxys) but I just spoof instead (trying to play in negative temps outside of a city is no fun) and just trade cool stuff to friends (who live in different places so I can’t even trade with them legitimately if I wanted to).
Another example of bullshit is the PAID shiny Mew ticket. Even after you pay for it you still need to complete a potentially ridiculous requirement of completing the kanto dex. Which would be fine if they didn’t geolock Kangaskhan to Australia (outside of events in the past?) so you would be shit out of luck if you didn’t either already have one or knew someone you can meet up with in real life that did.
As for your 2016 mons, the first 9 or so you trade will be guaranteed to be lucky meaning an IV floor of 12/12/12 or 80% (and half stardust cost) so you would ideally trade them for something strong and/or shiny like a shiny legendary or strong mega/dragon/top within its type pokemon. All 2016 pokemon have like a 75% of making a trade lucky so they’re all valuable. Another trick to get people to nag their friends and family to start playing again.
Back in the day, Maxis had an entire brand of “Sim” games that were exactly this. Sim Farm, Sim Earth, Sim Ant, and, most notably, Sim City. I have no idea how many titles there were, but there were a lot of them.
Simulation games, like the ones Maxis used to make (other than SimCity). SimEarth, SimAnt, SimTower, etc. Those were educational and fun.
I also once played a simulation game that realistically simulated running a shipping business where you shipped things by boat, sailing your fleet from port to port, dropping off your cargo and loading new cargo, giving the occasional bribe, etc. while avoiding bankruptcy. I think it was called “Port of Call.” It was made a long time ago, and I haven’t played anything quite like it since then.
Turn based strategy. As others have said, RTS’es, as well, but TBS. Yes, Civ series isn’t dead, but everything else seems to be. Master of Magic (1994) is literally one of my favorite games of all time (none of the sequels or successors measure up). Colonization, also 1994, (warning, MANY ethical issues) had a great logistic and economic model… (Just ignore eeeeeeverything about the white-washing of history/slavery/indentured servitude/genocide.) Alpha Centauri. Maybe I’m just old.
I spent my teen years around X-Com and the sequels. When Firaxis released the new games, I spent hundreds of hours on them, but haven’t seen any games quite like them in the last decade or so.
@sparkl_motion@GrayBackgroundMusic Xenonauts for a modern xcom. The sequel is in early access and is fantastic. Terra Invicta is a slightly different take.
There’s still nothing like XCOM:Long War, but fortunately the aliens are always waiting to take another swipe. Maybe this time I won’t rush mec.
Also I really like Wildermyth. It scratches the XCOM itch but your soldiers retire and have kids and can leave you for more reasons that just because you fucked up. And they can turn into were bears
Thank you! I woke up that morning to a frontpage full of low effort memes posted by one person and felt dread that it would be allowed to continue. I ended up blocking them for safe measure, but a mod response is the best outcome I could hope for. The worst aspects of reddit subs do not need to migrate here as well. There’s nothing worse than finding a new community or magazine and finding the top content is nothing but memes. The discussions in the comment sections are what brought me here. Memes, as funny as they can be, don’t really allow discussion. They seem more of a response to any given topic, so seem better fit as a reply rather than submission on their own.
The other mods and I are regular users here as well, so we are just as committed to seeing the community here be an enjoyable place as everyone else :)
Base building. Fortifying against enemies and being creative is a blast.
Exploration and big worlds. Games like Borderlands, Fallout and Far Cry with unique environments and ambiance.
Hate:
Escort missions. After all these years they’re still not fun.
Excessive health bars. Having to carry several different kinds of potions, etc. One of my favorite games is Dark Cloud for the PS2, but I think it had health, mana, weapon health, thirst and effects like poison that never cleared until you took a certain potion. I believe I used a GameShark or similar to get rid of thirst and weapon health.
I’ve been thinking about the disappearance of God games. I think they didn’t disappear, but they evolved so much that we don’t recognize them anymore.
I feel some moved into the direction that we now call “simulators”, like RimWorld, the Sims, Two Point Hospital, and more. In my mind, the big difference between the God games of old and those new games is that in the older games your role as the player was explicitly defined, where in the new games it’s not. In the old games, you were “playing the role of a god in that realm”. The new games don’t bother to tell you “who” you are in this setting. You’re just the player, get on with it, play the game.
I feel like other God games moved in the direction of top down colony builders, like Against the Storm or Frostpunk. And again, I think the big difference between those games and something like Populous is that your role as the player doesn’t have an explicit name in the game world. You’re not a “God”. But most of the rest of the trappings are there, I think.
But when I think of a God game I really mean a game where you literally play as a god and can do god stuff.
In all of your examples the player either controls what each character does or just whoever is is command of the colony. You can’t do miracles and supernatural stuff at the click of a button, you don’t control nature itself, your character is a human like anyone else.
Still fairly old, but newer than B&W: From Dust . Replace trainable animals with fluid physics and light hearted songs with didgeridoos, and it’s kind of similar.
The First Person Stealth Sim genre (Thief, Dishonored, etc) has been getting very little love in the last few years. Sadly the Arkane games don’t embrace it anymore; while great Prey was borderline as you really couldn’t control the stealth in many sections, and Deathloop and Red Rain are primarily short action games.
Have you played the two most recent deus ex games? HR is my personal favorite but I liked MD more for its atmosphere and level design. Both are primarily 1st person but switch to 3rd person when using cover.
I have, though even MD is getting on for 7 years old now. I don’t think that the series lived up to it’s roots in either title. I found myself feeling very constrained by them; I don’t necessarily mind if I have to play a character (Corvo is great as a Tabula Rasa) but Adam Jensen and his backstory are so fundamentally unlikeable.
Although they’re somewhat different the modern Hitman trilogy scratches this same itch for me (especially turning some of the guidance in the UI off and exploring the levels yourself, they’re actually designed well for that). Gloomwood is in early access but is shaping up really well and is inspired by classic Thief.
I’ve got a brand new intel nuc 12th gen i7, 4070 graphics, 32 gig ram, Samsung 990 hard drive.
Cost me a pretty penny, and a lot of time to put together. Not to mention all the time spent researching parts and agonising over choices. Then the wait times for deliveries and redeliveris of the orders I messed up (had to return ram twice, once because I accidentally ordered the wrong ones, and once became a stock was faulty).
Just finished Yakuza 3, started Yakuza 4. Enjoying the visual bump, and some refreshing changes to the combat, though I loved the story of Y3. Also playing through BotW for the first time (very late to the party).
Trying not to get sucked in too deep by my return to OSRS on top.
Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.
I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.
Check out Clone Hero! I’m away from my computer, but there are archives that let you import all of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero songs. You can use/mod old controllers or even 3D print your own.
You might be surprised to hear that Konami, famed for focusing casino machines, was actually mistranslated on also focusing on arcade machines. There’s still a whole rhythmgame scene, but unfortunately it’s mostly centered around Japan. That’s where DDR, beatmania, Gitadora (the series Guitar Hero/Rockband ripped off) are, including newer series like DanceRush and Maimai and whatnot. If you ever visit the higherscale independent arcades, you might find some unsanctioned imports with some even emulating the online functionality (with gacha, ofc…). Otherwise, your only hope in the states is Round1, which host official imports, and D&B which only has DDR.
To add on to the other commenter, check out Osu!, ADOFAI, Rhythm Doctor, Hifi Rush, and a whole bunch of apps if you don’t want arcades.
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