Not mentioned yet: Chronicon. A small indie game that doesn’t take itself very seriously. It has much less build variety than something like Grim Dawn (obviously) but it’s got some, and it’s aiming to be a much more streamlined/casual experience. Won’t demand as much of your time and attention, will deliver hugely satisfying colorful explosions across the screen. When I’m in the mood for an ARPG it’s a toss up whether I’ll install this or Grim Dawn.
Old timer here… Diablo 2 has a story with an atmosphere that sucks you in. In that sense Diablo 3 was a real disappointment.
Now, if you’re going for Diablo 2 it’s the remastered version you want. The game is like 20 years old and not made for widescreen so it really feels dated on a modern screen. Also, prepare for isometric pixel graphics.
Grim Dawn also has a mod called Reign Of Terror that lets you play the entirety of Diablo 2 in GD, complete with classes, skills and items! It has some differences because it's built on Grim Dawn's systems, so it has the dual-class system from Grim Dawn (with similarly laid out skill trees), item affixes work like Grim Dawn, etc, but it feels great to play! And you can combine Grim Dawn classes with D2 classes, D2 classes with other D2 classes, or just play the D2 campaign with a regular Grim Dawn build. It's great!
Another option is to get Grim Dawn, and then get the Reign of Terror mod. It’s basically Diablo 2 recreated almost completely + some extra content.
But since you’ve never played Diablo 2, I’d recommend playing it first in some form (D2R or PD2) so you can appreciate the storyline (and the epic cutscenes) - and then play the Grim Dawn mod.
The Crucible is the weakest - it’s just an arena mode, but it’s got a lot of utility for speed leveling new characters + some QoL for existing ones.
Ashes of Malmouth is the direct continuation of the base game’s story, adds Necromancer and Inquisitor which are both very well-loved masteries, and you need it for Forgotten Gods anyway. The zones are a bit meh - great overall mood but you spend a lot of time in cramped corridors.
Forgotten Gods adds Oathkeeper (very fun) and tons of huge new zones with a refreshingly different vibe to the rest of the game. And you can go to this expansion’s zones from the start! (Except that you probably shouldn’t on your first playthrough, you’d get destroyed and you probably want to focus on the main story anyway.)
I’d wait for a sale and get them all if you like this genre, or just base game + AoM if you just want to give it a shot (and technically you could hold off on AoM until you’re close to the end of the campaign).
i only played a little of both. i like titan quest for the story and mythology, but grim dawn seems more refined and modern, it’s actually by the SAME team (today i learned)!
I'm aware, but it will likely be mechanically similar. If it turns out to be a Bloodlines 2 situation, I can always just stick to the first game and Grim Dawn, maybe V Rising. And all of that is assuming that as I spend more time in Titan Quest I still enjoy it.
Baldurs gate 3. I started when it came out, but then got distracted by a few games. It took like 200+ hours, but I finally got my fill of factorio. So now back to bg3-it’s very good.
I’m on my second playthrough. It’s the very first single player game I’ve ever played twice in a row, just after finishing it the first time :) I wanted to play the bad guy but couldn’t do it. I love the companions too much to be evil :)
Same- I also did back-to-back playthroughs! I enjoyed my second one more, actually, because I at least partly understood how the DnD mechanics worked by that point. (And figured out how to romance the companion that wasn’t interested the first time around, ha ha!)
Yeah same! I tried to romance Shadowheart but when she wanted to kill you-know-who, I had to fight her :( And yeah second playthrough I knew the mechanics better as well so the acts were more of a breeze than a hurricane :D
As a plus side, I noticed I missed some areas and quests, so that was nice too!
I completely missed getting Gale in my first run, so I finally got to see his story the second time around! Also accidentally skipped the Mountain Pass area (and some smaller areas) and did a big chunk of Act 3 backwards. My first playthrough was a mess, ha ha!
Are you me? I missed Gale too sort of, because the portal looked a bit dangerous or whatever. I decided to skip it, but totally forgot about returning to check it out. And I also completely skipped the mountain pass because I was under the impression I had to make a choice between that, or the Underdark…
Spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Sacred 1. It’s aged very poorly, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone nowadays, but I still think that the world design and environmental storytelling were some of the best I’ve found in a videogame.
For example, at the beginning of the game, orcs are migrating from the desert and attacking human settlements. When you progress, you discover that they aren’t doing it because they want to, but because the undead army is forcing them out of their land. And when you progress in the northern part of the world, there’s a completely optional region inside the forest, where you can find a few hastily made orcish settlements - but you only find women and shamans, because the men are fighting at the front. There are no dialogues, quests, books or anything telling you that, it’s just something that you infer from the environment.
It made exploring the world and finding its secrets fun, even if there wasn’t always a reward.
(There were also a metric ton of easter eggs, from tombstones mentioning LotR characters to receiving sunglasses as a reward for chasing rude orc visitors from a tourist island… it was a wild game)
Torchlight 2 spoiled me for basically the whole genre. It is a classic Roguelike ARPG dungeon crawler but has so many thoughtful player centric quality of life features. Inventory is full but don’t want to stop kicking butt? You have a pet that can run back to town for you, sell your stuff, and even buy a “shopping list” of potions and scrolls for you. It’ll even run and pick up loot for you. I have trouble playing other games in the genre because I keep running into problems Torchlight 2 solved that I didn’t even think about. It also has mods available to add even more or keep things fresh. It’s getting old but because of that you can run it on anything. It’s a damn good game.
I haven’t played it. My impression is that it was trying very hard to cater to the mobile market. I heard it suffered from a lot of design changes and ended up being sold and then patched up and released by a new team to cut their losses. Meanwhile, Torchlight 2 may be older but it was made with love and care and a strong vision. It’s dirt cheap now too so it’s not hard to get your money’s worth out of it.
Have played a few hours of infinite and there’s fun to be had with the different characters, but every character being (different build and skills) locked behind another paywall, it’s a tough sell… (And as far as I remember the publisher was Korean from the start)
Ok, is a Diablo-like a thing I can call it then? It’s just such a specific type of game, the isometric top down view RPG with classes, customizable character leveling, randomly generated levels with area themes, randomized loot, a town hub and inventory etc. I’ve always heard those games called Rogue-likes but I never played Rogue.
Also a roguelike is usually top down/isometric and tile based. Really not a ton of roguelikes these days, which is good as far as I’m concerned because roguelites are better.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon notwithstanding, of course.
Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there’s a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.
I don’t know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.
Torchlight 1-2 are decent fun for normal playthrough but plagued by bad design decisions and downright silly difficulty spikes on harder difficulties. Mods probably fix many of these issues but in vanilla the build diversity on harder difficulties is quite bad with only handful of viable builds with skill trees full of “trap skills”.
I might have lucked into some cheesey builds, I only maxed one character and have a few at 60. One mod I did get was a full respec mod, but the default reset of the last 3 levels was at least good enough for me to see if a skill was working for me or not. I agree that there seem to be too many “dud” skills, especially on embermage and engineer. My lvl 100 character I did without mods and I kind of liked how punishing it was. I get that that’s a preference though.
A game nobody has mentioned yet would be Undecember. Instant dont play if Korean MMO, f2p or an in-game shop scare you away. Behind all that is a pretty good arpg with unique skill combination mechanics that are a joy to experiment with. Beware though that if you want to get really far, the grind won’t stop. (Progress can be bought, generally it’s just not worth it though, only p2 play hurdle is inventory space and that’s a one time payment of 20-40€ depending on you) I`d recommend checking out a guide or two concerning runes before jumping into the campaign as it can be a bit challenging in the early levels, especially if one doesn’t use all the skills available.
Path of Exile is like Diablo for adults. It’s much more dark and intense in my opinion. It’s worth checking out because the New Zealanders who make it are genuinely good guys.
The second one will be free as well, it isn’t even in beta yet. All micro transactions (I’m sure all the visual ones, not sure about stash tabs but I think they would be as well) will be usable in both games as long as you’re using the same account.
Path of exile is a wonderful experience, I’d suggest watching nyxvellum on YouTube, he started playing path of exile as a Diablo 3/4 player, and has good takes both on starting blindly and using a build guide.
Don’t be intimidated, don’t listen to the trolls and detectors, you can play the entirety of the campaign without 2 clues to the game mechanics. End game you might find more difficult, but by then you’ve experienced a bit of everything and might be interested in pursuing something different from when you started playing.
If you’re going to start path of exile I’ll give you 2 tips, 1) get a generic basic super open loot filter (use one from the path of exile website and it’ll tie to your account and be updated automatically), 2) elemental resistances (to their cap) and HP are the most important stats, chaos resistance and damage being second most important.
It’s a wonderful game with a very active community and development studio.
Haha, yeah, free. I totally haven’t spent hundreds of dollars on the game. It’s over a decade with thousands of hours though. I haven’t really played the last couple years though, but that’s mostly because I have small children and a career
The original NES version of Legend of Zelda! I want to (slowly) work through the whole Zelda chronology, barring like, the CDi ones. I’ve had the NES Zelda games on my 3DS for ages but I always found them difficult to play and pretty bad at telegraphing where I was actually supposed to go.
This time around, I just bit the bullet and used a walkthrough, and collected a whole bunch of power-ups before the first dungeon. And now a couple dungeons in, I’m actually having a lot of fun with it! I even kind of like how completely open it is. I stumbled across the eighth dungeon, took one look at the four-headed bullet-spitting plant thing, and turned right around. But it’s cool that I can go there pretty much from the start!
I also played the original Zelda via emulation, but the physical game came with a map that makes the game much more feasible to get through on your own. Once I had that, I was golden.
Yup. I think this is it, but you might find better scans elsewhere. It doesn't tell you everything, but it shows you most of the map and labels the first handful of dungeons. Even knowing where the first dungeon is is such a huge help, because then you get a new checkpoint when you die, and once you beat the dungeon, you get an extra heart container.
This is really fascinating, I think it contextualises so much of how the game was meant to be played. (I’m being lazy and using the Zelda Dungeon walkthrough). It’s so interesting to me when these early games kind of offload crucial information into the manual - like with some of those items, you might never know they even exist in the game without it!
I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.
I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.
I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.
I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.
Though… I’d be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.
I’m hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise… but I kinda doubt it.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne