At least in Morrowind the journal recorded EVERYTHING. If it was a highlighted keyword, it was going in the journal. Searching that thing was a bit of an issue though.
That’s one of the very few gripes I have with BG3, depending on your party makeup shit can go down real fast and boom someone is unhappy with you or you’re in initiative, the log doesn’t always show everything said or how/why someone is suddenly dead and tracing back is like trying to follow a conversation on twitter
Can someone explain the appeal to these games to me?
I did play several hours of Skyrim with some mods last year but the combat felt clunky, the loot felt like a pain in the ass to manage, and there didn’t really seem to be a good story and the world felt a bit hollow.
I do realize their age, of course, and this is an unfair comparison but I had a much greater time with Elden ring and the Witcher 3. Both those games are so dense with vast beautiful worlds.
It’s not for me either, but i guess not being strung along by the main story line and instead being able to just go anywhere and do whatever is appealing to people who just want to immerse themselves in the games world.
The appeal is that these games were made well before Elden Ring and Witcher 3; before ‘open world’ was mainstream. Every single NPCs had daily routines, quests were dynamically generated, and what you do in the game had consequences beyond pissing one character off. This made triggering specific quests or events difficult if you were just going ‘off the hip’, and made replayability a big feature. Because of these systems, there were several interesting “game breaking” issues, but these things were charming in their own right due to how new all these systems were put together with almost nothing like it.
In retrospect, not all the “game breaking” issues were truly understood at the time, and most are a consequence of several factors - the most common being that some quests activate behind the scenes and prevent other quests from starting, even if you haven’t picked them up and added them to your journal. So it is possible to do mostly everything in the game with careful planning. But at the time, it really did seem like each playthrough was unique.
It is/was also highly moddable for its time. While it took a long time to detail every aspect of the game, today there is nothing mods can’t do. Even Witcher 3 mods can’t do a bunch of things that Skyrim mods can. And it’s a good gateway into learning how to mod, and modding can be just as fun as playing. Some mod guides are so long it takes days or weeks to implement. It can get quite insane, with some people maintaining multiple ‘mod versions’: one to play (most playthroughs won’t let you add/remove mods mid-play), one to test new stuff, and one to keep up-to-date with whatever mod guide/group they are following (you know, for fun…and the next playthrough).
But mostly it’s nostalgia, like how some people like older Zelda or Final Fantasy games. Or how you might play that pointless cozy game you played a million times because it connects you to something deeper to what was going on at that time. We know TES games are pretty bad in a lot of regards, but graphics, gameplay, or story isn’t what we are after. Hell, there are now adults booting up Minecraft because it’s just the game they grew up with.
Nostalgia is a hard drug. I replayed Pokemon Red easily 10 times over the years. I tried Pokemon Gold (an objectively much better game) probably about the same amount of times, but I could never get through it, because I didn’t play as a kid and thus have no nostalgia for it.
I have more nostalgia for Keitai Denjū Telefang, which I played in bootlegged form mis-labelled as Pokemon Diamond (that was before the real Pokemon Diamond was released), and even though this bootleg is horrible in quality, it’s easier for me to play than Pokemon Gold.
Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).
The Seinfeld effect. Today they seem clunky, janky, unpolished or uninspired. Because you have way better modern examples to compare them to. The catch is that when they came out, they were the first. People have said the same about the Beatles, the rolling stones, the og legend of Zelda, counter strike, etc.
Did you play it at the time it was released or did u try to go back later? Skyrim was and is a legendary game for a reason, to each their own but in its day it was undeniably the best RPG game in existence and it held that title for years! The story is excellent. Games like this and enshrouded will also never achieve full enjoyment in those that don’t bother reading the game lore. If yo skip all the books and never read any I cans see why you wouldn’t get as immersed as say in the Witcher 3 story where you have more cutscenes fed to you. And don’t get it messed up, witcher 3 is a legend too and probably my all time favourite. But it did not offer me the same replayability Skyrim does. And the last point to Skyrim is it runs good on my potato spec laptop so I can play it on about anything!
For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.
I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.
The openness of it. I can play as I want and go where I want. I’ve played Skyrim since its release and never have finished the main story. It’s not the main attraction. There’s so much lore carried through the games since the 90s , it’s endless.
If you’re talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don’t think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.
Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to “adult zelda” but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it’s expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.
Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.
After ignoring the TES games my whole life, I first played Oblivion a few years ago, and for once in a very long time, I felt the same feeling I did when playing GTA San Andreas for the first time as a little kid.
I spent the first 10hrs or so just stealing stuff and fighting in the Arena, didn’t even touch the main story. In Oblivion, there is soooo much stuff to do, and I didn’t even mod it.
Elden Ring is definitely a great game, but it’s pale in comparison to Oblivion when it comes to “freedom to do anything”. Even Skyrim couldn’t top that for me. Don’t know about Witcher 3 though, I have yet to play it.
I used to use WeMod (they go by a different name now) but it was on Windows. Linux (Kubuntu) is my main OS but haven’t gotten into cheat software with it yet. Suggestions?
I’m running openSUSE Tumbleweed, and have had a very high rate of success with using WeMod while on openSUSE. I’ve probably beaten about 20 games with them since last year when I made the move to openSUSE. Now, some games do not work right off the bat with it, and I’m not sure why.
If you have any troubles, please reach back out to me in a comment here, so that if we fix your issue, others might benefit too.
My four year old son cannot game get, but he’ll ask to put that on and he just honks at people. He also likes to be the hat in that Mario game with the hat, can’t remember the name. I Mario, he hats.
What I took away from your writing is that you like the freeworld aspect, and Subnautica has plenty to fuck around with. It has a main story line, but the game is so good, you can kinda forget about it and just build your underwater palace. No stealibg cars or planes, but you can craft pretty amazing vehicles and ‘fly around’ underwater with them.
I tried it once and bounced off basically right away due to needing water constantly.
Then years later I tried again and got into it for about 15 or 30 hours, and was having a great time, but then I hit a point where I lost immersion. I could feel what they needed me to do to get the resources I needed to progress, but I wasn’t into it, and then a big monster broke my favourite little sub and I was like “fuck this, I’m not going to grind around getting the resources to rebuild my sub, I’m out”
But there was some time where I enjoyed it in the middle there!
It seems you gave it a fighting chance! During my first playthrough, I went with the easier version of not needing food or water. There is a moment in there, when you have to go way down to get some resources, which can be tough if you’re not fully immersed.
I don’t want to send you back in there, cuz 15-30h gameplay is plenty enough to get to know the game, it just scratched my itch for wanting to discover a world so well (which I believe is what you crave), it’s hard to accept that it’s not for everyone. Hope you find something swell! Maybe that Detroit comes alive stuff? I never played, but that seems gta-like.
I’ve always been open to adult only games, but for the vast majority there are only two basic types:
Visual Novels - Everything about these is fine. They vary from basically just a graphic novel to a full on RPG.
Nude Puzzles - Various cheap-ass puzzles with nude images as the prize.
I want, like, a real game but with full adult only content. These exist, but are hard to find. And a lot of those I’ve found aren’t finished, never will be finished, and/or just suck. It doesn’t even have to be the focus. Just imagine if when you got a hooker in GTA or some other game where brothels might exist, you got to see more than a fade to black/car bouncing around.
A good H-game with more that 4 hours of content, good porn, and good gameplay are rare finds. Not to mention the pain in the ass of finding the decensor patches or using a non-Steam, non-English site to buy it.
That seems like a fair assessment of the current state of things, but I do want to stress how good Huniepop is as a puzzle game alone. One sparkling jewel in a sea of erotic sliding puzzle and jigsaw crap.
If you removed everything outside the actual gem matching gameplay and soundtrack, I would still play it.
And yeah, I started poking around and saw some of the more ambitious open world projects like you’re talking about, and they all looked like abandoned early access. But if they have the technical ability, why not show my character licking some Asari ladyparts in Mass Effect 5? Adults play a shitload of video games too. Make it an optional DLC if you have to.
The biggest issue with adult content in games is that it limits your market to adults that want that content. Which is already small to begin with. And you often can’t advertise the same way, which limits your audience further. You only find out about them through word of mouth or through places like Lemmy.
From the standpoint of the developer, your ROI is likely to be very small. I think that’s why VN are the most popular form of adult games, since they are easier to make than full games.
Its inherently a gamble. Yes, it limits you to that audience (which is increasingly villified by christofacists and the influencers who “don’t want people to think they are gooners”). But it also makes you the king OF that audience.
Subspace is a great example. It had an incredibly vague and over ambitious crowdfunding campaign and it did gangbusters. Because people are hungry for a horny game that is actually a game. That said, it feels like other devs realized that was a thing and the patreon-style sites are now the main focus and discoverability went to zero.
Which is why I think the next big step is a blogsite that actually covers these without feeling like you are just reading a guy’s wank diary (… which we kind of are but it is nice to not think about that). Its the same problem onlyfans et al have. The biggies keep getting bigger but there is almost zero way to find out about the newbies.
It’s still in development but they’ve done a ton of work on it to, already, be pretty flashed out game and its development hasn’t slowed any over the years.
Alicesoft is one of the major dev studios in this exact space, but their games range from having some non-con to outright featuring it. Not for everyone.
in general, people choose adult games explicitly to get off, so putting a bunch of unrelated activities between them and that is not a recipe for success.
or in other words: good gameplay makes for bad porn, and vice versa.
i understand what you are asking for, and the solution for that is modding;
check out loverslab!
the biggest communities (i know of) for this are:
Skyrim Special Edition
Fallout 4
The Sims 4
RimWorld
all of these have what you’re asking for, with varying levels of integration into the main game!
and since it’s modded content, you even get to decide how much, and what kind of, adult content there is in your game!
and when i say everything is customizable, i mean everything!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne