Isn’t combat just so boring? While none of the games you mentioned are familiar to me, story focused games are my main interest. My personal favorite is definitely The Wink and Kiss Part 2 for Neverwinter Nights. Its an adult romance damsel in distress bard’s tale in which there’s almost always a social solution. Whenever combat is apparently unavoidable even the nicest and most harmless character can prevail with the help of her friends! Still though, it is all based on the 3rd edition of DND, so don’t expect things to be easy!
If an old DND game doesn’t interest you, then perhaps consider The Sims 1. Its one of the best selling role-playing games of all time. The Sims is just so awesome it doesn’t even need combat to be creepy, scary, and hard! Right now that’s the game capturing all of my spare time.
There is also a really good visual-novel with enough different paths to cross over into similar territory: Cinders! Its a contemplative retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale which focuses on the player character’s own agency and freedom in an oppressive world. Perhaps its best described as being a game about the true meaning of freedom and independence.
Since you’ve already received many excellent suggestions in this thread by now you hopefully won’t mind these more unusual options. Have fun with which ever game you choose and good luck!
I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!
The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)
Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.
Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU
The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs
Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE
Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M
There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo
I mean, if credit card is the issue, you can buy steam gift cards with cash at most game/electronics stores. I know this will depend on your region, but he can absolutely have a steam account with no card attached. I sometimes delete my debit card info by accident trying to use a different card and have to readd the card entirely. There’s been plenty of times my steam account has had no payment method.
IIRC I’ve never given Valve/Steam payment info. Everything is processed through PayPal. But even then, you should be able to gift his account a purchase without him putting in payment methods if you can convince him to use steam at all
Definitely have to get him Valheim, and they have an Xbox version now. Also, not multiplayer, but Kerbal Space Program is pretty fun. I have only played the PC version though, so can’t speak to the console version.
Moonring has been really fun, and it’s free! Not F2P, just free. The developer made it as a passion project, and it’s easily worth $10, imo. Lots of reading.
It’s akin to an old NES or early 90s PC game with the polish and applied game theory of modern times.
Yep, one of the co-creators. Has a website that he hasn’t updated in a year or two that’s geared towards teaching people programming, so seems like a pretty cool guy!
If you’ve not yet played through the Kiseki (The Legend of Heroes: Trails) series, I highly recommend them. They are very story heavy. You’d definitely want to begin with the Trails in the Sky series since every game in the series is connected (and if you want to get the whole picture and experience the greatest impact from the events that happen throughout the series).
I have had that one in my steam wishlist for a while, starting with Trails. Never pulled the trigger. I’ve heard that it is very much a slow burn, but ends up being a favourite for a lot of RPG fans. Accurate?
I'm a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.
It's a fairly "cheap" series to try out and see if you're into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It's not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you're not a fan of Sky FC, you're not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series' 20 year history likely won't have much appeal to you).
There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.
I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you'd like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you're really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.
I’d say that is accurate. It is a slow burn to start, and it took me several tries to actually get into it. Once I did, I ended up plowing through all of the games. :) They are all excellent. The series is really something special. Trails to Azure is actually one of my most favorite games of all time, too.
Started with Rogue trader, can recommend it as a solid CRPG - Act 1 anyway. Apparently in Act 3/4 the gamebreaking bugs start to appear, and I’ve already found a few talents to be rather buggy. Probably should wait a month or two.
Otherwise, a game of Shadow of Forbidden gods is always good to relax while sending the world into shadow.
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