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)
Angle the your nose down on a straightaway and you’ll see the speed indicator on the right get a red bar that’ll go up to a green light. When that light goes yellow, you can hit the boost key to go turbo.
(On keyboard, the defaults are the up arrow to angle down and shift to activate boost)
Since she is very young and has no social pressure towards microsoftcraft, I‘d suggest mineclone, its free, open source and in opposition to bedrock mc not bloated with ingame purchases.
If you could list one that isn’t just “Microsoft bad” sure, I’ve never played it, but I’ve played literally thousands of hours of Minecraft Java, along with several thousand more on mod packs for Java.
Not to mention the very large community of Minecraft let’s players, tutorials, etc that exist for Minecraft, and it’s huge cultural influence.
Not saying mineclone is bad or anything, I don’t know much about it aside from the site listing it’s features, but MC is the OG and huge for a reason, and I agree bedrock is full of garbage MTX, but Java is not.
modders literally had to reverse engineer minecraft to mod it (closed source)
you cant download the game without logging into mojang despite the fact that you have to log in to your microsoft account anyway
constant changes that make the game more approachable but barely any that make it more complex ie redstone (subjective)
cant be played offline easily
Those are just the first ones I can come up with.
I have started playing minecraft in the browser. Had to pay for it using paypal since it wasnt available in shops. I definitely played thousands of hours as well, made lets plays, have multiple servers.
The reason I dont recommend it anymore is the initial minecraft was very different from today. It used to be about creativity. Today it feels like a race for content. Mostly like a game as a service thing.
You don’t have to login to a mojang and ms account, it’s just Microsoft accounts, which if you dislike Microsoft sure…
The telemetry is far from insidious and is used in many many games as a way to provide data about what people interact with (or don’t) so devs have a better idea of what to focus on. minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Snooper
Modders seemed to have made due with the closed source nature… Again talking about Java specifically, not Bedrock.
Not sure if you’re aware but the 1.21 release includes an auto-crafter, pretty big addition for Redstone related automation. Though this post is also about a 4yo so… It’s not super likely they’ll be interested in Redstone anyway.
Can be played offline if you’ve logged into the mc launcher at least once before being offline afaik.
I don’t really understand what you mean by “a race for content” if anything it feels like the game hasn’t changed enough considering how long it’s been out, they’ll add one or two new kinda nifty things per release, but compared to mod makers… The pace is much slower.
What? You said use MineClone instead, I asked for any reasons why one would prefer MineClone over MIneCraft, you gave some reasons, I argued my points and agreed with some of yours.
How is that disrespectful lmfao, that’s how people discuss differences in opinion.
I did. Besides the obvious „dont expose your children to microtransactions if avoidable“ I have brought many more that are my concerns.
If you reread your text, you said this, in short:
telemetry no problem
closed source no problem
offline no problem
Which is just taking the facts that you asked for and putting them into the trash. This I found disrespectful. Even before when you said „find one“ was disrespectful but I chose to keep talking since it might be a misunderstanding.
They might be no problem for you but consent is quite a huge problem. Being able to use the product you bought (over a decade ago) in the way you want to and are used to. There is an argument that prolonged sales and development cost money and such but we‘re on lemmy, a FOSS program (where telemetry is opt in btw) and we‘re discussing why telemetry without opt out is bad?
Also, to play offline is pretty much impossible, I checked multiple sources. If you dont have internet and cant login, youre f*cked.
Its also not a point to say modders got around it. Repacking games for piracy reasons isnt much different from what they had to do and I think its legitimately a big plus that the minetest engine is so easily moddable.
I think the problem is you seemingly don’t know how a discussion and difference of opinon works.
I’m not taking your “facts” and throwing them in the trash, I was point for point giving my take on your concerns.
I was genuinely curious why someone would play minetest over MC and wanted to know what pros/cons exist, and the pros/cons you gave didn’t resonate with me.
Lemmy has forced telemetry, for example, every time you upvote or downvote something, that information is easily seen by instance admins. The question becomes is that telemetry harmful in any way to the end user, in Lemmys case, I can very easily see how that could be used to harm another user. In Minecrafts case… I don’t see it.
MTX again aren’t in Java, which is again why I stated to just use Java in my first response.
It’s not impossible to play offline, there are many very easy workarounds available.
There are tens of thousands of mods minimum for minecraft, so yes it is fair to say that modders got around it. I’m not talking piracy, I mean large content additions such as Mekanism, Create, etc…
Yes it is a plus that minetest is more open source, but does a 4 YO looking for a game to play, who will likely socialize with other children who are more likely to know what minecraft is vs minetest really understand or care in the slightest that their knockoff mc game is open source? Come on man.
I’m also going to point out I didn’t downvote you at all, and wasn’t at all trying to be rude or disrespectful, simply stating my opinions as a long time MC player, my first paragraph of this response being an emotionally charged/rude response not withstanding, as I was irritated at the strange emotional response you had to what I thought was an innocuous discussion.
I do apologize for the first paragraphs rudeness, but am leaving it there to not hide my misstep.
Thanks for elaborating. I understand a little better now. Also I appreciate you apologizing.
Some things I still want to clear up:
lemmy doesnt have „telemetry“, it is federated and instance admins have a lot more to do than harm someone. Thats very far fetched, whereas microsoft will receive tons of money for behavioral data from players. There is opt in telemetry for lemmy servers which is entirely different. Telemetry is a technical term, not what someone makes of it, sorry.
I checked, the ways to play offline arent easy. From four sources, you always have to log in with an account and after can play without internet.
Mods being available is not an argument against my aegument. Its still been hacked which I find unnecessary. I know about mods I own public minecraft servers.
Mineclone (minetest ist the engine) is not more open source. It is open source, minecraft is closed source. A child does not care either way. Introducing them to open source just makes the world a better place, bit by bit. Not necessarily important now but definitely in a couple years.
Also, you use the child to make your point (of open source) and exclude it when convenient (bedrock being a microstransaction mess and heavily geared towards kids).
I really dont want to fight more today. Its been a rough couple of days actually. Many people with really strong opinions and very little empathy. Lets agree to disagree.
Still in early development, probably not that suited for a kid. The bespoke and enclosed experience of Minecraft would be better, assuming you can turn the shop off or limit it in some way.
I dont know where you have your information from but it works just like minecraft does, no difference. Especially for a really young kid that probably barely would press „play game“ there’s no issues afaik.
Why do you suggest something that you have to assume things about? You cant turn off the shop in bedrock minecraft. It is part of the ui (made to pull kids into microtransactions) exactly the reason why I would not suggest it to kids - or anyone - in the first place.
I checked the page and your claim is false. It is not in early development and the list of missing features has 4 points in comparison to 40+ points that are on par with minecraft.
Its also incredibly easy to install and free so no harm in trying.
Skyrim never “clicked” for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices…
In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.
Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn’t change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.
The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).
Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don’t understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.
I feel like, at this point, any enjoyment I still derive from Bethesda games is really just leftover nostalgia for Morrowind that will likely never come close again to how 14yo me was able to enjoy them, when they were still something new.
There’s travel and discovery in Skyrim, which imho makes up a bit for its many flaws. Starfield on the other hand was stripped of that, in the sense that you always land directly on points of interest, so there’s never a process of “getting there”, or even “getting around”, which to me was the whole point of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the landscape is almost never handmade, but procedurally generated, so it has very little appeal. That sense of discovery I had in Morrowind was still there in Skyrim,… but completely gone in Starfield
Most Mario games in general. I can play Mario Kart or some of the sports games with friends if someone else chooses them, but the singleplayer Mario games just aren’t fun to me. The only exception is The Thousand Year Door. I tried the other Paper Mario games and none were as good.
I also agree on BotW. Nintendo was chasing the survival game trend and I guess it paid off for them, but I find the world empty and boring, made worse by the dull colours in the art style. The worst part is the durability system. If there was a way to repair items it might be okay, but everything is like tissue paper. Even higher end weapons are gone after a few enemies, so eventually I just started avoiding combat entirely. I’m certain they did that and kept it that way in TotK because they couldn’t think of anything else to reward players with for exploring their empty world.
There is still item durability BUT! it is “fixed” by the addition of a weapon creation system. Now monster parts that drop can be slapped onto whatever weapon you find on the ground, making every (still breakeable, disposable) weapon less important than the monster part. You can even (a bit later) save your badass monster parts from breakage and reuse them. Furthermore your can immediately see what monster part will drop (its on their heads) which saves unnecessary farming and serves to show the enemies strength at a glance.
Insert comic of the guy in a staff meeting suggesting they fix complaints about durability by adding a simple repair system like every other game and Miyamoto throwing him out the window.
I mean, TOTK is almost copy pasted BOTW. Yeah there are some new mechanics, but it still has all of the flaws of BOTW.
Crafting and the building mechanic add some fun, but the farming required for all of it is tedious (and I even used duplication glitches for items).
Itll be curious to see how people’s opinions of BOTW change over time because I think it took Zelda in a bad direction (unfocused gameplay with simpler puzzles).
Yes. I don’t mean it has a piss filter like Xbox 360 games. I mean the lighting washes everything out. Compare this screenshot to one from Wind Waker or Skyward Sword.
If your argument hinges on the colors being duller than The Wind Waker, perhaps you are setting the bar too high? TWW is more vibrant than 99% of modern games.
But I’m also not the only one who thinks the colours are washed out. Modders running the game on PC were able to increase the vibrance to something that actually looks appealing to me.
Galaxy is actually the one I was playing when I realized I don’t like Mario games. I got about halfway through it, decided I wasn’t having fun and turned it off.
I think this is actually a good thing. In a perfect world exclusives wouldn’t exist and you would buy things based on their own merits. Having to buy something you don’t want because you fear missing out on a game is a horrible experience. In fact I stopped caring because I got so tired of possibly missing out on a game. It has worked out great for me this generation.
Baldur’s Gate 3! The amount of ways the game can play out is extremely impressive. There are a lot of tough choices to make that can greatly affect your party and even the world as a whole
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t come across any. The “challenging moral decisions” werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.
Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.
I also disagree. Even discounting the large number of choices which were just a binary where one side was cartoonishly evil, I didn’t remember any I found impactful.
I ended up following The Emperor path in Act 3 . There wasn’t a moment where I got to weigh up the pros and cons of each major path, as I had decided I didn’t trust Raphael already and he doesn’t give you enough detail to do so if you don’t play along when you meet him at the start of Act 3. If I had then maybe the Orpheus stuff could have given me pause, but that’s not how it played out.
I think part of this was playing as Tav though, as the decisions with real emotional weight are all centered on origin characters and I didn’t dictate what my companions should do for things that were so personal. Shadowheart’s choice in Act III strikes me as one that probably would have hit.
But the bigger issue is I think Larian just isn’t very good at writing evil. You never get those moments of practical evil. I don’t remember ever having to consider doing something horrible for the greater good or being desperate enough to do something compromising out of self preservation. It was all evil for evil’s sake.
which is of course what you would expect
Nah. I would expect there to be difficult choices before the final act, especially in a game so long.
Spec Ops: The Line is a pretty decent pick when it comes to having “morally ambiguous choices”. the game itself states that there are no “real good choices” and thus, you must pick between the two evils.
The right choice is to just stop, but this is a phenomenal game that should be experienced by more people. Just don’t let kids play it, it’s very much an adult game.
The end of Red Dead Redemption. Spoilers for a game that's over a decade old, but John's death was a brutal cruelty that stayed with me for a long, long time.
The sequel was even more brutal. I cried like crazy at the end of both games. Like full on sobbing into a paper towel bc tissues weren’t going to cut it crying.
When I was in the final mission of chapter 6, on my first playthrough, my wife came in to tell me it was time to put the kids to bed. She took one look at my face and the tears rolling down it and put the kids to bed without me.
After everything you do in the game to get Abigail and Jack back, and to see John get to be happy and enjoy his ranch in the final act to it being tragically cut short. I know a lot of people don’t like playing as John in the RDR2 epilogue but I felt like it gave me needed closure from Red Dead Redemption
When my husband was playing this through for the first time I was watching him play and guessed what was happening when John was getting ready to propose to Abigail. We both watched that lovely cutscene teary eyed. It really reminded us of our engagement.
Does anyone else remember bringing home free trials on floppy disks? Like you get the first level of Wolfenstein or Commander Keen and you just play that over and over because you don’t have any money.
A bit before my manufacture date but as a kid there used to be CD ROMs in cereal boxes which had games like Tonka, Hot Wheels, Timon and Pumba, Rainbow Fish, etc. Those were hype.
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