I had a similar experience of first finishing the DLC and then going into God of War (2018). While not open world, it’s the same type of AAA soup you get from most big studios. There are so many baffling design decisions, I cannot fathom why people love the game so much - the constant barrage of stories and small talk is the most engaging thing in there.
The combat is utterly boring. Increasing the difficulty only results in spongy enemies. Their move sets are boring at best and annoying at worst. They are all but helpless if you just keep them at a distance and throw your axe.
Even worse, your godly powers are cutscene only. If you don’t want to make your game challanging, at least make a fun power fantasy and Kratos is perfect for that. He kills giant enemies, tears the very ground asunder and moves the heaviest objects imaginable. He even has super healing. None of which are tied to actual combat mechanics.
Upgrades are meaningless. Early on, you unlock a smith. I got my axe from 5 to 40 damage. Guess what? The very next enemy took the same amount of hits as the same type of enemy did before.
Traversing is mechanically boring. Climbing just means you gotta follow the yellow markings - press in the right direction or do the indicated button press. You literally cannot fall. Everything else is just walking from combat area to combat area.
The game throws an endless barrage of puzzles at you, none of which are engaging. They are so watered down, there’s barely much more thinking involved than in climbing.
Even worse, major upgrades are placed in “puzzle” chests. The puzzle? Well, just walk around and rotate your camera for several minutes until you’ve found all three runes.
The game basically just feels like a very long cutscene with a lot of padding so you can press some buttons. You can play it just fine, but they removed everything that could make any one system interesting in favor of having nothing in there a player could be stuck at. I like the characters, but I’m better served just watching a cutscene compilation for the second one.
Windows also does not have 100% compatibility. Try playing something like age of wonders 1 on current windows. I could run in out of the box on steam deck but not on my pc that at the time had windows 10. I think Windows no longer has compatibility with win 98 and lower but i might be misremembering.
Not sure about satisfactory, considering the map is always the same. So the only sources of randomness are starting at another location in the same map or playing differently yourself
Then just go for factorio. Randomly generated map and recources. Highly adjustable for dificulty and a LOT of mods that add to the game. Concidering that the dlc , that seems to be as complex as the Base Game, comes out in Oktober you have a good Kandidaten for infinite replayability
If you’re into scripting or hacking you should check this game out. It’s an interesting twist on the Multi-User Dungeon genre. The game presents mostly as a command-line interface where your goal is to seek out targets to pwn for money/points. NPC targets will have vulnerabilities you need to find and exploit in order to expose a hackable part. Once found you engage hackermode where you’ll have a timelimit to break the target’s security (mostly through bruteforce cracking). The game allows you to write short scripts in JavaScript to automate searching for vulnerabilities and cracking security.
Being Multi-User, there are other users online doing what you’re doing and you’re free to chat with them and exchange scripts. You’re also free to write malicious scripts that will steal money/points from others who don’t check scripts before running them!
The part I found cool was that the game mirrors IRL hacking much closer than other hacking games. You’ll often need to submit incorrect data to NPC targets to get an error message that will contain hints about where to go next. Ex. A webpage has “News” and “About Us” sections. You can request a section that doesn’t exist to get an error message that shows all acceptable sections: “News”, “About Us”, or “Employees”. You’ve found a hidden section! Using scripts to send a bunch of mal-formed data at a target and then analyzing which ones generate an exploitable error is part of real-life security testing.
In hacknet, when you try to hack a target you’ll see it has SSH and FTP services running. You run fake programs like SSHcrack.exe and FTPbounce.exe to exploit those services and the you’re in.
In hackmud, when you try to hack a target you’ll see it has an “ez_35” lock and a “c001” lock. The ez_35 lock requires an unlock word, something like “open”, “unlock”, “release” and a digit between 0 and 9. The c001 lock requires a color like “red” “purple” “lime”. You need to enter the right inputs within the time limit to hack the target. You can do it manually, but most targets have too many locks with too many options to manually guess all of them in time. You’ll need to write your own real life script in JavaScript that can detect locks and automatically guess every option for those locks. If you’ve ever done programming challenges then you shouldn’t have too much difficulty writing these scripts. If you’re new to programming it’s not the easiest tutorial. The game provides very little direct help.
It’s all about timing, just like face buttons. Platforming or fighting games, you gotta have that instant response. Aiming or acceleration needs the precision of analog. So, “depends on the game” is my hot take…
I realised all these years later that so many games from my childhood had the issue of “floaty characters”.
Mario 64 felt so good because you could run at full speed, snap the alalog stick back and jump, and Mario would pivot on a bees dick and launch himself at your face.
Mortal Kombat 9, also known as “Mortal Kombat” or “Mortal Kombat (2011)” is where the modern canon starts. It’s also delisted from sale, so you’ll need to find a used copy for consoles or pirate it for PC. It’s a soft reboot of the story and also establishes the bar for what fighting game story modes should be. It’s campy and leans into it, and that’s the tone that MK always has when it’s at its best.
Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 11 are sequels to that, and they escalate the ridiculousness. These are direct sequels, so while they make efforts to ensure you can understand what’s happening even if you haven’t played the games before, MKX is best enjoyed after playing MK9, and MK11 is best enjoyed after playing MKX.
Mortal Kombat 1 is another soft reboot, but (slight spoiler) it also does this while preserving the canon of, and sequeling, MK9, MKX, and MK11.
MK9 is a throwback to your favorite characters with modern (at the time) mechanics.
MKX brings back the run button and tries to keep all of the different versions of each character over the years in the same game via its “variation” system.
MK11 tries to do away with some superfluous features of MKX while adding more defensive options.
MK1 introduces “kameos”, which is like a Marvel vs. Capcom 1 style assist system.
MK9 is also the start of the modern game mechanics, in addition to the story. They established the current gameplay formula in MK9, and have been iterating on it since then.
Unless you really want to play the classic games, I think MK9 is the best starting point.
edit: Wait wtf am I talking about you obviously start with the movie from 1995.
If the mtx is meaningless because you can get it easily in game, then it is predatory as it is intended to be purchased by people who are not aware that they can earn it in game. That strikes me as worse than mtx that is required to do something they can’t without it, because it preys on people’s lack of information and they aren’t making an informed choice.
You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.
I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.
I have another theory, and please don’t be offended if I’m wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t a game at all.
Could it have been The Bishop of Battle from the movie Nightmares? You might have Mandela-effected this game from memories of that movie and similar games you had played.
Super Mario Bros on the NES. I remember getting super frustrated and throwing a tantrum because I couldn’t figure out how to jump over the second hole. Hahahaha man I was pathetic.
Every open world game has turned into the same “do this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the game”
I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.
Open world is really only good if it’s something like an MMO where the content is built up over the course of years and there are multiple story lines.
Aside from that, it works well for racing games not much else.
I tend to agree but then I also have moments where I get lost in the world for a few hours and it’s great. Death Stranding is probably my favourite where I walk everywhere and I spend an hour doing one delivery!
I also miss story driven games such as Uncharted games, playing several open world games in a row can be exhausting, I kinda feel it for game reviewers and such.
I found the three newish Tomb Raider games to be a great mix of a sort of open world feel at times where you have things to explore, while being very much on rails. Each arc in the story gives you an area to explore and your actions in that area progress the story. You get some weapon and ability upgrades throughout. I came in not expecting much and couldn’t put the first one down. I think I finished Tomb Raider 2013 to 100% in about 20-25 hours and it was excellent. Will probably do another playthrough at some point, still haven’t played the third.
I agree there. At the very least with the first of them. The 2nd and 3rd started to add a lot of crafting mechanics, but I really enjoyed the first one (and have played all 3 to completion)
Absolutely agree on Red Dead Redemption 2. Another point considering it’s an open world game it plays extremely linearly and sometimes in missions it tells you that you can’t leave a certain area for no reason.
I really enjoyed it, and will return to it. But I put it down because it felt like doing chores. I will try again and try to focus on the scenery and story, which I do like a lot
I got it for free and really enjoyed it. The main character is the epitome of beige and bland generic gruff white dude but the game did quite a lot new and had some good ideas.
The second one was even better, it’s very meme heavy in its characters but if you can tolerate them the gameplay is even better and the story is better too.
Always ready to bump my favorite game of all time, but honestly I feel this is quite a popular opinion (compared to some of the games in OP’s list that are really overlooked on these discussions of best games ever).
But still, what an incredible experience, the OST for outer Wilds was my fourth most listened to on last year’s Spotify Wrapped :)
Yeah, it may not be as popular as Mario or Zelda, but I wouldn’t say it’s “unfairly forgotten”. People who have played the game tend to be pretty vocal about it. And justifiably so, I’ve never had a comparable experience in another game. I wish I could forget about it and play it again.
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
I started playing the Outer Worlds thinking I had simply misheard the name Outer Wilds and found myself very confused but still kept trudging on. Thank you for bringing some sanity into my life; Wilds seems like the game I wanted to play the whole time, not Worlds. I’ll see how chaotic I can fuck out Worlds before I ditch it for Wilds.
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