I play Trailmakers which is like Legos where people mostly build planes and tanks to shoot each other, but I build cranes, forklifts, trucks and boats and fill them with the barrels and crates from around the maps and move them to other places. Very peaceful and rewarding to me.
I would laugh if it wasn’t true. But also, people underestimate how realistic light and shadows can really sell a scene. It just shouldn’t require the electricity of a refrigerator to do it.
A lot of that is just poor implementation on the developers end. They go “oh the engine we bought supports this? Well let’s do the bare minimum to enable the setting.” And you get games that don’t even look better, but run like ass.
Well, yeah, ray-tracing is actually a lot simpler to implement, because you just implement things the way physics works and then that works in most situations as you’d expect (i.e. how physics works).
All the lighting techniques we used in the past were just faking lighting in ever more intricate ways. Computationally much less intensive ways, which is why we bothered with them in the first place, but it’s genuinely quite a bit of work.
There’s some ways to optimize ray-tracing itself (e.g. pre-bake the lighting into scenes), but many times it’s also a matter of mixing ray-tracing and more traditional lighting techniques, which brings in that additional work again.
Which is then why it’ll be done less and less, the better hardware becomes. Because if publishers can sell to a wide audience without putting in that work, they absolutely will not put in that work.
I’m trying to see some stuff in BG1 and 2 that I missed as I take another lap through the entire series, and I remember BG1 being a fairly easy, straight-forward game, but now that I’m replaying it, I remember that’s only the tail end of the game. Early in the game, when you’re stuck at level 1 for hours, lots of attacks just one-shot you, and it takes so long to get level 2. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re barely out of the tutorial area before you get level 2, so you just don’t have that problem with low HP.
I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of 2e, but I think first level HP might be set in stone by class, and the Enhanced Editions of BG1 and 2 give you a max HP per level option, which doesn’t really help at level 1. Dynaheir keeps getting smoked with her mere 6HP, and she can’t get to level 2 fast enough.
If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!
Pelting the enemy with slings and arrows still works, but now and then they’ll still target me at range and land a hit. I don’t have a summoner in my party either, so I doubt I’d see a difference, especially at level 1.
I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.
I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.
While I agree with you on how mediocre voice acting drags down most games, BG3 is one of the very few where the voice acting elevated the dialogue for me and the dialogue felt a lot less rambling than in NWN and other similar games. In BG3 the player character dialogue options are pretty robust, sometimes having six or more options to choose from, since the character doesn’t speak. I haven’t played Planescape Torment or Fallout 2 to compare, so I’ll take your word on them.
On a side note, BG3 was one of the games where the dialogue choices do matter. The worst are games where there are only a few poorly described choices and they have zero impact on what happens after! While I live Battletech (2019) the dialoge choices were completely pointless other than microfosing information. They would have been better off just having the NPCs banter after a single choice.
Personal preferences of course, which is why I love how many games there are to choose from.
I don’t normally like that kind of character but he really grew on me fast. Astarian, Gale, and Karlach are my absolute favorites but the cast as a whole is solid.
That’s what I am glad they included enough for personal preference and included the ability to respec them so they weren’t locked into their starting classes.
While I didn’t like his class much, it was his personality that really got me. I saw he can become a literal god in some endings. Sure didn’t happen in mine!
XCom and XCom 2 can be played entirely with the mouse. Minor typing if you want to name your soldiers, but nothing requires quick reflexes. Everything is turn based.
There’s an older breakout style game on steam called Shatter that can be played entirely with the mouse and has a banger soundtrack and neat visual style.
Emulation opens up a lot of options for old school turn based games. RPGs, turn based strategy. Any of the Pokemon games gen 1-3 can be played one handed with some clever button mapping. Any game made to use just the Wii-mote as a pointer would also work, but I don’t know those off the top of my head.
You might want to look into one handed controllers, or something like the FLIR USB dongle that you can use to map IR TV remote signals to keyboard button presses. Just need to use a remote that doesn’t already control something.
As I mentioned in another comment it plays quite well. At least with the Steam Index that I use. Most games seem to work out of the box. One thing that isn’t currently implemented is BT communication with the lighthouses which is a bit annoying but there are other apps and tools to workaround that.
Completely agree. 6 has some fun elements and really cool guns, but the enemy health system they implemented completely ruined the game and franchise (among other shitty things)
Reasons why Ubisoft is in the shitter, facing hostility from both gamers and shareholders alike. It seems the Guillemot familly is hellbent into destroying every last shred of good will left.
4 is very similar to 3, in my opinion. It generally ranks lower than 3, but I’d attribute that to 3 defining expectations and 4 meeting expectations rather than pulling another groundbreaking move. 3 shared some notable elements with 2 but refined the direction of FC. 2 doesn’t have magic and FC enjoyers begroaned 3’s supernatural element, but here we are.
5 removed the supernatural element and got some mixed feelings. I’d put some of that on the fact that they brought the white American savior trope home to America. Instead of a foreign land under a whimsical authoritarian regime the West likes to go to war with, it’s a religious cult in classic Americana rural towns. It’s like changing from 1990s Batman movies to the Nolan trilogy. Gritty, more realistic, closer to historical fiction than fantasy. It harks back to the 1993 Waco Massacre.
I’ve played 6 on and off over the last few years. I read lots of hate but still enjoyed it. It’s in Cuba, so it was back to being a far-off fantasy for me, with lots of story rooted in the 1960s revolution (though the game is present day). That is until the Gaza war flared up. Suddenly the game got uncomfortable for me. You play as a terrorist group fighting the military. That’s not exactly different from 4. Sure, if you win, it’s a revolution, but if you lose, historical speaking, the winners call it terrorism. I suppose the story could be considered weaker, but it’s a change up. Instead of basing the story on you vs the big bad, it’s rooted more in the friends you make along the way. You’re building a revolution as one faction gathering 3 more.
There’s also 3 half-games. Between the main titles, half of the prior maps for alternate experiments. I’d wait for all the titles to be discounted but would say the halfsies need to be discounted more. Granted, they’re probably all regularly under $20 now anyway.
After 3 came Blood Dragon, using one of the islands for an over the top 1980s synthwave action comedy. It has corny 80s moves in lieu of superpowers. It’s fun.
After 4 came Primal, a prehistoric version of the FC formula. I think it’s neat that they developed a proto-proto-indo-european language for a 10,000BC setting. Spears, slings, clubs, and knives are the weapons here with some grenade-like items. There’s spiritual elements resembling living a mythology. It’s also fun.
After 5, New Dawn is actually a continuation of the story. A quasi-Fallout/Mad Max post-nuke-apocalypse world in which Joseph Seed still lives - and becomes an ally. I think it brought in supernatural powers from nuclear stuff. Probably my least favorite of the 3, but still enjoyable. It also introduced a number of the elements people begroaned in 6, so maybe that’s why I don’t mind 6 as much.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a halfsies between 6 and, presumably, an upcoming 7. 6 does have some extra story (dlc?) that has you relive parts of the prior titles. I haven’t done them nor read about them much so I can experience them myself.
I liked 4, it’s very much a victim of being a Ubisoft game though, as in it’s more of the same. I’d say the only difference is the setting.
5 is similarly pretty good, I feel like it removed a lot of the “Guerrilla Warfare” feel of the combat but the villain is really good and the setting is pretty solid too. I haven’t played 6 though. If I had to guess though it’s the same. More of the same.
Worth mentioning that some of these earlier titles were built for IPX networking, which is no longer supported by modern operated systems. I get the impression OP is asking for games with LAN gaming supporting to get recommendations, so I feel it’s important to make sure they or others checking lists like this one understand they may need to go through some hoops to get some of these titles to work with a modern machine.
Yea I’m not sure of OP’s ability and the requirements for games was vague. But IPX isn’t that big of a hurdle, DOSBox has an emulator for it: www.dosbox.com/wiki/connectivity
Bigger issues would be sourcing and playing some of these games on modern systems at all. And some dedicated servers can be a pain.
Holy shit, I had forgotten about SOLDAT. My friends and I used to play that on the library computers in middle school.
IIRC it had a portable version that you could boot from a flash drive. Or at least the installation happened on your local user account, so it didn’t require admin rights from the school IT team.
Also, the old Dungeon Siege games. IIRC, 1 and 2 both had LAN multiplayer, where each person took control of a different character. It was basically the groundwork for the gameplay that Dragon Age Origins built upon.
It’s easily The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It has everything I could ask for in a game: Sword fighting. Magic. Secrets. Dungeon crawling. An alternate dimension. Side quests. Different tools and items. There’s enough content that it feels fulfilling to complete it. Peak art. Peak music. NPCs don’t talk too much, and there are just enough of them to make the world feel alive. Bosses.
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