Divinity: Original Sin 2! It’s by the same devs and it’s absolutely incredible. Different classes and spells and stuff, but you’ll pick it all up very fast, and I actually think character building in Divinity is a lot more fun than D&D, because there’s a lot more flexibility about how you choose powers and abilities.
If you’d prefer to stick with something based on the D&D mechanics, Owlcats games are excellent (it’s Pathfinder, but Pathfinder is just a lightly modified D&D 3.5)
I second the owlcats games, especially Pathfinder Kingmaker, which is less gory in theme, more exploration and kingdom building in addition to the adventuring
The game itself is great, the UI/UX is just on another level. The UI has no ambiguity, is very responsive to input and just feels smooth. The wording on the cards is also excellent and consistent.
StS is a joy to play and I bet it’s also really great on the Steam Deck.
Those fifteen classes are all we’re getting for last epoch. Two of them won’t be live until launch on February 21 (falconer and warlock), but there’s a ton of diversity between those classes.
What?? Faith might be the only interesting character in the whole FC series. I don’t think you understand the character’s backstory at all, TBH. The original Faith was the Seeds’ sister who died young, so the brothers kidnap young women in the cult, drug them (I forget what the name of the drug is in the game), and convince them that they’re Faith Seed. Eventually that woman dies so they replace her with another. It’s horribly tragic and, in my opinion, is leagues above the standard character writing of the Far Cry games
Funnily enough, I figured it out really fast, like I GET IT, it was a very strange and wonky mechanic to suddenly hit players with, but i was immediately wiggling around the moment I got on it, trying to figure out what they wanted and noticed that I was bouncing a little more when I moved up and down. So kind of… like pure chance I got out alive lol
Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) is my favourite pirate game. No, it’s nothing like what you think a licensed tie in game from 2003 would be like.
It’s a real oddity. This was made by a Russian studio and originally meant to be a sequel to their previous age of sail game, Sea Dogs. In Russia it was still marketed as a sequel, without the Pirates of the Carribean branding. It has basically nothing to do with the movies in reality. I have no idea how or why this ended up being a tie in.
I don’t really have a short hand for describing the genre. It most reminds me of space sims - where you control a vessel which you can replace, has an economy/trade system, management mechanics, factional reputation systems and an open world. It’s not a simplified as Freelancer, but not a spreadsheet game like the X series.
The sailing is great, a happy medium between completely arcade stuff where you just point your ship where you want to go and sims. Wind and weather play an important role without being tedious or overwhelming.
You also control a character for ship environments, like boarding, and exploring towns and islands (with swashbuckling combat, of course). It’s pretty bare bones but the variety is appreciated. There are lite-RPG dialogue/story mechanics and quests, though I do not want to give the impression this narrative heavy game. It’s an RPG style that used to be relatively common but not so much anymore.
But the real highlight is the New Horizons mod which greatly overhauls the game. It’s been developed for almost 20 years. I don’t recommend playing the vanilla game - I enjoyed it at the time, but it’s just an inferior experience to the mod.
It’s good but as a fan of survival games like Minecraft, Rust, Valheim and Grounded it leaves a lot to be desired in that aspect of the game. It feels really early access (which yeah I guess it is so I’ll concede on that) and feature non-complete. With that being said, I’m still coming back to it and enjoying it.
P.S. I’m also on gamepass and have sunk a few hours into cloud gaming as well and it’s pretty good. As soon as Microsoft start adding something like native upscaling to xbox cloud gaming they’re gonna be on a whole other level of playability.
proprietary games that install rootkits(wrongly called anticheats) on the system. the corporations in charge have brainwashed masses into thinking that it’s just a benign thing there to fend off “cheaters”, conveniently brushing aside the fact that this is a massive and lucrative attack vector. it only helps bad actors(including three letter agencies).
and this is not a what-if scenario. every year you can find an incident where such a “solution” is exploited.
Pillars of Eternity is very good. The writing is fun and I liked a lot of the classes. Especially Cipher.
I think the second one is better though. You get a ship! And the powers are per-fight instead of per-rest, so you don’t have to worry about camping much at all. Also multiclassing is fun. I wasn’t a heavy optimizer but my rogue/monk just punched stuff into chunks.
It’s on my Steam wishlist. Since I already have a copy of Tyranny I’ll probably play that before Deadfire, but I definitely want to play it! Hopefully Avowed will be good too whenever that comes out.
Gotta agree, they haven’t inspired confidence lately, I was expecting redfall & starfield to be groundbreaking games that I would want to play for years, sadly no. It makes me concerned for elder scrolls 6
OpenMW may as well be a remake, it runs very well and updates everything for modern hardware. Thats probably the way to go if you want to play Morrowind today.
After Fallout 3, each Bethesda release was less ambitious than the last. Oblivion tried to do tons of stuff and ended up as a beautiful and memorable total mess (It’s my personal favorite). Fallout 3 was a bold new direction and a more stable but fudamentally compromised experience. Skyrim established the trend of scaling back and making what’s left more consistent, simple, and flashy. Fallout 4 was the last major fan outcry from those who believed Bethesda could have done better while Starfield is a confirmation that everyone’s worst fears about Bethesda are true.
I can tell dozens of stories of buggy hilarious moments in oblivion stories that are memorable and unique. All I remember from vanilla skyrim are the official plots everyone went through. It was just as buggy just charmless.
Too true. Being able to jump over buildings was the basis for many of my old Oblivion shenanigans. You can’t really get weird with the Skyrim options without modding.
PGR3, a Xbox360 racing game, contains Geometry Wars 1 and 2 as mini games. YT Link
Celeste contains the entirety of Celeste Classic (PICO-8) as an easter egg in one of its levels. YT Link
Xenogears, a PS1 JRPG game, contains a battle arena minigame, and I spent a few hours on that as a kid. YT Link
Machinarium’s Gomoku/5 in a row minigame is so much fun, I played it with my friends at school when we didn’t want to listen to our teacher :) By the way, I really recommend Machinarium to every fan of old school point-and-click games.
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