Yeah performance is my absolute biggest issue rn. I’m getting like…70-80fps on med on a 2080ti. Other than that, I’m very happy with it, although I’m only about 4 hours in
Of those 3 I've easily spent the most time in Portia. I really love the fishing in that game and when you get the super valuable fish you really feel like you earnt it :)
Yeah it kinda does. It's this weird sandfishing minigame though with a kind of claw thing that you throw out. Nowhere near as fun as the fishing in Portia imho.
since you brought up stardew and ac, fishing doesn’t need to be the main focus/gameplay of the game?
Far Cry 5 has fishing, can’t remember if there’s different fishing gear really.
Warframe has fishing, but it can take quite some time for a new player to get there. The “openworld” areas on planets have spear fishing you can do for faction rep. etc.
Have you played any of the harvest moon / story of seasons games? It’s the series that inspired Stardew Valley. Most of them are, in general, much more chill than even Stardew itself. There are a bunch of them on steam (on there, look only for the story of seasons games and ignore the ones named Harvest Moon)
If you can get past the kind of… weird control scheme…
The game is basically a single player mmorpg.
You start off as an absolute weakling, and there is no … scaling, the way most other rpgs either generally have certain levelled enemies in certain areas, that you progress through linearly or unlock sequentially, or just an outright whole world spanning dynamic level matching kind of system.
You can be battling a small beast… and then a herd of very, very much more dangerous beasts, or slavers, will just happen to pass by, and royally fuck up your day.
Every character in the game, including you, plays by the same rules.
All major NPCs can be killed, the game is also full of varying factions with varying alignments towars other factions, and they will treat your character differently based on your race, the kinds of actio s you do, your reputation with other factions.
The storytelling is … a sandbox/emergent approach. Not in the sense of ‘there are no story lines or quests’… but in the sense of… a whole lot of stuff is out there, but you have to self direct yourself to go out and find it, or randomly encounter it.
Also, you can gain allies, make your own faction, and control a small army… and you can even build your own settlement, and economically interact with the rest of the world.
… Its… kind of hard to describe.
There really aren’t any other games quite like Kenshi.
Its got a good sized modding scene, and it incorperates at least some elemenrs of… every game you mentioned.
If you use a mod to up your max follower/faction member count… you can basically play the game as an RTS (with pause). Build a settlement, recruit followers (or enslave them), arm them, fees them, train them up, and go take over a city if you want.
… Or play basically solo, just you and your bonedog, maybe as a bounty hunter for hire, or a hashish smuggler, or get a pack animal and run a trade caravan.
I love BGS games. For me, other than Starfield, the only issue with them is the dated graphics and gameplay, but the Oblivion remaster certainly fixes that! If anyone already loves classic oblivion, the ramaster is definitely for you, and if you loved Skyrim, but oblivion was too dated to get into it, the remaster is also for you. Not everyone likes bgs rpgs though
Yeah GoT quickly turned from a fun game I enjoyed to a game I almost loathed and resented as I had to force myself to finish it.
It really doesn’t have enough variety to support being that long, in my opinion. The mission design is way too bland and samey and the tone of the writing just starts wearing you down. Literally everything is the same serious tone delivered in a dour monotone. A handful of moments with Kenji is not enough to break the tedium. It would be fine if the game was 20 hours long, not 60.
I still think it’s a fine sort of 7.5-8/10 at the end of the day but I consider it one of the most overrated games of all time. It’s just a polished Ubisoft collect-a-thon open world with solid combat at the end of the day. It’s not game of the decade or whatever.
Definitely how i’m feeling with this game now. The opening was really good, but the middle is disconnected and very hard for me to get attached to the story. It definitely brings it down a point for me, which sucks because besides that i really enjoy the game.
Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.
I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.
Balatro.
You think it’s simple until it’s suddenly 1 am and your brain is mush trying to remember what strategy you’re currently using -oops lost, ok one more run…
Soma.
If you’re in the mood to be hooked on a story. Scary stuff happens, and youll question life a few times.
Pathfinder.
Wrath of the Righteous is the only tabletop pc rpg you’ll need agian. Baldergate 3 is the tutorial mission for this monster game.
Rain World.
If you enjoy metroidvanias with new mechanics.
Tunic.
If you enjoy zelda and dark souls. Theres more to it than it looks. I couldn’t put this one down either.
Satisfactory is nice, but first person with huge machines. So travel time is a downside for me. Dyson sphere program is much better in that aspect, I played 2 games, with both finishing the tech tree. I played the second game when the first combat implementations were added but I haven’t checked them out yet. I don’t feel like restarting again and my old saves are a mess to pick it back up (can’t remember what is where etc with all the planets). But it’s an amazing game!
I’ll go with some classics if you haven’t tried them yet. Planescape: torment is a really engaging crpg if you don’t mind old graphics and dig lots of lore and dialogue. Morrowind if you prefer first person for another old school rpg with lots of stuff to discover in a weird surreal environment. Dwarf fortress sounds like another older one you might be into too.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.
Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).
For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it’s led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I’ll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.
Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game, which are shown on that game’s store page.
But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.
I basically do the same, searching overwhelmingly positive games. But most I haven’t tried are poorly looking indie games or weird Asian games. I played several really good indie games, I’m not against that, but what I see generally doesn’t catch my interest. And I have over 600 games in Steam alone, so many good ones I already played.
Now it’s just a sea of junk, having to find a needle in a haystack. And user reviews aren’t a gold standard anymore. I’ve seen amazing reviews of mediocre games, as young people don’t have standards anymore as most games these days are empty of story, full of bugs or both.
The game dev community was outraged by bg3, warning people they shouldn’t see bg3 as a new standard. While back in the days when you still bought physical games in a store, it indeed was a standard to sell you a proper product for the price you pay.
These days I illegally download triple A games to check them first, if they are good I’ll buy them. I haven’t bought a triple A game for a long time. Often 2h of playtime for a refund on steam isn’t enough, when you want to see all the storyline videos and conversations. Not enough time to experience the gameplay.
Indie games I often buy immediately, they really put in effort to make something worth playing. Big companies however just put in effort to make it look really good to make a lot of pre-orders, then to abandon it after a few minor bug fixes while gameplay is poorly written and just a few hours. As long as you peek the interest for just over 2h so people aren’t eligible for a refund anymore. This is scamming people, I don’t understand why they keep getting away with it.
In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/ is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.
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