Hmm… While it’s nothing like Outer Wilds and infamous for probably being the most obtuse video game ever created, I wonder if you’d like La Mulana? Metroidvania about being an archeologist where you sort of need to actually peice together the culture and history of the civilization you’re studying to move forward sometimes. It’s style of storytelling is closer to FromSoft (hence the obtuseness) but still.
Open-ended, sandbox sports games. SSX, Skate 3, Steep, are a few off the top of my head. I remember the Steep devs made a BMX game that was similar a few years ago. I tried it but I just didn’t find it nearly as fun as Steep was. They don’t have to be extreme sports either, I think more traditional sports would be fun too. I like it when they’re unrealistic and over-the-top too. I love playing Skate 3 and just listening to music and doing inhuman tricks. I’ve never played it but I’ve heard the NBA Jam series is like this.
edit: Wreckfest is also sort of in that realm. I’d love to play more racing games that aren’t constantly trying to be simulators. Trackmania is the only one I can think of that’s entirely divorced from being a simulator.
I didn’t even find the Steep game entertaining mate, maybe it is because I never played SSX to begin with, but hell the latter still calls my attention!
Checkout Distance on Steam. It’s definitely up there in terms of unique racing games.
Split/Second was also a really interesting take on racing, I wish they had released DLCs or something to add more maps, the way that game worked with the crazy visuals to open up new shortcuts and modify the track midrace was an awesome idea
I absolutely loved Carmageddon. My PC couldn't really handle it so it would turn into a slide show eith every crash, but I just loved it and didn't care.
I really want to see more games like Might & Magic 6-8 or Wizardry 8, in that vein of open world dungeon crawler, but not locked to a grid like M&M 1-5 or Dungeon Master 1&2 (although I do like those games, they’re more well represented in the contemporary space with titles like M&M 10 or Legend of Grimrock.
Eh, not very well - there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that these games capture, revolving around skill allocation and character development that Skyrim doesn’t have. It’s exciting to become a water master in MM6 because it means being able to teleport freely between towns, or expert level spirit being able to bless the whole party at once.
Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it’s also got a lot of differences.
The similar:
You start out as one person.
It’s not especially easy, particularly at the start.
You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.
You can form military groups – much larger than squads, normally – that are out and about.
There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.
There is an economic aspect.
The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.
But there are also some pretty substantial differences:
While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you’re still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you’re going to know and equip each character.
You’re generally working with formations, not individual units.
Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what’s there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There’s a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B – you’re mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.
Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you’re aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.
The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you’d do with your companions, if they aren’t in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.
M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There’s the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you’re setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.
M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.
M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi’s modeling the whole shebang; what’s being produced matters a lot more.
Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It’s just that in Starfield – at least vanilla; we’ll have to see where mods take the thing – there isn’t a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don’t want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.
In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it’s a first-class part of the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I like M&B too. It’s just that in practice, I don’t think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you’ve picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don’t individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren’t killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don’t really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There’s a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn’t really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn’t much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world – that’s what the camera follows on the strategic map.
When I saw your title, space combat games are immediately what came to mind.
I adored the space operas that were FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 (VIP Volition). I would love for something along those lines. Add in a little bit more management, some rpg/progression elements, even pilot/FPS sections, and it’s dream game for me. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited (and let down by) Star Citizen.
It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
What is there to do in the end game? I’m at the point now where I can get 1000+ golden eggs and I don’t even know how much gold per run, if I want to, but the whole thing is just fairly easy and repetitive. No matter which character I get, I can use pretty much the same OP combo.
I guess I could just go back to making the game hard again by disabling eggs, the OP weapons, and other things, but then what’s the point since a lot of the fun is in unlocking things?
Or am I just “done” the game, now, and it’s time to move on to Soulstone Survivors or Brotato?
I did, and I’m very glad! I set an alarm this morning, made sure everything was good to go. Got the LE right at 10:00:03 and delivery said 1-2 weeks but then the purchase didn’t actually get through until 11:26 after many various different errors. Got the “out of stock” message maybe 5 times by which point it was saying 2-4 weeks lol. At one point had been restricted from “too many attempted purchases.”
I’m just glad I managed to get one. Valve hardware is truly something else. I happily use my 4 Steam Controllers (game nights and I rotate them :)), I got the Index when I was able to have space for VR and after that the Steam Deck was just a no-brainer (went with the 512gb for the anti-glare as I’m not a fan of gloss.)
When they announced the OLED I was a little remiss but accepted that it was gonna happen eventually. No plan to get it or sell the old one even though I’ve really wanted an OLED gaming device since emulating on phones actually looks really good compared to LCD screens.
Then I saw the red themed translucent and apparently something came over me and I’ll have 2 Steam Decks now. (don’t worry, my OG currently has 4 roles so it will still get plenty of use as a music tracker and girlfriend machine… er, machine for her)
I really enjoyed Hero’s Hour, it’s eeriely similar to Mount and Blade but… pixel.
My gaming history is so diverse that I only recently realized that certain games have baises to certain styles of console now. Growing up I played a lot of NES and SNES games on an old hitachi laptop with the roms and a control scheme I didn’t know how to chance from PGUP PGDN and arrow controls. Never the less, my platforming 2D top down exploration feeling kicked in. Then the PS2 introduced me to 3D games and the different dynamics, but it was stolen so I got to explore the world of flash games until the Wii expanded the PS2’s dynamic games with depth of controllers. (Honestly it’s not talked enough about how Wii Sports is a form of AR.) Anyway, now as an adult the last nearly decade of gaming has been done mostly on PC, with just a few Nintendo games here and there between the 3DS, Wii U and Switch.
And through all of this, Nintendo has had very strong 3rd party titles - Retro City Rampage, Shantae, Shovel Knight, I mean the list could go on for forever. But what’s interesting is none of these kinds of games, even some dear classics like Phantom Brave/Disgaea, none of them fully appeal to me on PC. When I use the Steam Controller it helps immensely, but even then it can take some work to really feel “right”.
It wasn’t until I got the Steam Deck that I realized this connection between the smaller/portable nature of certain games to certain consoles. I mean, I was aware of it in the sense that I preferred certain games for certain consoles, but I never realized just how strongly “retro” games just need to be on a small screen with gamepad controls - and I loooved playing flash games on mouse and keyboard but the nostalgia of the screen format is just so overpoweringly nostalgic.
Anyway, all this to say - I have found a previously “nearly useless” part of my very large game library to be no longer “nearly useless”. There are now so many games that I have some interest in to at least try, because playing them on the Steam Deck just feels right.
Forager, Hero’s Hour, Monster Sanctuary, Blasphemous, and Yakuza (refound love for this one) are my 2022 replays top Steam Deck games. However during that time I also ripped all my Switch games to format shift them to the Steam Deck, so Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance 3 also got a lot of playtime.
Within the last year I’ve come across Smile for Me, Guts and Glory, and Narita Boy which I wouldn’t have normally played either.
As a piece of hardware and platform, I like it. I think that the OLED screen is definitely a win too.
But I carry a laptop and tablet (EDIT: and smartphone) with me already, and I rarely game much when out and about. Just not enough additional utility provided by the thing.
Thank you for putting into words what I've been trying to weigh out regarding a Steam Deck.
I think your tech arrangement is similar enough to my own and therefore just what I needed to read in order to convince myself I won't miss not having one.
I thought I felt the same, but after getting it I’m just super impressed. It blows the “gaming laptop” experience out of the water IMO. It’s not as good as a proper gaming rig, but for a budget device, the bang for buck is insane
I beat Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines for the first time on Deck. KBM controls bound to the system really did it for me and since it was a low spec game it ran flawlessly. And the game’s reputation holds up (well written and engaging but janky lol)
Well I didn’t first discover it on deck but I play a ton of Spelunky 2 on deck. Every time I boot it up intending to play something else, I see it there and go, “ooook just a couple rounds”
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