I’ve been extremely impressed with the longevity and all around toughness of my Dell Precision. I think it’s gotta be 12 years old now, it weighs a ton, been dropped multiple times, and while I replaced its disk and memory at some point it has never suffered a hardware failure. The thing is a tank, I love it.
This is really well articulated and puts into words the reason I stopped playing. I was one of those non FPS players who really thrived on Sym and Moira and Mercy and I felt welcomed and appreciated when it first came out. I just had fun and that made me want to try to get better and kept me coming back. As they kept retooling things, especially with Sym 3.0, I felt they were deliberately pushing me and people like me out. Instead of having a fun, wild and playful team game for my friends to all have a good time in, it became just another FPS game.
Seconding 9 Parchments and the Trine series. They are both by the same studio and they are beautiful games, they make sure every new scene is a tableau worthy of a screenshot with hyper saturated fanciful environments. The gameplay is fun, polished and goes by fast, in a good way.
It was not an uncommon occurrence for people to play as, say, Symmetra, Torb or Hanzo and refuse to switch regardless of the circumstances of play and whether they were able to use those characters effectively. People got reported (and subsequently banned) for throwing matches and griefing constantly if they were on an off-meta or “troll” character in Overwatch 1. Thinking specifically around seasons 1-10 or so.
Stellaris has a fine soundtrack, but I found myself vibing way more playing it with FlyByNo’s soundtrack for Endless Space. Endless Space didn’t have the staying power with me that Stellaris did but that soundtrack is * chef’s kiss * .
I’ll give you that it’s been longer than I realized since the base game came out, however, Beyond Earth came out 10 years ago (2014) and Alpha Centauri was 25 years ago.
I might have lucked into some cheesey builds, I only maxed one character and have a few at 60. One mod I did get was a full respec mod, but the default reset of the last 3 levels was at least good enough for me to see if a skill was working for me or not. I agree that there seem to be too many “dud” skills, especially on embermage and engineer. My lvl 100 character I did without mods and I kind of liked how punishing it was. I get that that’s a preference though.
Ok, is a Diablo-like a thing I can call it then? It’s just such a specific type of game, the isometric top down view RPG with classes, customizable character leveling, randomly generated levels with area themes, randomized loot, a town hub and inventory etc. I’ve always heard those games called Rogue-likes but I never played Rogue.
I haven’t played it. My impression is that it was trying very hard to cater to the mobile market. I heard it suffered from a lot of design changes and ended up being sold and then patched up and released by a new team to cut their losses. Meanwhile, Torchlight 2 may be older but it was made with love and care and a strong vision. It’s dirt cheap now too so it’s not hard to get your money’s worth out of it.
Torchlight 2 spoiled me for basically the whole genre. It is a classic Roguelike ARPG dungeon crawler but has so many thoughtful player centric quality of life features. Inventory is full but don’t want to stop kicking butt? You have a pet that can run back to town for you, sell your stuff, and even buy a “shopping list” of potions and scrolls for you. It’ll even run and pick up loot for you. I have trouble playing other games in the genre because I keep running into problems Torchlight 2 solved that I didn’t even think about. It also has mods available to add even more or keep things fresh. It’s getting old but because of that you can run it on anything. It’s a damn good game.