Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?
Yes it’s professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they’re always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you’re a “whale”.
They don’t want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that’s why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.
Well, I will say, for a “free” to play game League isn’t that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.
Also as others have mentioned, the game’s reputation in terms of it’s community isn’t exactly stellar. Being very “toxic”.
But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game “Tyler1” constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.
Let’s just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it’s not (only) because they’re going through a teenage phase it’s probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.
For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…
But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.
Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).
Divinity Original Sin is also great.
Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)
But I will suggest some anyway just in case
Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.
There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.
Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.
You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.
Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.
Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.
And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)
I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.
But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.
I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.
I didn’t have high hopes for WG2 at first but I saw they made some really good improvements with the map editor.
I’m still on the fence about buying it though, I heard it doesn’t have ranked match making so if I get it it would only be for the single player. Might get it if it goes on steam sale
I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.
Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.
Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)
But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.
Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.
And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.
I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.
LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.
As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.
Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.
One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.
But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.
There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.
Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).
Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)
I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I’ve played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).
As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.
Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)
I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I’ll never play it because I’ve come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.
I’ve replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)
But the game I’ve played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I’ve played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it’s what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)
If Blizzard didn’t completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I’d probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.
I have played a bit on private servers but it’s just not the same anymore.
There’s a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I’ll start playing again.
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)
Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes
Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.
The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they’re playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.
I felt an urge to play Skyrim again, had a lot of fun for a day or two, but eventually after I added some more mods I started getting frequent CTDs and have been trying to figure out what the problem is (and how to fix it) through the crash logs.
I might just have to remove Immersive Citizens from the load order but I really don’t want to because it really makes the NPCs feel so much more “alive”.