They honestly could not have picked a worse release window.
In a lot of ways, Enshrouded appeals to me. Valheim with more action RPG/MMO elements is an obvious hit to my interests, but I can’t justify dropping $40 CAD so closely to paying roughly the same price for PalWorld, which admittedly had a much more different and interesting concept.
I’m sure I’ll hop on board at some point, but this just wasn’t the time.
I tried to pick up Rayman Legends when it was I’d cheap over Christmas. I ran the game from Steam was greeted with the UPlay launcher asking me to make an account to access my game, and immediately closed and refunded the title.
Including Jeopardy in a list of games like this is the kind of awkward “technically correct” dissonance I’ve come to expect from AI. What a weird inclusion.
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t come across any. The “challenging moral decisions” werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.
Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.
I just bought a series of 8bitdo controllers, and they are fantastic. The off green/purple USB Xbox controllers are literally $20 USD a pop and imo feel better than the Series S controller. And that’s their cheapest option; if you are willing to spend money for more features, they keep getting better.
OP said he wants motion control though? I feel like his options for motion control controllers are EXTREMELY limited. Like Nintendo proprietary limited.
Apparently the 8Bitdo Ultimate DOES have motion control. I’d dare say it’s just hands down the correct option, unless you want to just flat buy a Switch Pro controller. That said, if off-colours don’t bother you, the Switch targeted Ultimate C Bluetooth is cheap af, has motion controls and actually has ABXY in the correct format.
Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate noise-canceling headsets. It creates something of a booming, echo-y sound, and I just cannot stand it. Open ear acoustic headsets are an absolute godsend.
I use the Sennheiser Game Zero, because if you want a combined headphones/microphone headset, and you want an open ear acoustics, your options are extremely limited. That said, it is awesome. The “flip up to mute” feature broke extremely fast, but beyond that the quality of both incoming and outgoing audio is fantastic. And I drag the thing around with me quite a bit, so, despite one feature breaking, it has survived quite a bit of abuse.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.
The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.
Opinion: I think all of the characters have very interesting, often emotionally moving arcs, but I can certainly understand why most players are focused on one character in particular.
That said, it’s a game that demands 100% to get a really satisfying conclusion though. That wouldn’t be a problem, but 100%includes collecting all 60 of the arbitrarily hidden shiny things across the game, which is quite obnoxious.