Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.
I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.
I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.
Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.
You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.
Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in prep for the new game. I had forgotten how much grind the game requires, honestly. I’ve been Mage 1-11, MArcher 6, Ranger 6, Sorc 30-40 or so, and my magic score is still low as hell. I’m purposefully delaying meeting the duke because I really want to give MArcher a try in the post-game, and it feels like I’ve already played for a long time but sheesh, levelling up is slow. I had never focused on building for stats, honestly. I know now though that most of your damage comes from your gear, so I might quit levelling Sorc when I reach 450 magic instead of the 600.
Hope it’s a little faster in the second entry.
Apart from that, trying the Nordic Souls modpack for Skyrim, and Helldivers 2.
IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They’ve realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there’s no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.
Unless leadership resigns I won’t expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.
5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.
Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.
Yup. D2 has the worst new player experience of any game I’ve played. But at the end of the day, it’s just about knowing where the daily solo dungeon is, so you can grind Light level. Raids are complicated though, because a lot of them are like puzzles.
Stopped playing it because of how money hungry the game is.
I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).
Skyrim, after lots of years of not playing it. Tried a couple modpacks and collections and they either have horny mods, bad performance, or are unbalanced in regards to difficulty. Like, I can accept dying a lot, I have hundreds of hours on soulslike games. What I can’t accept is dying because of jank, and as good as a mod might be made, it still interacts with a janky engine. Even scriptless mods end up janky sometimes. I’m building my own modpack instead, choosing simple mods for modularity. Not gonna bash nothing so it will probably end up a little basic, but eh. Playing this to tide me over for whenever an Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate expansion drops.
Apart from that, Baldur’s gate and Zomboid with friends. And the good ol classic, Rimworld.
Also, I’m a new DM and decided to fuck myself thrice over. I’m designing a whole new homebrew to play in an ASOIAF setting. It requires whole redesigns of classes, weapon systems, mechanics, etc. My players are excited for it though, I’ve been dropping sneak peeks and they’ve responded well.
Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there’re backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could’ve tailored the experience and they wouldn’t feel so empty.
And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There’s very little reason to go for a second playthrough.
Like, they did a good job with most of the game’s mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, though less and less each time. Baldur’s Gate 3 with my friends, Halo Infinite with my friends, and Skyrim for the nth time. Downloaded Wildlander and it’s like a whole new game.