Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.
And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.
So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.
AC Shadows
I want to play it but fuck Ubisoft
Sail the high seas. That way you don’t support them and get to play it. I haven’t pirated a game for many years but some game houses deserves what comes to them
Nah, pirating is not worth the effort. I just don’t play it
The newer Anno installments. I’m not buying another Ubisoft game unless they get rid of their stupid Launcher, and I’m also not buying anything with Denuvo and similar BS.
Daggerfall.
It has the most elaborate character creation and most freedom of choice of all the Elder Scrolls games.
You can walk, ride or fly through an open world that’s as large as Great Britain, with thousands of realistically modelled towns and cities, and enter any house in them. You can turn into a vampire, werewolf or were-boar, buy a ship, make deals with the gods, invent your own spells, and commit bank fraud.
First time I played it, it took all night to download the 140MB installer from Kazaa.
But actually playing it now, after so much development in game mechanics has happened, is a chore.
When doing quests, you just go through the same loop of “talk to person, clear an absurdly huge dungeon, kill dozens of enemies that aren’t scaled to your level, die a couple dozen times unless you cheesed the game to become invincible, solve a text riddle, find the McGuffin, return, repeat” over and over again.When doing quests, you just go through the same loop of “talk to person, clear an absurdly huge dungeon, kill dozens of enemies that aren’t scaled to your level, die a couple dozen times unless you cheesed the game to become invincible, solve a text riddle, find the McGuffin, return, repeat” over and over again.
That’s pretty much all Elder Scrolls is. What’s particularly impressive is that they’ve been releasing the same game since the 90s.
They really favored being a lycanthrope in that game. It’s the most OP transformation, especially when you get a special ring that takes away some of the negatives of being a lycanthrope. All of your stats get maxed, you can instantly heal between transformations, you are immune from what the guards try hitting you with.
Being a vampire in Daggerfall, isn’t as fun.
The Talos Principle 2. The micro stuttering makes it unplayable for me, and it will never get fixed.
The Dark Souls series takes place in a fascinating universe and I’m sure the lore is enthralling… I just refuse to play games that are made artificially hard for the sake of it. If it’s single-player, the devs shouldn’t have an opinion on how much time each player is comfortable wasting on it. Give me “story” difficulty, cheats, etc., and let me decide what to do with them. All you’re hurting are your own sales.
Part of what makes Souls games fun is that you can work together with others.
I pretty much only play them co-op.
Agreed.
I love dark fantasy as a theme. But I can’t enjoy the theme if the game is going to be padded like that. That’s how you make games not fun and there’s nothing fun when you’re killed in one or two hits. There’s challenge and then there’s not fun and all soulslike games fall into the not fun part.
Bloodborne
The last console I owned was a PS3, and I don’t plan on ever having another. Sony thankfully mostly got with the program and released a bunch of their stuff on PC, but Bloodborne remains a standout.
Emulating bloodborne is really good now. It is 100% playable with rare minor bugs now. Highly recommend playing it. It’s the best souls orne out there. Imo
What kind of specs do you need to run it smoothly? Does any of the online stuff work?
So I will be honest and say I have a beefy computer. Intel i9 13900k and a 4090. But I run it at 1440p at 60fps. I see people playing it on the steam deck but I haven’t tried that myself.
I’m running a 5600x with a 3080. I might be alright. I’ll have to check it out.
Factorio, I might legitimately starve to death.
Victoria 3, still the undisputed king of world economic simulation. I had a blast with Vic 2, but I just can’t bring myself to support Paradox Interactive in their current form with ridiculous monetisation of DLC…
Star Citizen
Still waiting for it to release.
Most anything PvP.
I just can’t do anything with games that don’t allow me to pause (or go idle) as I just have constant interruptions.
It doesn’t help that many PvP games also have sweaty tryhard metas that put you on a different level if you’re not reading up on forums or discussions.
I’ll straight up admit that I can’t compete in most pvp titles; and I don’t want to be a loot goblin for the high school kids who are going to 360 no-scope headshot me from across the map and then tea bag my corpse.
Shooters might need some kinda leagues where old farts would play with each other. Some sim racing games have topical leagues/servers like that.
Though matchmaking is supposed to solve this problem, but idk if it succeeds.
Arc Raiders took this trope and turned it on its head. The game is entirely about being a loot goblin around other people in a no-rules environment but if you don’t pick fights, you will gradually get matched to servers with other people who don’t pick fights, and you start to meet people and have adventures together, it happens very organically and pleasantly, and if you ever DO run into a PvPer the game doesn’t really give a huge advantage to sweaty try-hards, a newb with a basic gun can defend themselves just as well as some well-equipped player hunter.
That’s because Arc Raiders ISN’T a PVP! It’s supposed to be a PVE.
About 100% of shooter/survival games made with open PVP turned on all the time become kill-on-sight instantaneously, and those games usually give players a PvE mode for people too scared or annoyed with PvP, the segregation has been normal in gaming since the early days of online gaming. So it’s not as simple as saying it’s “supposed” to be PvE, it’s that they tuned the mechanics and themes to encourage more cooperation in an unprecedented way.
Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.
Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.
I’ve played a lot of ARPGs and every one of them has their different flavors. But, I’m a type that wants a specific flavor and trying other flavors just makes me feel like it’s not good enough. It’s kind of like it’s a discount version of that flavor I like. I’m playing a game that’s inspired by the game that defined the genre. Just to expand a little, I am not trying to say that the games mentioned are terrible. I’ve touched upon Grim Dawn and Titan a few times.
But a lot of the time, my mood and feeling always darts for Diablo.
I feel that, Im a huge diablo fan but 4 was incredibly disappointing. FWIW i think path of exile gets the closest to the formula, I’ve also had a lot of fun with early access in poe2
I’m in a similar boat. I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but it looks like some of the old D2 devs are now working on Darkhaven. It’s not out yet, but there’s hope!
I’m a big fan of Last Epoch for ARPGs
What did you think of Torchlight? I’m a bit surprised it didn’t make your list.
…well, then again, I haven’t played anything you listed, so I can’t compare.
I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.
Silksong. My muscle disease has progressed too much to physically play it. That really stings because Hollow Knight was one of my favorite games ever.
May I ask what part of playing makes it difficult? Duration? Dexterity? Specific motions, etc? If it’s too much, please feel free to ignore me.
Doing anything repetitive with my hands causes quickly worsening nerve/muscle pain in the entire arm. And something demanding like a platformer will get it going in less than a minute.
And the really crappy thing is, the longer I try to push through it, the longer the pain lasts. If I stop when I first notice the pain, it’ll only last an hour or two, but if I keep pushing it can last for days.
Fortunately, I can still play turn-based games for the most part. But even then, I prefer low-APM ones because problems can still arise. I’ve had to learn to love games like Into the Breach and Chess. Zachtronics games are good, too. Any game where you spend the majority of your time thinking.
https://thinkygames.com/ is a godsend for discovering new games of this sort.
Oh man I’m sorry to hear that. Is it limited to just your hands? While not for me, I’ve been interested in alternative control models (head, arm, feet, XBox adaptive controller, etc). I hear it’s a challenge to learn the muscle memory, of course.
Unfortunately my neck and legs are even more screwed up than my arms. Alternative controllers could maybe buy me more time by giving my arms a rest, though.
A while back, someone made a post about an AI model that can play video games. People were just trashing it in the comments but I genuinely believe it could help me by taking over during high-APM moments and I could give it strategic advice and sort of turn any game into an idle game.
BTW, good luck finding a solution for your person. I’m not familiar with alternative control or I could give some advice.
That fucking suuuuuuuuucks. I wonder if there’s a mod that could accommodate you somehow. I’m not trying to spawn a big debate about difficulty in games here, but I really wish you’d be able to play it for yourself, somehow.
I’m sure there’s a cheat engine invulnerability hack or something I could use, but it would kinda take the fun out of it.
Have you considered the Xbox Adaptive Controller? I know Microsoft designed this controller with different extensions an such to assist people with disabilities while gaming.
Here’s hoping for a healthy recovery chief!
I agree. I was imagining maybe a time dilation mod that you could toggle on/off to make your inputs less physically demanding, but I don’t know if that exists. That’s how I’d do accessibility in this game personally. I don’t know anything about your condition though, so really I’m just spitballing and daydreaming simultaneously.
I’d love to play games like Fortnight, PUBG, and League of Legends (I know, don’t judge me), but they don’t work on Linux, so they’re just a no-go for me. I used to play GTA V Online, but they added kernel anticheat to that too, and now I don’t play that anymore.
I have Windows, but I’m not booting into another partition just to play a game. I use it for compiling my software for Windows users, and that’s already too much of a pain in the ass. I cannot stand Windows. It’s a bloated mess, and I don’t understand how anyone gets any actual work done on it. Just navigating it feels like a chore.
I play overwatch and rivals on Linux, no issue
Same with Battlefield 6.
I can’t even play Apex anymore because EA decided Linux players cheat, and therefore, must be categorically banned from playing. All they did was turn off that switch for Proton/WINE support.
The real reason is because they can’t spy on people who use Linux too easily, like they can with Windows used.
didn’t know they added kernel anticheat to gta online, thought they just disallowed linux players. i had 5k hours on it, didn’t really play anything else for almost 10 years. dropped it entirely that day because it’s not worth using a worse OS, and turns out single player is more fun anyway with mods. will also pirate gta 6 and play it without windblows, suck my shrimp rockstar.
You can play Arc raiders and the finals :) and dota and counter strike just to name a few
Plenty of other games like them to pick up
Rdr2. I’m not making a damn account just to play the game offline.
I couldn’t get into it. I’m not a fan of westerns to begin with, so even the environment couldn’t pull me in
I would create ten different accounts to play a game that’s the quality of rdr2.
Ya maybe one day. I also morally don’t want to support that behaviour.
Elden ring is the gold standard for me in multiplayer. It’s optional. It just requires you to be online. No account creation bullshit. And it’s a quality game also.
@cyberpunk007 @Abundance114 that is if you play on PC. other platforms might require subscriptions of some kind in order to enable multiplayer feature(s).
And that’s what you get for buying a console.
Honestly I might pirate it instead and avoid the whole account thing all together lol.
Outer Wilds.
I very much want to play this game. It’s everything I want from a detective puzzle game, but actually playing it gives me motion sickness.
I bought it and went in blind, just because I heard it’s a really chill game with a great atmosphere.
But then the twist happened, and now that I know, it gives me anxiety, so I can’t enjoy it anymore.
I simply can’t play games with a time limit.
Without that, it would be one of my favorites.I’ve heard supposedly that sitting back further away from the monitor helps with motion sickness, so if you have some sort of TV screen that you could hook up the game to, that might work?
Same here. I get nauseous playing most first person games so I miss out on a lot. The only thing that sometimes helps is if the game lets you slow down the camera movement.
My issue was, I did not feel the expected experience of “Each loop, you learn something new.” It was more like, every 7 loops, I might get into the thing I was repeatedly trying to enter; and then it might just be a bunch of random ancient messages that don’t teach me anything. On top of that, I really hated the ship controls, especially when they veer AWAY from the autopilot path to pull me directly into the sun. If the game had been remade without any physics system, and simple direct puzzle mechanics, I might’ve enjoyed it more.
Yah I keep hearing fantastic things about the game, but I can’t connect with the “looping” mechanic and the weird ship/floating controls make it hard to want to keep doing the same planets or whatever again and again.
And I mean, I KEEP trying to get to a place where I’m like “Oh yah, here we go again, lets do this” like with other games and it’s just not happening. I can’t find the fun part. Maybe I’m too old.
same here. i can play it 30 mins max and then i get very nauseated. and you can’t really get anything done in that time.
