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.
Even if you don’t mind the online only part, ignore this abomination. They botched the D4 campaign. It’s too easy and almost impossible to die during the regular campaign. It takes roughly two minutes to beat a world boss on the first play through.
That doesn’t bother me. What made me gravitate to Diablo was how they did the story. The plot of evil vs good and angels vs demons in a eternal conflict is cliche and overdone. But I liked how Blizzard handled it and I’ve been glued to it for a while. Mephisto is my favorite character overall and damn they’re having an expansion coming soon, that revolves around him, so my temptation will be even greater.
So no it doesn’t bother me that it’s “too easy” or “almost impossible to die”, because my idea of fun is not to have a very frustrating experience.
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.
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…
Factorio, I might legitimately starve to death.
Hollow Knight. I watched someone on YouTube play it and I just don’t want to spend that much time playing that kind of game. I’m someone who grew up playing Mario 64, Mario sunshine, Mario Galaxy and I just recall spending so much time playing those games as a kid. So much time wasted. Cannot bring myself to do that again. I’m pretty stubborn and so I know because I wasted so much time on those Nintendo games that I would pull ridiculous amounts of time on another game like that. Not worth it anymore for me.
Any game at the moment would be nice
Star Citizen
Still waiting for it to release.
I honestly want to play skyrim on the Switch 2, but I won’t because the input controls function so poorly and the framerate is subpar. I was excited for when we got the boost in power on the Switch 2 but Bethesda fumbled it. Hopefully they do fix Skyrim and that they launch Fallout 4 in a good state with a gold framerate.
Don’t you worry. With every new console release, you can accommodate guarantee that Skyrim will be on it at some point. It’s like Bethesda NEEDS to release it on every single platform… Sometimes multiple times.
Oh Skyrim is on the Switch 2. But it runs so poorly and it’s so unoptimized that it makes it not worth the Switch 2 version upgrade. I’m just going to wait and see if they re-release it again haha.
Skyrim Remastered: Definitive Special Edition - Nintendo Switch 2 Version
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.
