Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit playing them after a few hours or even minutes. Too much stress and surface experiences has had me looking in the other direction. Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and hours of riding during rain or sunshine, dawn or dusk, in the city or the most remote mountains. It's beautiful and serene and made me realize that I don't really need dozens of hours of frantic gameplay. But as amazing as those experiences are, they aren't the core focus of GTA5 and that's a missed opportunity.

I am ready for video games with these beautiful moments - and please keep them short! I don't want to spend hours and hours on a game anymore, at least not traditional ones - but I have no idea where to find them.

View on HN

This is exactly how I felt about Red Dead Redemption. Years after beating the game, I couldn't tell you much about any individual mission.

I do remember staring at the in-game sunset as it cast shadows across the open prairie and thinking, "Wow."

I was about to recommend RDR, because I feel the same way about it. I intentionally avoid taking the 'fast way' to places and ride my horse everywhere. I gather herbs, hunt, take on side-quests, or just enjoy the ride. It's very zen.

...until you finally collect that last blue flower, and get eaten by a mountain lion :D

On a similar note, Zork I had a textual description of a sunset (being a text adventure) that, for whatever reason, I found massively peaceful.

The sandbox style of game is your ticket to bliss then. Wandering through London in Assassin's Creed Unity. Climbing mountains in Skyrim. Traversing the landscape with a grapple/parachute in Just Cause. Plundering the high seas in Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Exploring Mordor in Shadows of Mordor. Driving through the city and countryside in Need for Speed. Flying the endless black in Elite Dangerous.

There are frequently scripted introductory sequences to familiarize you with the mechanics and attempt to hook you with a story, but they will consume your time but once, and can provide you with hundreds of hours of entertainment and escape thereafter.

Of course, if driving is your thing, there are a ton of racing simulators out there, from F1 to rally cars.

This list is incomplete if you don't include Minecraft, the canonical sandbox game. Play in creative or in peaceful mode, and you don't have to do any fighting at all (though some resources are still best collected from mobs).

Other categories of nonviolent or non-FPS games would be puzzle games like Tetris or Candy Crush. Also, video games can reproduce or make single-player versions of the classic board, card, and dice games like chess or yahtzee.

> the canonical sandbox game

is GTA, really.

I would have said Elite, which predates GTA by, what? A decade? And pretty much created the concept of a sandbox game

It's funny that every single game you mentioned is a "theme park" open world game, and exactly zero of them are "sandbox" open world games.

Really? Skyrim, the game where if you place an apple in a bucket on a guy's counter and go do 200 hours of quests and come back... the apple is still there. That's not a persistent world? That's pretty much the only point of that engine.

Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.

The Elder Scrolls games through Oblivion (and I think Skyrim?) are not permanently persistent. The game does eventually do garbage collection, and only some places in the world are safe from it. This is why every major town/city has a house you can buy; your collection of every cheese wheel in the game may not persist forever if you leave it in some random chest in a shop.

In real life, your cheese collection may not persist either if you leave it in some random chest in a shop ;)

The ability to create or change objects is not what defines the limits of player agency within a game. Is my ability to go on a relaxing drive through fictional terrain any less meaningful because I didn't first build the road and the car?

In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.

The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.

> I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.

This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below).

N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :)

Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason.

And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones.

That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;)

Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular).

Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy AGE can give you a nice balance. They manage to be traditional but with some modern mechanics carefully blended in: a little more gritty than the likes of Fate or Apocalypse World but not so much as GURPS or the typical OSR game, and they balance cinematics with simulation pretty elegantly. Traditional yet casual, these games feel mellow and relaxing to me somehow, with less demand to constantly be table-consulting and jurisprudently brilliant than more classic-style games, and less demand to constantly be super-creative and imaginatively brilliant than many of the more modern-style games. (I tend to recommend this type of game for players about to embark on their first long-term campaign — usually after they've had a few one-shots with a nanogame (see below) or two under their belts, though that's hardly necessary).

Or maybe you just want to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with your friends. Nothing drives out boredom like a good one- or two-page "nanogame" RPG, such as Everyone Is John, Police Cops 2, or Lasers & Feelings (free, free, and free).

I introduced a few friends to TTRPGs at my bachelor party a few years ago, in which we grabbed a cozy table at a cigar & whiskey bar, busted out a d6, and played a few hours' worth of Everyone Is John. They all said that they had a blast playing it (as did I), and a couple of them have since picked up "the hobby" themselves. The "rules" and the "setting" are just tools to help you maintain direction, to occasionally introduce complications that make the fiction more engaging, and to enable the group to engage in a shared imaginative experience. And those rules and settings are not sacrosanct — tweak them to your heart's desire, or do away with them and substitute your own. Do whatever you think is fun, or awesome, or epic, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or funny, or... really, just anything you want. Let loose t̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶r̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ your imagination, and set your creativity free!

Compare that to a video game, where you can do literally anything the developers decided you could do (and had enough time to implement before the deadline...). Not to hate on video games (gods know I enjoy a good video game myself), but TTRPGs are a totally different experience. —"Wow, did you hear that Dragon Age Inquisition has over 100 hours of gameplay? And it's still only $60!" —"Cool. I dropped $40 on the Dragon Age TTRPG, which has literally ɪɴꜰɪɴɪᴛʏ hours of gameplay. INFINITY. (Plus it looks pretty damn cool on my shelf, to boot... quite possibly the prettiest book I own, and I own lots of books...)." Of course, video games have the advantage of single-player mode(s) — despite Tunnels & Trolls featuring many popular "solitaire" modules, the experience is so different that it feels like a totally different game, even if all the rules and mechanics are the same. Whereas video games can actually be (and often are) fun to play solo, I don't think I've ever had much fun playing a TTRPG solo (though, full disclosure, I've only ever played two solo adventures before I lost interest). So grab some friends and some dice!

There's even a decent amount of "open-source" TTRPGs, if you care about licensing terms & conditions :)

---

P.S. If you're really hung-up on Star Wars, there have been some half-dozen officially-licensed Star Wars TTRPGs (West End Games's original back in the 80s being rightly considered a classic, and Wizards of the Coast's early 00s version providing the mechanics for Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, while Fantasy Flight's current trilogy has been generally well-received despite requiring strange, custom dice (grr...)). As you can probably imagine, there have also been tons of fan-made, unlicensed Star Wars TTRPGs as well, usually provided as splatbooks for existing sci-fi/space-opera games or generic/universal systems, not to mention plenty of "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off" games/splats, such as West End Games's D6 Space (now free), which they produced after they lost the IP license. Both types of game/splat are easy to find on the Internet. Of course, if you and your party are comfortable enough with the Star Wars setting, you can just grab an appropriate game/system and just wing it (Traveller being the classic sci-fi game, while just about any game mentioned above would work (most of the OSR games, nanogames, and Apocalypse World would be considerably more work to adapt than the others, although Uncharted Worlds is a space-opera game using a slightly modified AW system (PbtA—"Powered by the Apocalypse"), so at least that work has been done for you already), as would a great deal of others).

If you insist on that "sandbox" definition, Creation Kit awaits ;p

So do Virtual Worlds.

For me a big part of games being boring is the lack of cheats and codes that come with the game. Developers/Game companies have decided HOW they want me to play the game and that irks the crap out of me. Take for example GTA5, I can only turn on invincibility for 5 minutes without having to reapply the code. What is the point of the limit? Can't I define the way I'd like to play the game? Sometimes cheating is fun and can be creative. Cheat codes could make a game like Assassin's Creed playable to those that just don't like the repetitiveness.

The sense of achievement just fades off with age. For a lot of games equal time sunk with progress(, without going all in on the fun of grinding, thats something different for me), most games mechanics just start to feel like the artificial speed bumps they are, only meant to stretch or distract from a hopefully existing story and setting.

Game progress of story-heavy offline games should be unlockable at will without importing save games. Or there should be some kind of an AI play mode, where you only take over that autopilot if you seem interested or just like to watch.

For most linear games with an actual story a youtube replay, including fast forwards, will be as good as the thing itself. This might as well explain a part of the let's play success.

It doesn't even have to be considered "cheat codes" if adequately factored into the difficulty level. I feel like some of the backlash against old school cheat codes (all the games we used to play in "god mode" or with things like the Game Genie) is as much the terminology "cheat code" and the idea that it is "hacking" or "breaking" the game.

Most games seem to stick to some simple linear variation of a difficulty model: Easy, Medium, Hard, ... Why aren't there more options? Why aren't there more custom options? For many games, why is "easy" have to be so "hard" as a baseline. If I want to play a game as a 100% power trip, why not let me?

I recently started playing Saints Row 4. In the casual mode, its an easy game with an overpowered protagonist. It's really relaxing when a game gives every weapon in the beginning and let us choose the way to use them.

I agree, I think Saints Row has been a particularly good franchise at realizing that it can be a ridiculous power fantasy and lean into that and have fun with it. It even includes things other games would consider "cheat codes" as eventual unlocks, and that also adds to the fun and the mayhem. SR4 even does the best job of directly integrating that into the explicit appeal and story line in its "superhero powers" progression work.

I was surprised how much I got into the "walking simulator" Dear Esther. It just had beautiful art direction and sort of semi-random nonsensical voice over that gave it a bit of atmosphere. It turns a lot of people off for being pretentious and having zero gameplay, but I still really enjoyed it just to ogle the scenery. It was only about an hour long.

This is what I came here to say.

I only have Vice City, nowhere near as visually spectacular, but I get myself a car and just drive around with the radio on. It's the same for Assassin's Creed through to IV, I often just go for a walk and look at the scenery, immerse myself in a time and place that's long gone. Often enough, the missions get in the way.

I occasionally load up Black Flag to sail a 16th century ship and listen to pirate songs. It makes it fascinating to think about what the Caribbean were like back then...

I do the same in GTA V. I think its feeling of freedom and escapism is why games like No Man's Sky were appealing.

I used to clock hundreds of hours on Flight Sim 98, not necessarily learning how to fly (though that was fun too) but going to various cities in Flight Sim, checking them out in Encarta and doubling back to Flight Sim again.

Now that I'm older and financially capable of visiting these places, its pretty surreal. I hope the new AR/VR movement brings about these kind of experiences.

Interestingly enough, this is one of the reasons I still play World of Warcraft: I used to be pretty hardcore (never Realm Firsts or anything, but hard mode raiding during BC/WotLK), and thus invested into my main characters... but recently I much more enjoy leveling, questing, pet battles, and all these little things. I basically play it like a single player game and enjoy the scenery. I just can't bring myself to enjoy other new games like I used to, I have a huge library of unplayed or minimally played Steam games, because I will just play WoW anyway...

My wife and I have been playing Guild Wars 2 in roughly the same way. I used to raid in vanilla WoW, she ran an Everquest raid guild. These days we just mess around in GW2 doing dailies or personal storylines. It's ultra casual, usually pretty easy, but it's fun to drop into for an hour or two.

This was actually one of the reasons I loved No Man's Sky. I will spend some time finding a nice planet, and then I will just hike to and fro places. Sometimes it's very much like walking through some of Roger Dean's work, and can feel nice and peaceful.

I don't like playing single player games at all because I can't get into the story. I'm always down for multiplayer games from MMOs to MOBAs to FPS probably because it's competitive and just more fun in general since I'm not competing against AI but real human beings.

Interesting. Note however there are storyless (or minimal story) single player games, and also single player games without an AI. No/minimal story: puzzle games, abstract games, board games, sandbox/exploration. No AI: adventures.

Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but try playing The Walking Dead.

Not very demanding on time, and it's not about killing zombies.

Very story oriented, and you get attached to the characters in the game.

I myself abandoned games over a decade ago - they just required too much from me. Only recently I decided to check some games out from the library. Not sure why I picked this one to play and was very pleasantly surprised.

I really liked The Walking Dead even though I'm not a huge fan of QTEs.

Couldn't agree more. I still even get nostalgic about the "places" in the original Doom. Something about just hanging out there being amazed that my computer could even do that.

Damn I want my holo-deck. What's taking so long?

>Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and hours of riding during rain or sunshine, dawn or dusk, in the city or the most remote mountains. It's beautiful and serene and made me realize that I don't really need dozens of hours of frantic gameplay.

You sound like you'd love the mostly open-world, graphic-centric (MMO)RPG genre! Something like Black Desert Online or FF14 Online. Where you can optionally focus on the story here or there and are mostly free to explore the world (although areas that outlevel you may be a bit dangerous...)

    [0] http://i.imgur.com/oV4smNW.png
    [1] http://i.imgur.com/XqGjx5e.jpg
    [2] http://i.imgur.com/lpJ272N.jpg
    [3] http://i.imgur.com/1w9yCy2.jpg
    [4] http://i.imgur.com/QCRQLIP.jpg

You raise a good point. I would never purchase a GTA game because I find the whole concept morally offensive, but I am very intrigued by the exploration aspect you have described. I would love to see more focus on exploration in games. A lot of RPGs (like the Elder Scrolls series) have significant aspects of exploration to them, but tend to get bogged down in the fetch-it quests or lots of repetitive hack-and-slay.

I've got nothing against combat elements of games, but if it falls into endless repetition and involves lots of grinding, etc, to advance, then it just becomes work, not fun.

GTA5 is the kind of game that the adventures the player takes on says more about the player than the game itself. Sure, you can run around causing mass chaos and deaths; but you can also do none of those things. Once you reach a point in the game, I forget how far into it, you choose what to do.

Want to drive around town obeying the laws and enjoy the sites? Do that.

Want to partake in multiple instances of non-violent side missions such as racing, skydiving, and more? Do that.

Want to stand at the boardwalk on the beach and watch people walk by while enjoying the setting sun? Do that.

Want to take flying lessons? Do that.

How about some tennis or golf? Do that.

At one point in the game you can even do yoga for crap's sake. There are actually several examples of exploration-type tasks that you seem to be interested in as well. There's a great deal more to GTA5 than the violence you hear about from people, that only focus on that one topic, that have a narrative and rhetoric to push on people for their own agendas.

Still have negative opinions towards GTA5 because of moral reasons? That's cool too. But consider you may be missing out on tons of stuff you would actually enjoy because you might dismiss it immediately for reasons.

It's the extent of the different styles of game play, and the kinds of things you can get out of it, is a huge advantage to these kinds of games.

When I got bored with GTA5's regular mission based mechanics, had finished all the missions, I spent just as much time getting two characters in a car and driving back and forth as fast as possible between the furthest auto body repair shops on the map just to see how long I could last before the car blew up.

From "My 4-Year-Old son plays Grand Theft Auto":

At this point my son was familiar with the game’s mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered out loud if it were possible to take people to the hospital. I instructed him to press R3, and he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life-saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.

http://venturebeat.com/community/2010/06/05/my-four-year-old...

> Sure, you can run around causing mass chaos and deaths; but you can also do none of those things

No, you literally can't. You have to kill people en masse from the very start of the game. And, if you want to progress far enough to unlock the various features of the game, you have to do downright reprehensible things.

I've played, and enjoyed most of, GTA5 (though I think the developers, at this point, should fuck off with the faux-satire, they lost the plot a long time ago), but I understand why other people don't.

And I quote: "Once you reach a point in the game, I forget how far into it, you choose what to do."

Once you have reached that point, you can do pretty much anything you want. Yes, I understand you have to do bad things to get to that point. That's why I agreed with the comment about if you still have moral objections to the game, then that's cool. I personally would prefer they allow you those options from the start, but I can understand why they do not for gameplay purposes.

IIRC, the only required part of GTAV was a single introductory mission representing a flashback of two of the main characters pulling off what was seemingly their last heist. Took like 10 minutes to finish. After that, free reign of the city. There are also some non-violent missions you can accept, like filling in as driver for your friend's tow-truck service and repossessing cars. They're actually pretty fun.

Without doing a good chunk of missions, the game's set of activities doesn't open up.

> I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions.

Sounds like you would enjoy Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Yes you still have a mission (taking a trailer from point A to point B) but you can choose from a long list of "jobs" that will take you to many different cities, and you even have the option to free roam.

Heh, spent hundreds of hours on Flight Simulator doing just this, reading up on Encarta about beautiful cities, and then paying a 'virtual' visit in Flight Sim.

Yes, simulators are strangely compelling despite being seemingly "boring" at first sight.

If you are interested in the genre, you can follow Squirrel on Youtube, I especially like his "trucking diaries" but there are flight sim videos as well: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaSquirrelsNuts

Rockstar makes great sandboxes, and I mostly play them that way as well. I do the missions very grudgingly, and mostly just to see the cut scenes.

Have you tried No Man's Sky? Once you get the initial couple of hours of "game" out of the way, there is pretty much absolutely nothing to do except hop from star to star, land on planets, and wander around them looking at the prettiness. I sunk hours into it. I wish the PS4 version had a cheat I could enter to completely turn off the "survival" mechanism and the HUD so I could just put it up on my projector, find a nice view, and have a living painting on my wall.

Try "The Witness".

Or Firewatch.

Firewatch is a really big step in the right direction.

But try playing it as a child or a woman marginally interested in a gaming experience and you get unnecessary swearing and tropes from a man's perspective.

Oh well. I wish there was possibility for a mode. Not one you are forced to select, but one based on a profile, more akin to the predictive one advertisers already have on you.

A "possibility for a mode" dilutes the artistic message of a game. If you don't like what the authors did, I would suggest doing something that presents a different viewpoint that you find valuable. (And that's not a cop-out--there are loads of indie developers doing exactly that, and a lot of those games are awesome.)

I understand that, and this understanding has been pervasive for 30 years, which is why this exact article was written, and is still being circulated on HN.

Dare.

Are you implying that women don't swear? and why does a child have to play this game? this game is obviously oriented to a mature audience. Not all the games have to be suitable for everybody. If not, the only games available would be pixar-like games.

I'm implying, and directly said, that the tropes aren't relatable or interesting despite trying so hard to be LIKE EVERY OTHER GAME AND THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE ARTICLE AND THREAD

You think your rebuttals are original but they are just rehashing the same arguments from the past 30 years and completely unproductive. Assume I already know the counterpoints, you went for the lowest hanging fruit of them all.

Firewatch is an interesting one to call out, much like Journey as the author imagined, because those games try to be more interesting. They were created by artists and gamers tired of AAA titles and tropes. But they continue to fail to interest this other broad audience that is repulsed by the idea of games, but as the author realized, are actually entertained by immersive experiences.

This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit...I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions.

Most of the time, games are structured by people whose viewpoint and incentives are radically different from the players. In the short term, the industry doesn't "care" if you play because you're bored and there's no real choice (for AAA levels of production effort) and because that's what your friends are doing, and there's a little variable schedule of reward that's gotten its hooks into you.

The most memorable times I had in Eve Online were entirely through emergent gameplay. I and my fellow alliance players in 0.0 security space couldn't give a rat's ass about anything the content team generated -- except as a source of resources in our own player-generated drama of building a player owned station. The emergent stuff is what really engages the mind. That's the real "play" that's going on in games -- not the publishing company's interest in keeping us paying a subscription. That stuff was 100X more engaging than anything some content team could dream up.

I find there's a whole subset of gamers today who remind me of the college students who would come up to you at the beginning of a course, and ask if you'd play their "college game" with them -- You tell them exactly what to spit back out during exams, they memorize that list, they get their grades, they satisfy their requirement, and no one has to actually care or be engaged or actually learn anything. Those students remind me of a lot of gamers. It's not about finding fun, genuinely engaging, unexpected gameplay. It's about getting expectations met, and getting the stuff they're entitled to.

I got fed up, and I've decided to do something about it. I'm self-funding and making my own MMO, and I'm going to do my best to have it be about emergent play. I'm very far from being able to tackle those issues, but I have a server cluster that can spawn any of the 2^87 star systems, and support 70 players in the same multiplayer battle. All but one of those 2^87 star systems are identical at this point, however. But that's the next thing on my list. No RPG progression yet, but we'll get there. I want to make an MMO that's specifically built for smart people, where no one gets nerfed, no one grinds, and devs never give any sympathy to forum whiners.

http://www.emergencevector.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ...

(I'm planning a game that you'd have to spend hours and hours on, overall, but I'm going to try and structure it so you can play in half-hour, hour, or two hour sessions.)

Seems to me you will love Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Simple - don't buy AAA (apart from very few select titles) because 99% of those is rehashed garbage and cliches

Buy gamess from small studios, made by a few people or even one guy, usually a lot of them are in Steam Early Access (yes, it is risky, some of them get abandoned or just never improve much)

For me this is like a reneissance in gaming. Have a look at Factorio, Starbound, Rimworld, Banished, Pillars of Eternity, SotS:The Pit, ARK:Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, Hearthlands. Some of those have multiplayer and are something else completely to play with a few friends

A whole lot of people don't even know there is entire world besides CoD or 50th fucking Asassins Creed...

I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable

> don't buy AAA (apart from very few select titles)

Yep, that's a good rule to live by. There are a lot of great games out there if you put in the effort to look into them (and know where to look)

And I think that's the biggest problem: The entry-games that we present are mostly boring shooters, and the like. Non-gamers aren't going to spend time figuring out what kind of game they want, aside from friends recommending something, they'll probably just try what is popular or advertised.

I think movies have this same problem. Your weekly superhero blockbuster's are fun, they definitely aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you weren't ever really into movies, and started jumping in, you'd think that's all there was.

I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable

It's a shame to see how AAA companies have butchered the Dota-like genre. There's Valve's Dota 2 which is the shining example of what the genre should be and then there's all these garbage rehashes out there that have just tried to dumb down the game or introduce some kind of gimmick or cliche.

AAA games are just a race to the bottom in terms of design. They just try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and games get more shallow and casual with each iteration.

Games aren't getting more shallow and casual. More likely you're just getting older and developing a preference for nostalgia over novelty.

I'm not talking about games overall, just games made by AAA companies. There's certainly still games that cater to a hardcore/competitive audience but you have to look a little harder for them and they're usually coming from indie developers. But for a AAA studio casual is where the money is and it's the philosophy driving their game design even though from their perspective they'd probably call "easier to get into" or more "intuitive" or "streamlined".

Look at the difference between Starcraft Broodwar and Starcraft 2, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, Dota and every clone like LoL and Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch. All of the sequels and successors are more shallow and casual than what came before. And the novelties these games introduce are better characterized as gimmicks to hook casual players. Why make a game that caters to a hardcore audience? That's just limiting your playerbase and limiting your potential profit.

I've been playing XCom2 a lot recently, and it occurred to me that I was caring waaay too much about my soldiers. Then it occurred to me that actually the part of the game I was enjoying most was looking after my soldiers.

I have a sniper that never hits anything, ever, and I've started having little pep talk with her before each mission, trying to get her to buck her game up and be a useful member of the team.

Shooting aliens in the head isn't the fun bit. Caring for my little gang of incompetents and nursing them through each mission is the fun bit.

I spent a lot of time playing the original XCOM on both playstation and PC. This is what made the game amazing. I would name the soldiers after friends, family members, and famous people that I admired. When one would get injured or killed I really cared. It also made approach the tactical part of the game with much caution. I would get really nervous when taking on some of the more dangerous missions. However, once I would get one of my soldiers fully trained and ranked up it was totally worth it!

You might like Invisible Inc. It's a turn-based sneaking/spy game and one of the few recent games that I played straight through with no 'guilt' afterwards.

If caring for your incompetents is fun, then dwarf fortress or the genre of DF-lite will be for you.

love DF :)

I try to do this on PS4. Many indie titles are released on all platforms fairly simultaneously these days.

Sony's user experience in the store just really is horrible. It has gotten better, but its been how many years now?

Most titles don't have any screenshots or trailers or previews of any kind.

Most payment methods simply don't work.

A paypal account where you want to choose a payment source? TOUGH LUCK

A mobile payment from your telephone? NOT ON YOUR PROVIDER

Okay, fine don't take my money. I got a credit card to work once though, I saved that one.

Rimworld is so good. At the same time, no game has made me ragequit more intensely in a very long time. Broken thoughts right when you need the colonists to buckle down...

AAA = ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com