u/WarriorOTUniverse

Diablo was never really a multiplayer game for me, or for most people I know really. The only time I ever played it socially was back in the old times of Diablo 2 LAN, when I would mess with my highschool bud and hunt him for his ears with my barbarian (lol) 

Even then it felt more like parallel play with some meme moments than an actual co-op experience. Spent the years since trying to dodge the online direction the series took with Diablo 3. My instinct was always to burrow away from all of it and play solo, so I did, including PoE and other games that became notorious for how the player economy worked. I also play Grim Dawn and Last Epoch exclusively solo (and more often than not SSF). I know these are technically trading games, and that not engaging in the online element technically sets you back. But I don’t care. I had MMOs for multiplayer, ARPGs felt better the other way.

But I’m in a social mood lately since I started playing Vermintide, and I want to carry over some of the coop chillness into Diablo 2, so I’m wondering… Like, is there a segment of people who play this gave primarily/intentionally as a 2 player co op game? It seems like such a fun concept, doing it beside one other person and sharing that permanent tension, dragging each other out when things are dire. That sounds like a completly different, thrilling way to play. Probably makes it easier too (?) but I don’t care about difficulty - just how well it works as a wholesome but deadly coop experience.

Trouble is, I have absolutely no idea where the people who play like this even are. I basically need just one other person who wants to take a hardcore run seriously as a duo. I don’t use a lot of apps (I tried Gameram for Arc Raiders and some other games like that, extraction and PvP based) but for Diablo specifically is there like a dedicated niche Disc server mayhaps? Do people actually play D2R this way, hardcore and co-op specifically for the shared stakes, and if so, I really want to try it like this.

Just feels like permadeath can turn a solo grind into something that’s more like a 2 man survival pact. If that makes sense. Did you try it like this/ what were your experiences if you did n would you recommend it?

For me it split down two very different lines from the very start.

The first was the ARPG, though back then it was really just the one game, the one and only DIABLO 2 babee. That was my introduction to gaming as a whole, and without it I would never have touched either PoE, or later one Grim Dawn and Last Epoch, latter of which is still my underdog favorite in some ways and the first which is the spiritual successor to Diablo 2. I remember literally sneaking runs in after school and slowly realizing a game could be a bottomless well rather than a thing you finish. Everything I love about the genre today traces straight back to that.

And then there were RTS, and there it wasn't one game but a whole avalanche of them. Warcraft 3 was the big one, all campaigns and custom maps and the map editor I sank absurd hours into. But C&C Generals is the one that really lives in my chest, all those ridiculous superweapons and that specific brand of loud, silly, fast warfare. And let me not forget STRONGHOLD ofc, the grandaddy and king of all castle builders. I played Crusader the most, which I still replay at least once a year + which got me into absolute gems like Diplomacy is Not an Option and several other “spiritual successors” that turned out to be the best modern RTS I tried in years… like From Glory to Goo, Cataclismo etc.

The two aged very differently for me, though. ARPGs I still play constantly, they've grown and modernised and there's always a fresh one to sink into. RTS I love just as fiercely but the genre itself went quiet for a long stretch, so a lot of my time there is nostalgia, just pure nostalgia and replaying older games and some new ones that are heavily reminiscent of those oldie goldies.

Those are my two origin points anyway. I played FPS here and there but they were more a side piece for me, and even then I enjoyed the main campaigns more than any multiplayer pvp. CS 1.6 was more a game I played with friends, but never a favorite. But what genre was your introduction to gaming? Lemme hear it

I’m as far from a fresh rosey eyed honeymoon as you can get. I have been on this bumpy train ride since the early beta and I remember when half the classes were placeholders with just the images and the endgame was just a far away thought. The Monolith system right now, for all its faults and shortcomings, is still more than passable to be enjoyable, to me, on each returning bout I have with the game. 

But goddamit, do I wish the campaign itself had a conclusion. And even so, despite the unfinished-ness, this is still the ARPG I play up when I just want that distilled ARPG experience, which for me is the power fantasy of cracked each class and perfecting it as much as possible, and if possible making something unique to my own tastes. And each time around I find something new, even though it feels like scraping the barrel at times, but the dregs are sweet instead of bitter.

I'm not going to pretend the pace of updates hasn't been beyond rough. The pivot to a seasonal live service model has, if anything, worked against the game. Every cycle has to be an event now, which means the gaps between them feel like dead air instead of just a slow stretch. Grim Dawn is the instructive contrast, Crate just stubbornely kept making a singleplayer game you own forever and patch when it's ready, no season clock, and it aged into a classic doing exactly that. 

Part of me wishes EHG had leaned that way instead, but we will see in due time where the road leads them and what we’ll end up with. Wait till the final knockout bell and all that.

And YET none of that explains why I still keep LE installed. When I sit down to play, Last Epoch is just plain FUN in a way a lot of its deeper rivals forget to be. The itemization is the unsung hero of it for me and the Circle of Fortune is a system every ARPG ought to have. Deterministic crafting means I'm building toward a specific thing instead of praying at some gambling altar the way you do in PoE. Every upgrade feels like a decision I made rather than a slot machine finally paying out. Pair that with the per skill trees, where one ability can be reshaped into something visually different. The power fantasy is there from the start and it builds up fast but it always feels like I’m the one owning it.

The offline mode is a gift as well for SSF fist players as well, and it’s another thing I wish all live service games had. An offline SSF mode. That is the whole comfort game vibe right there. The reason it’s so comforting, that lack of FOMO (which TBF is impossible with the pace of updates) 

Real talk though, the game has problems, loads of them,  but the FUN aspect on returning tries is still awesome and personally unmatched and… uh weirdly enough, it’s still one of the better optimized ARPG for the Steam deck where I usually play it before going to bed. Which is kind of funny ... wake me up when another season drops, I guess? Or before, doesn't matter at this point.

Every so often the gaming industry hands you a small miracle, and for me this is one of them.

My entire relationship with strategy games goes back to Stronghold. In particular I mean that one WOLVES ATTACKING mission in the original Stronghold, you know the one. I remember playing when I was so young I could barely read. 

That tutorial wolf attack will always be etched in my memory and might possibly be one of the last random things I think of before I die. So watching this series claw its way back into niche relevance has been a strange and lovely thing to witness in my thirties. The Definitive Edition of Crusader is what that kicked it off for real. In theory a remaster of a 2002 game is the safest, least interesting thing a studio can do. Instead it went the respectful route, the units and systems left almost completely intact and just more stuff added on top. It was exactly what I wanted, like 100%

But a remaster doesn't make a revival, and this only started feeling like a real resurrection because of everything happening around it. The last couple of years have produced a literal avalanche of castle siege type games that clearly pay humble homage to Stronghold's legacy. Manor Lords with how the economy functions (plus added complexity), and Diplomacy is Not an Option with how it replicates that feeling of defending from a siege in Stronghold Crusader Extreme, but increasing the madness by adding the undead, monsters, and focusing JUTS on defense, making it a denser experience. Both of them come from the same medieval fantasy cloth that Firefly more or less invented in this form.

There's one more bit I'm almost superstitious about jinxing. It really does feel like all of this has been building toward a proper new mainline Stronghold. These sortsa things fumble all the time, and a modern Firefly game has plenty of ways to let down the exact people who love it so much. But the fact that we're even in a position to worry about it, still feels like a good thing.

PS yes I played the demo for Stronghold 4 and what can I say, I’m equal parts excited and terrified. It has potential but it’s all up to Firefly what they’ll make of it.

I haven't played it yet myself (gonna have to wait till evening) but I caught the news on Discord so sharing it here as a matter of courtesy.

How is it so far, if you got a chance to try it?

⁠Previously Enjoyed Games - (most recent favorites) Age of Mythology Retold, Diplomacy is Not an Option (best thing to happen since Stronghold in my opinion) and Frostpunk 1 and 2

⁠Preferred Genres: - City Builders/Base Builders & Classic RTS

Budget - hmmm about ~$50? (I'm in the market for several games if there's some that are still on sale...)

Other notes:

I like classic RTS (AoE, AoM like I mentioned) but modern city builders are a much more "alive" genre, and are actually flourishing but I have no idea how many of them are optimized for the Deck. If it makes a difference, I'm a particularly big fan of wave/horde defense RTS (Diplomacy that I mentioned + Here Comes The Swarm is a newer one I also loved) so anything in that range is welcome. Again, I'm just not sure how well the Deck handles large load sizes when there's thousands of individual units meshing together.

I'm going on vacation soon so extra props if it's not battery intensive!

I have been playing this game on and off since like season 8 and I have not gotten any better in these five years. This is the hard truth I had to admit to myself. My aim is terrible, my game sense is horrendous and every single gunshot makes me run into that direction to die, like the whole match is rigged from the start for me.

Lifeline is my main because at least when I'm bad I can still throw a heal drone and feel like I contributed something. I *tried* maining Wraith for a while because everyone said she was the best but I was phasing into walls and getting downed before the animation even finished. Pathfinder is fun but I just don’t have the reflexes or that natural instinct for me, but I still like playing the game goddammit. So I keep coming back to it.

I know solo queue in ALL games gets a bad rap but that’s also the reason why the random kindness I get from people is so memorable. As a 30 something, when I got into Apex I expected everything to be rage and toxicity, the kind that’s all you ever hear about when hero shooters and mobas get brought up. I got some of those flames, same as anyone, but the amount of times I had teammates who clearly see I'm struggling and instead of leaving they just start pinging stuff for me… was still higher than I expected. As in people actually waiting to res me instead of just running off. 

There was this Bangalore player I matched with twice in one night on Gameram (gaming/connection I started used since almost no of my real life friends game anymore) … and this dude! He literally hard carried both games and at the end of the second one even asked me if I was down for some more tomorrow just because he liked the banter. And unlike most random matches like this, we actually did play again the next weekend, which literally never happens when I try to match with someone on Discord. Likely the most wholesome interaction I ever had in a battle royale, and that’s saying something. 

(I thought wholesome multiplayer was now relegated to games like Darktide where there’s absolutely no PvP - the very thing that makes people blow up, knowing another human beat them…I’m tempted to say kids usually act like this , but the rage filled demographic is much larger, sadly)

But there’s kind people in all games as well, those who still play (shockingly!) for the fun of it, even for the fun of carrying lowskill scrubs like myself. It’s a positive loop that can still exist, I’m reminded of this whenever one of these wholesome moments happens to me, and I think as people yeah we’re just too quick to forget the good times and remember all the toxic times, or we actively participate in the toxicity and trolling and then ask - hey, maybe this isn’t so nice after all? I know it took me a long while to grow up, so I can understand why things are the way they are.

TL;DR So yeah if you're one of those people who see a clearly struggling teammate and decide to be cool about it instead of dropping a mic and solo pushing - thank you! You're the reason people like me stick around and keep fun out of games where we did <100 damage. And if y’all know what it’s like to be carried, then I need say no more…

I know as you all know that the most spectacular abilities on your screen are usually magical. Even if it’s understated, it can look majestic when you spam them out and then nuke mobs with other abilities on top of that. Like the Flame Wall in PoE 2 and then the detonation on top, it doesn’t break the aesthetic and just reinforces that roleplay flavor that you’re using chaotic energies that you’re kind of channeling more than controlling. That’s my headcanon for my witch, anyway.

Same goes for most other games, Last Epoch being maybe the best example due to the indepth spell customizability which is kind of choose-your-own flavor if I'm being honest, so for example the Fissure that cleaves the earth apart and sends damned souls spilling out… can actually become a *bloody* fissure if you modify it to do physical/bleed damage, or a poison fissure etc. It all looks pretty nice visually.

You get the point, it’s usually the spellcasting spells that get the most colorful eye candy.

The melee classes give you that heavy feel of digging physically into enemies and they pack a punch, I loved this playstyle IN SPITE of the lack of visual spectacle ever since my first Frenzy barbarian from Diablo 2 stole my heart. But they usually lack, if only just a tiny bit, in that visual department.

‘S why I’m asking, what you think is the melee based ability (or ranged whatever, so long as it ain’t magical) that has the best visual look and feel when you’re using it?

Every time I see a thread about AI for outbound it is exactly the same. It is always entirely focused on the send side. People are obsessed with automated hyper personalization, and come up with crazy AI workflows to get the perfect first touch and get as many first touches as possible daily.

Don't get me wrong I’m sure that works too, but everyone is doing it and people are becoming good at noticing it. We still do the research and most of the writing by hand to stand out precisely because everyone is automating it right now.

The highest leverage AI agent my team runs right now is entirely on the reply side. We set it up to monitor our inboxes and classify every single inbound response we get. It instantly reads and tags if an email is an out of office bounce, a referral to the right person, a standard objection, a hard no, or someone actually ready to schedule.

Based on that tag (basically a reverse-prompt from the prospect side), it either automatically drafts a contextual response for the rep to just review and approve, or it routes the thread directly to me with all the necessary context attached. It's saving every single SDR on my team an hour of mindless inbox rummaging (daily!) They just log in and immediately focus on the people who are actually engaging. It just seems super weird to me that nobody is really building in this direction. 

The entire market is obsessed with sending more volume, but nobody wants to fix the nightmare of managing the inbox afterward. That's where I noticed lots of the mess in people's workflow comes from, sheer disorganization in replying and off-beat response times instead of having a concrete system of what goes out and when.

Ditto as the title of my post says. I want a game where the main part of the gameplay is just messing with parts, opening things up, figuring out how they work, repairing them, upgrading them, and creating interesting custom gadgets in your own workshop.

A heads up on what I'm NOT looking for

• Large scale automation games (love Factorio but not what I’m after)
• Factory games
• Tycoons

What I want is more of a life sim, more direct and where a lot of the tiny bits matter in how your creations will behave, or even work. Give me broken gadgets, wires, panels, scrap, glass - give me duct taaaape!

I’m not quite sure if there’s a game I take as an example of what I want. There are a few but they have mixed reviews so I’ll not even mention them. Of all the games I played recently, I think Loftia comes really close to that sweet spot  - especially the parts that revolve around gathering different kinds of jank around the city and then building machinery, including solar panels and such, and lots of decoration too. It doesn’t go quite in depth with that “tinkering” aspect but I liked the loop. Shame the Beta has ended already, so I can’t even play that right now…

But the closest game I could find overall is the ReStory - Chill Electronics Repair, which is about running an electronics repair shop in 2000s Tokyo and restoring old phones, music players, consoles. I played the demo and it’s almost exactly what I want, even though this one is also on the simpler and cozier side. And in my case, the more complex the better! 

Anyone know of something playable right now that can give me that feeling? Google is just giving me slop, or obscure old games that are miles apart from what I actually want :V