u/petehans303

I realized how different my approach when starting a new game has become as I've gotten older. Younger me approached a new RPG or strategy game like an exam I had to cram for. I would have so much knowledge about a game before I start playing it, otherwise it would feel uncomfortable somehow.

These days that whole approach just sounds exhausting and counter productive to me. I play video games to relax and have fun, they are not research projects. I really love ARPGs, and its genre a lot of people use guides for, to make sure they are playing the optimal builds and farming in the most efficient ways. Not me, I boot up Last Epoch to play one of my janky homebrew builds and it’s way more fun than using someone else's optimized setup. In fact sometimes I make a silly build on purpose just to see if I can make something really stupid work, like my beekeeper necromancer (works surprisingly well lol).

And when it comes to unreleased games, I used to obsessively read everything I can about them, test everything I can think of in the demo so I can have an “edge” when they come out. Whereas nowadays after I decide I like a game I add it to my wishlist, maybe try the demo out to see if it plays well on my hardware and that's it. Right now I’m hyped for The Dark West, love everything about the setting (occult western) and the demo is fun. Instead of figuring out what class and build will be optimal on release, I plan on just jumping in completely blind and playing whatever looks like the most fun, doesn’t matter if it's “suboptimal”.

Before It was all about not messing up. I remember reading the optimized starter builds and memorising which choices secretly locked me out of content and things like that. I'd cross reference the wiki so I wouldn't waste my stat points or miss some item forty hours down the line. The idea of playing a game "wrong" stressed me out, so I did hours of homework before I started playing. And it worked, in the sense that my characters were always efficient and strong. It also robbed me of the opportunity to figure things out on my own, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

Which has me wondering how common this is with age. Anyone else abandon the min maxing, efficiency obsessed way of playing as you got older? Letting go of the pressure to play optimally makes video games so much more fun for me, and more relaxing.

I think I stopped playing so called casual games somewhere in the Sims 3 era. After that I got into WoW (pretty hardcore raiding guild), and kind of looked down on casual games. Like they just weren't worth my time.

Looking back now I took my gaming hobby a bit too seriously. After I quit WoW the next addiction was Dota2, and then some other PvP games like Rust, Tarkov and Battlerite (really miss that game). Basically only games that had skill based “hardcore” pvp, literally ignored everything else in the gaming world.

What ended up changing that was me getting gifted a Steam Deck by my sister, along with her favorite game at the time Stardew Valley, she wanted me to try out the multiplayer with her. That was such an amazing experience, and so relaxing compared to my usual gaming sessions, I got really hooked. I was nagging her to play all the time (which was funny since I kind of cringed at the thought of playing that game initially) and we have been playing a bunch of stuff together since.

Most recently we played the Loftia playtest together and it was a lot of fun. We found it while looking for some alternatives to Palia since it's starting to get a bit boring for us (we’ve been playing it for about 6 months now). The setting is awesome and the community was really friendly during the beta so we are really looking forward to the release. I’ve also played a bunch of the more popular “cozy” games on my own.

I sit down to play on my PC only when my group comes together for some Dota2 or Rust, but that happens about once every 2 weeks or so. And the rest of my gaming is usually either something fun and casual with my sis or on my own, but curled up on the couch instead of slouching over the PC.

Young me would call me a filthy casual right now, but I’m fine with that. Have your gaming tastes also changed once you got a Steam Deck?

Whenever the topic of relaxing games comes up I feel like my tastes are a bit different than the norm. The usual answers people give like farming sims, or cozy building games have never really been the things that I find relaxing. I've found them oddly stressful if anything, all those little clocks and daily chores feel more like the tedious stuff I deal with in life and at work (management is basically my actual day job) than something I would do to unwind. 

When I wanna really chill with a video game I reach for either a nice visceral nostalgic boomer shooter (as weird as that may sound) or do some satisfying grinding in an ARPG.

The ARPG is the ultimate podcast game for me. I usually put something on in the background and switch the higher brain functions off. I stop mowing down hordes of enemies just to sort the loot or grab a drink from the fridge. There’s no real way to lose really, if you die it's no big deal. I guess the worst thing that can happen is you slowly realizing the build you came up with actually sucks. 

My main ARPG is Last Epoch, the SSF (circle of fortune faction) mechanics are great, and I really love coming up with builds with the skill tree system, each skill has its own tree so you can customize them. At the moment though I’m trying out the new Grim Dawn expansion, having a lot of fun trying out some new class combinations. The Dark West is also something I definitely wanna play through when it comes out. I love using guns in ARPGs and the occult western theme sounds fun. Visually the game looks awesome as well which is nice since most of the other ones are starting to show their age a bit.

Boomer shooters are relaxing in a completely different way. Instead of switching my brain off, I drop into a hyper focused flow state where there's nothing apart from the game. I feel like the devs have perfected the formula over time and now exactly what the fanbase wants, it's like the ultimate “fan service” genre if you can call it that. If I’m feeling particularly stressed with work or something nothing shakes that off faster than blasting through something like Ultrakill or Dusk. And the fact that I’ve been an arenaFPS fan forever helps, I’m actually good at these games, both the shooting and the movement are second nature for me at this point.

I think the common thread is that both genres don’t have any of the tedium I deal with in everyday life. The last thing I wanna hear when I come home from work is anything related to the word “Management”. Simple, straight to the point satisfying gameplay is what I need, not something that forces me to manage my time or deal with deadlines or responsibilities.

Every time I open my friends list I see my friends doing their Valorant ranked grind, or in a Dota 2 game that's somehow been going for like more than an hour. And I play both games with them quite a bit, but I need a change of pace sometimes. They only really care about competitive pvp games and a few roguelites like Hades 2. When I bring up anything new and interesting to try, it's really difficult to convince them to actually give it a shot, especially if it's not something they would usually play. And if I can get them to try a co-op game with me they quit after a while and we don’t get to the end.

Which is the problem, because the co-op games I'm dying to actually play are the strictly two-player kind and quitting half way is so disappointing. It Takes Two has been sitting in my library judging me for ages (I played the first 15% of the game like twice with different people). Similar story with A Way Out, and the whole We Were Here series I keep hearing is a blast with the right partner. 

None of these work solo, that's the entire point of them, and none of my people will touch them or stick long enough to actually finish the games. Water Me & You also looks really good, I really want to find someone to play that with me when it comes out, it’s also a co-op adventure but with a bit of base building too, and really cozy looking.

I’ve added all the games to my Gameram profile, which is what I usually use to find people for pvp games when my friends aren’t online (and worked really well when I needed a squad for Deep Rock Galactic).  And I joined a few Discord servers to find people, but I thought I would post here as well, and see what works out first.

Figured I'd cast a wider net. Anyone else in the same boat, wanting to just work through these back to back for the fun of it, with no like strict schedule or pressure? I'm a patient and calm person, I don’t care what your skill level is. Drop a comment if that sounds like your jam.

The multiplayer was never why I fell for this genre. I came up on RTS campaigns, the ones with actual missions, briefings, a story that escalated and characters you love or love to hate, or just plain hate. But that was GOOD because it meant the game elicited some sort of emotional response. 

Every RTS campaign has that one adviser that at once defined and presented the game to you. Lots of them were annoying gimmicks but they immersed you into the world, if nothing else. They made you feel like you weren’t a dude clicking stuff but a meta-being in that reality controlling units, like you were more a part of it mechanically. But along the way the whole genre seemed to decide that competitive was the real product (NAHHHH) and the campaign was a glorified tutorial you rushed through to play ranked. If it existed at all. Wasn’t helped by the fact RTS just fell off in favor of MOBAs with LoL and DOTA2 etc.

But I’m glad that campaign focused games are making a slight comeback, and from a few directions at once! Some of it is remakes, Age of Mythology Retold is the best example for me. When you look at what actually pulled people back, it was the itch to march through that campaign again with modern comforts (new engine, slightly…saner pathfinding, better models and stuff).

What I also like is that new original IPs are also doing it, ever since indie games became the main creative force (and acknowledged as such by most people). The game that brought me back to RTS after years away in 2024 was Diplomacy is Not an Option, of all things, because underneath the wave survival hook there's a proper long campaign, took me 30 hours to finish on release. Probably more now.  It’s when I realized there are still devs who treat the campaign as the main course. 

Tempest Rising is the other one I loved to no end, a loving rebuild of everything the old Command & Conquer games nailed. Tiberium green never really left my bloodstream, what can I tell ya.... It also remembered that that a good # of us play RTS for the missions, not for the multiplayer.

Even some EA games, I couldn’t believe it, are going for that scale of worldbuilding that I thought was dead. Godsworn is the newest one that impressed me, and it’s like… less than 1000 reviews? Shame really, but it goes to show perhaps how underappreciated this trend still is, even though it’s IMHO the best thing to happen to RTS after its long hibernation.

None of this is really about scale so much as intent, I think. A campaign designed as the point, whether that's a sprawling story or just a tight run of handmade missions, plays completely differently and hits differently than anything that’s sandbox freestyle oriented or god forbid, pushing that PvP mulitpalyer component. Which should emerge organically out of a well designed game IMO, or just not if the game isn’t good otherwise in singleplayer.

I'll just say it plainly then, more campaign focused RTS - PLEASE!

So my dad is getting old and despite being somewhat tech savvy when he was younger now he is pretty deep into conspiracies and all sorts of stupid stuff. He reposts a bunch of stupid vaccine/space/newworldorder type stuff on facebook and reads a bunch of those really dumb new age conspiracy blogs (fluoride, secret moon bases, 4th dimension, covid hoax, stuff like that). Unfortunately that’s not the worst of it.

He also regularly almost falls for scams and fake ads, usually I’m able to stop him before it's too late by having a long drawn out argument which tends to end with him saying something like “Ok this was a scam but don’t act like you are right about everything”, because he of course won't believe me about his conspiracies.

But for the past few weeks he has been acting weird and seemed to be hiding something. I noticed he was talking to someone on telegram a lot, and he didn’t really use that app before so that immediately made me suspicious. I managed to grab his phone and as expected it's a romance scam, he is talking to “Kate” from the UK. It started out as one of those wrong number things on whatsapp, I guess that’s how they get new victims.

I already know this would be a really difficult conversation to have with him so I decided to just take matters into my own hands and literally nuked her off of his phone completely, blocked and deleted the convo and contact. He has been pissed for 2 days now since he can’t talk to his new crush but I would rather have that than trying to explain to him that he is being scammed which never really goes smoothly.

I also wrote down the phone number from whatsapp to see if I can maybe find out something about the person. The number was Nigerian (go figure hahaha) and Googling it didn’t find anything. I asked AI if there was any way to identify who was behind the number and after trying a few useless apps and searches like spokeo and truecaller that didn’t do anything I landed on some OSINT tools, floeintel and dehashed. And actually found some stuff, which lead me to a facebook account that I’m like 99% sure belongs to the person behind “Kate” (he actually had Kate’s pfp on there for some reason, not sure why).

My question is can I do anything, is there anyone I can report this to at this point. Seeing as my dad didn’t actually get scammed I’m wondering if anyone would even care? I mean this person has surely scammed other people successfully and even attempting a scam like this is surely not legal right?

My girlfriend keeps seeing those couple's co-op games on TikTok and wants us to play them together, which is great in theory except she really struggles with dual-stick camera movement. Like moving and looking at the same time in 3D space is still a genuine coordination problem for her. She wants us to play It Takes Two, Split Fiction and Water Me & You when it comes out (It’s a similar game with some light base building, but mostly 2 player co-op adventure)

We made an attempt at It Takes Two and it didn’t go well, she quickly got discouraged and frustrated (It likely didn’t help that I am pretty good at games so I would have to wait for her a lot, which felt pressuring for her). Now I’m thinking if I can get her something a bit easier, or at least similar for her to play while I’m at work she can get a bit more used to using a controller.

So I'm trying to find a good "training ground" game first. Something 3D, forgiving, low stakes if you fall or mess up, and ideally fun enough that it doesn't feel like homework. The vibe I'm thinking of is those early 2000s 3D platformers like Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time where the controls were simple and the camera was mostly fixed or at least not fighting you the whole time. But I can’t really find games like that, seems like they are really not as popular anymore.

The only modern game I've played that fits is Psychonauts 2, which is excellent but I’m not sure if it's good for someone's first video game. On steam I found Outclaw which looks really good, and reminds me of Overlord which I loved like 20 years ago, but that’s not out yet. And A Hat In Time, which I’ve never heard of but the reviews are good and it looks kind of what I’m looking for. I feel like there have to be more options I'm just not seeing or thinking of (my platformer knowledge basically stops around the PS2 era lol).

Anyone have recommendations for beginner friendly 3D platformers or adventure games that would work for someone who really struggles to use a controller, to ease them into the mechanics a bit?

There's games in almost any setting you can think of, but for some reason, actual normal current reality is like the rarest one ever. Not a parody of it or an alternate timeline or "our world but with zombies or aliens". Just regular Earth in the current year with real geography and real politics and nothing supernatural going on.

Even the games we call "realistic" almost always cheat. GTA builds entire fake cities (Los Santos, Liberty City) instead of using LA or New York. Call of Duty and Battlefield invent fictional countries or fictional PMCs so they don't step on real geopolitical toes. Watch Dogs actually feels pretty close, the hacking being so “video gamey” kind of takes me out of it a bit.

The closest I can think of are maybe some simulation, management and sports games. But these types of games focus on such a narrow aspect of our world I’m not even sure if it really counts. When it comes to RPGs I can’t really think of anything that depicts our world, maybe Yakuza kinda? Which is kind of surprising when I think about it, RPGs have so much dialogue and narrative it feels like a good way to talk about historical events or depict something that really happened. There is one game that hasn’t come out yet which is trying that, Hollow Home. It's about the things that went on during the recent (and current) conflict in Ukraine, from the perspective of a child in a bombed city, really interested to see how that turns out.

I think part of the problem is legal (good luck getting permission to blow up actual landmarks or depict real conflicts without a lawsuit) and part of it is prolly just that reality can’t be easily molded into a fun gaming experience. Everything is pretty slow and gradual IRL, and the consequences for stuff we do all the time in games (Violence, theft etc..) are dire. And if the game is multiplayer do you just start everyone out the same? Because real life is incredibly unbalanced in that regard lol (being born poor is hardmode tbh). But I also think developers are just scared of the PR nightmare that comes with depicting real countries as the bad guys or depicting something cultural or sensitive in a wrong way.

What do you think about this? I know realism =/= fun but I would have thought we would at least have more games with real world narratives, the gameplay doesn’t have to be realistic.

I was playing Diplomacy is Not an Option lately and there's this mechanic where you have to deal with the corpses of your units (you need an undertaker and a graveyard), otherwise disease spreads and it can cause big problems, and many more deaths. I thought that was pretty neat, but it made me think about how rare mechanics like that are, and rarer still are those who go beyond the one dimensional and simple unit death and HP in most games.

This has kinda bugged me about almost every RTS I've ever played. A unit sitting at 1 HP fights with the exact same efficiency as a unit at full health. There's no functional difference between a unit near death and a fresh one. The only thing that matters is alive or dead, and everything in between doesn’t make a difference (apart from the available HP). I feel like there could be so much tactical depth with injury mechanics.

In actual conflicts (not that I'm demanding realistic military simulation from my strategy games lol) managing wounded soldiers and the logistics around medical evacuation is just as impactful as actual fatal casualties. It ties up resources, slows down operations, and affects morale. But in 99% of RTS games that entire layer of strategy just doesn't exist. Your units either work at 100% or they are dead, nothing in between.

I understand the gameplay reason for this though. If you punish a player whose army is already taking damage by also crippling their units' damage and speed, you can create a massive snowball effect. The player who lands the first good engagement doesn't just get an advantage, they get an exponentially growing advantage because the surviving enemy units now fight worse AND move slower, making the next engagement even more lopsided. Comebacks might become basically impossible and every match gets decided by the first real fight. Nobody would want that.

But some games have actually found ways to make it work (at least partially). Company of Heroes has localized vehicle damage where a penetrating hit can knock out specific components - engine damage slows you down, a destroyed turret ring means you can't rotate, crew injuries reduce rate of fire. Men of War takes it even further with individual soldier wounds and bleeding mechanics. Both games are still fun and competitive despite these systems, so clearly it can be done without creating a snowballing effect.

Do you think a more mainstream RTS (something closer to AoE or StarCraft in accessibility) could ever pull this off, or is the binary alive/dead system just fundamentally the better design for some reason?

My ARPG habit goes back to when Diablo 2 was the only thing that mattered on my PC after school, and at this point the grind is prolly my favorite part of the genre even though I know most people who don’t play ARPGs would probably think that's insane. The loop itself is what keeps me hooked probably, it's just so satisfying to destroy huge packs and sift through the loot, I can do that for hours without even noticing the time passing. And whenever I get a juicy drop for my build I get motivation to do it all over again. My wife has asked me multiple times if I'm "still playing the same game" and the answer is always yes, I've been running the same map for two hours and I'm having the time of my life lol.

But that tolerance for grind doesn't transfer to basically any other genre for me. MMO grinding actively drains me tbh. I tried going back to WoW Classic and the pace was so slow I couldn’t do it. You kill one mob at a time, sometimes you have to wait for respawns and sometimes you need to grind the same stuff for weeks to get reputation with a faction or something. It felt like watching paint dry compared to blasting through a LE mono or PoE map in like 2 minutes. Looter-shooters come closer but they still miss something, Destiny 2 has the slot-machine feel but it just takes too long to kill stuff, which ruins the pacing for me. And survival game grinding (farming mats in Valheim or whatever) is a different animal because there's no loot RNG involved, you're just collecting known quantities of wood and stone, which is relaxing but it's not really exciting.

I think what makes the ARPG grind unique is that it combines speed with randomness in a way no other genre does. You're clearing screens of enemies fast enough that it almost feels like a rhythm game, and every clear has a chance to drop something that fundamentally changes how your character plays. That combo is prolly why I can run the same content 200 times in Last Epoch or Grim Dawn and still feel a little spike of excitement every time a unique drops, but I'll quit an MMO daily after twenty minutes because it feels like I'm literally doing a job.

 Totally subjective take ofc, I’m sure some people love the slow methodical MMO grind and find the ARPG pace exhausting. What’s your take on this, do you play other grindy games too?

I was looking at my wishlist today and had this realization, teenage me would have literally made fun of me and called me a filthy casual if he saw these games. I have Haunted Chocolatier in there, Loftia and Witchbrook

For me everything started with games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3d (very kid friendly I know hahaha) on my dads PC when I was a kid. At first I would sit in his lap, he would do the moving and I handled the mouse, basically just clicking to shoot. Then he slowly had me move up to playing on my own, but for me it was just too scary to play without godmode on. The possibility of dying in the games for some reason just terrified me, there were also levels I couldn’t play without my dad because I found them too scary. Especially in Duke Nukem 3d, the weird floating aliens that appear in one of the first few stages were too creepy for me to handle on my own.

The next phase when I got a bit older I could play anything on my own, and slowly started phasing out the godmode. I would play on the easiest difficulty and save a lot, that felt safe enough. I was playing games like Outlaws and dabbling in Age of Empires and Red Alert at that time, though I was extremely bad at RTS, still am tbh. This is when I was slowly starting to get better at games and starting to understand that the challenge is part of the fun.

Fast forward a few years and things change a lot, Counter Strike 1.3 and Quake 3, multiplayer against other players in a lan cafe. This was something completely different for me, I picked up the games pretty quickly and started getting pretty good. At this point I was about 8-10 years old, I was playing against older teenagers and kicking their asses quite often. I think this is what kick started my competitive phase. Suddenly being better than others started becoming important to me, and since I had been playing since really early childhood I was actually pretty good compared to most people playing with me (we didn’t really play online back then so this was just other older kids from my town).

Then a couple of years later the internet became common and online gaming is now a thing for me. Queue Dota, HoN and League addiction… I spent so much time playing those games its insane, they have this strange toxic competitive culture around them and I was fully immersed in that. The only other game I would play would be the currently popular shooter, think it was cod 4 at the time, and that was just so I could play with my friends. I feel like I missed a bunch of cool games that came out during that period because I was so immersed into being competitive in MOBAs

Fast forward a bit more, after a few years of Dota2 and CSGO I am now in my current phase, which I could only describe as “Casual gamer that plays for fun”, which is feels pretty funny to type, the word “casual” was like the worst insult you could give me a few years ago hahaha. With my work and family stuff going on I just have way less time to play. And when I do play I would rather have some fun with my friends playing some friendslop stuff or something casual all of us can enjoy. Currently Mechachameleon of course, and we are waiting for Loftia to come out. Now I get excited for games that are based more on player interactions and cozy vibes than the competitive or “challenging” stuff. I don’t wanna sit down to play after a long day at work only to get merked by some teenagers that practice all day, or get flamed by them if they are on my team hahahah. Now I just play to relax and hang out with friends, and I feel like its way healthier for my mental as well, games almost never piss me off any more, while MOBAs had me raging all the time.

Has anyone else completely evolved as a gamer over time? I would have never predicted this trajectory for myself but here we are.