u/varnajohn

The “power level” of the main character is really important for how a CRPG feels. It’s way more immersive for me when I’m playing a scrappy underdog trying to figure out how to get the upper hand despite my disadvantages (maybe it reminds me of real life hahaha) compared to playing some sort of unstoppable hero everyone loves.

A lot of RPGs have you playing some sort of prophesied chosen one, only you can save the world from whatever evil force is trying to destroy or conquer it. Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous cranks it to absurdity with its mythic paths, where you can literally ascend into a demigod partway through and start warping reality (the mythic paths are ALL absolutely bananas). The whole world orients itself around you and your choices actually reshape the map. But that’s an extreme example, most games have you slowly building up to being that powerful, and fulfilling “the prophecy” or something.

On the other side sit the games that make you a nobody and mean it. Age of Decadence is the obvious example that comes to mind. You can die in 5 minutes if you aren’t careful, and god help you if you draw your sword in front of the wrong person. Underrail has that same feel, you start as a nothing in a hole in the ground and every scrap you can get is valuable. Another one different in tone and theme (and gameplay) from these previous two, that I tried this year, was Hollow Home. Though it might be cheating to include a purely narrative based RPG with no power climb of this sort. You play a child so you don’t really get to build up to becoming powerful, but your narrative choices can have great consequences, which is an interesting way to have such a “weak” character have a strong impact on the story. The game is set in Ukraine during the war which is pretty interesting too, since it's quite rare to have a game set in our actual reality (And our reality can be way harsher than fantasy).

I can personally enjoy both, but I prefer being the underdog more, probably because of the immersion and my preference for really difficult games (obviously it's usually harder being the underdog)

How do you feel about this? I feel like devs are experimenting a lot more with this lately, whereas before most games had the same kind of “You are the chosen one” kind of storyline.

Some of my best build ideas happen when I'm nowhere near my PC. I'll be doing something totally unrelated to gaming, like sitting in some boring meeting, and my brain just wanders off and I get some stupid build idea I obsess over until I get home. And then when I actually get to trying it out it's never as good as it sounded in my head hahaha. 

Somehow the theorycrafting and thinking of these build ideas in my head is almost as satisfying as playing the actual game. Sometimes more, cuz the version in my head always works flawlessly and never runs into the reality of me being kinda bad at the game and not getting good drops or misunderstanding a mechanic. 

Last Epoch is prolly my favorite game for this, purely because the skill trees mean one ability can turn into five completely different things depending on how you spec it, so my brain keeps coming up with new things to try. Grim Dawn is the other game I catch myself thinking about all the time. I'm really excited for the DLC tomorrow, can’t wait to see where my brain will take me with the berserker….

I think part of why I find it so fun to theorycraft is because in the fantasy the build always works and kicks ass, and you get the drops you need, and details like not having enough defenses or damage don’t really matter (I rarely come up with a build that has actual good numbers this way tbh). 

It's just the fun part of an ARPG, the imagining and the optimizing, with none of the tedium attached. I guess I’m just a really nerdy person that enjoys thinking about video games even when he is not playing them.

Anyway, I’m just wondering if I’m alone in this. Do you guys also catch yourself daydreaming about builds in random situations when you’re bored?

My obvious answer is to reach for any of the myriad cozy worlds from any of the myriad cozy games around. I’m not above it and Stardew Valley is the low hanging fruit for a reason, a whole life measured out in seasons and festivals and knowing everyone in town by name. It’s a cozy small town fantasy that’s so appealing to us city dwelling wage slaves. 

Or to give another cozy example, the world above this world on sky islands like those in Solarpunk or in Loftia, floating high above this planet which is so polluted and terrible when I look at just my neighbourhood. The tragic implication in both of these is that we ruined our world and now have to rely on this scrape of islands to built a better world on top of the one we ruined. IIRC in Loftia, when I played the beta, there’s constant shakes and earthquakes that occur because these islands can’t handle exploitation and need care and an ecofriendly attitude to be sustainable in any major way.

I’m sayin all this just to show how even these cozy settings can have a dark background that would be an unpleasant awakening if you woke up in these worlds and thought it would be all sunshine and joy. Same goes for wanting to live in The Shire, especially in how it’s portrayed in Lord of the Rings Online. God I loved that starter zone, it was so cozy and the quests were so loreful I just wanted to stay there forever… but then you realize it’s Tolkien’s world and orcs and wargs and all sorts of evil forces are just outside your door. So nice in principle, but the chances of something terrible happening get exponentially higher when you leave the Shire.

Same with my all time favorite zone in any RPG: Toussaint from Witcher! The vineyards stretching for miles, everyone’s tipsy, sun’s always shining. Sure, there’s vampires but as long as Geralt is taking care of shit, I wouldn’t mind having a cottage somewhere near Corvo Blanco LMAO

I mean of course I want the place I’ll be living in to be non violent. Objectively, we’d die instantly in any of these settings otherwise. Just want something peaceful where stuff won’t happen to me if I mind my business.

Where would you actually want to wake up every day, not just visit or play the hero in?

Some of my oldest online friends to this day are people I met in WoW back during the Burning Crusade days, random dudes from my guild (shoutout Apex from Xavius and later Stormscale) and a couple people I ran into just standing around Shattrath waiting on a group, and we still talk almost twenty years later even though half of us barely game anymore. Same story with my old arena FPS crew, a bunch of guys from a scene so small now that if I hop back in I literally can't find a match unless I message one of them first to hop on too (the playerbase basically IS a groupchat at this point lol). 

Point being, back then the friendships were kind of a byproduct of just playing. You'd get thrown in with strangers, someone would crack a joke in party chat, and three weeks later they're on your friends list and you're sharing stories about where you are from and chilling in teamspeak. I don't really see that happening anymore, and I'm honestly not sure if it's me getting older and crustier (very possible ofc) or if the whole social layer of gaming just migrated somewhere I'm not looking.

Everyone seems to pre-group on Disc now, they show up already in a private call with their 4 mates, play the game, and dip without a single word typed or spoken to anyone outside their Disc call. I’ve adapted to this as well since it seems to be the only way to find new people to play with, so I’m in a bunch of servers and I use Gameram as well to try to find folks. It’s working great and I don’t really have an issue finding people, but I really miss like running into a random ingame and becoming friends just from playing together, it just felt different when it happened that way.

In-game chat is a ghost town in most games I touch, and the randoms you do get matched with feel more like NPCs than people, just bodies filling slots that happen to be piloted by a human somewhere. Nobody's talking, you get instantly kicked if you make a mistake and you likely won't end up on someone’s friends list even if you do well.

And I get WHY it happened, tbh. Disc is just better tech than clunky in-game voice ever was, matchmaking got fast and frictionless so you don't linger in a lobby long enough to actually meet anyone, and a lot of us older folks already have our people and aren't out fishing for new ones. Convenience won, as it tends to. But something got lost in the trade, that whole slow-burn thing where a stranger turned into a friend (or enemy) over a hundred small dumb interactions is just kind of gone now. The whole point of playing was to interact with other people back then, and now that’s almost seen as an inconvenience, so weird.

Maybe I'm romanticizing it a bit (nostalgia is my default setting at this age, I won't pretend otherwise), and maybe the younger crowd makes all their friends in Disc servers now and it's prolly functionally the same thing to them. But it doesn't feel the same to me. Do any of you still manage to make friends naturally inside a game these days, or has all the actual socializing just moved outside the game entirely for you too?

My favorite build right now is Purifier, (Demolitionist + Inquisitor) it’s so much fun. I really don’t know why almost every other ARPG acts like firearms don't exist. The genre is practically all pretty generic fantasy for the most part, with a few exceptions.

The gunplay in this game is weirdly satisfying compared to what you'd expect from an isometric ARPG. Pretty much every gun (My fave is dual pistols) has a nice punchy, visceral feel that I don’t think using a bow could ever give me. And when you mix that with Demolitionist skills like fire strike and grenados or Blackwater Cocktails, you get this strange gunpowder + magic vibe that I haven't found anywhere else in the genre. It feels so satisfying to clear a room with explosive rounds while your Inquisitor Seal keeps you barely alive in the thick of it.

Part of it is obviously the setting, while you can kind of shoehorn in guns into almost any setting it's better when it actually fits. Grim Dawn's world isn't strictly medieval fantasy, it has this industrial edge that makes guns feel natural in context. And I think the setting is a big part of what makes Grim Dawn so interesting, it really stands out from the crowd next to all the other fantasy grim dark stuff. Like my favorite ARPG when it comes to mechanics is probably Last Epoch, I really love how SSF works and the skill system is so fun, if it had a gunslinger type class I don’t think I would play anything else.

I've tried to think of other ARPGs that even attempt gun combat and the list is embarrassingly short. Remnant doesn’t really feel like an ARPG for me, Torchlight had some decent options but they didn’t really feel fleshed out. PoE 2 has the crossbows that pretty much act like guns, a really strange choice in my opinion, I think they should have just done actual guns instead. The only game that looks really promising in that regard is Dark West, since it's a western theme I think all of the classes will be using guns, really excited to see how it turns out. Nobody else is really doing the dedicated gunslinger thing with the commitment that Crate put into it here (even if there’s not as many ranged centric classes as I like) and its a shame, its like my favorite archetype by far.

Is it just that developers think guns break the fantasy aesthetic, or is there an actual game design reason the genre keeps avoiding them?

I was playing Stardew Valley and something occurred to me. While we find this game relaxing and cozy, if we got to experience it in real life it would be absolutely miserable. We find it cozy but you're really doing backbreaking manual farm labor from 6 AM to midnight every single day, and then on top of that you're expected to venture into deep dark caves full of actual monsters and fight them with a  rusty sword. In real life I get tired carrying groceries upstairs if I need to take more than two trips. I would not survive a single day on that farm, and even if I could, I doubt it would feel very cozy.

And then I thought about Minecraft and that would be even more ridiculous. Getting dropped completely alone into an empty wilderness with nothing, punching trees with your bare hands to get wood (would this even work lol), hauling literal tons of stone just to build a basic shelter before the sun goes down or burying yourself alive. Because you have incredibly accurate skeleton archers after you, not to mention creepers, which would be absolutely terrifying. A pretty intense survival scenario to go through, we play it to relax after work but the actual premise is a horror movie.

Sometimes it is not even the manual labor, it is just the actual setting that would give me a panic attack. I’m pretty hyped for Loftia to come out, having and decorating your own sky island home sounds nice in theory (and it was super fun in the beta) but in reality you would be suspended thousands of feet in the air and one clumsy step near the edge of your farm means plummeting to your death. I mean, unless there’s some kind of cozyfield protecting you - that’s the only logical explanation I can find. I’m hella afraid of heights so no amount of wholesome vibes in the air would make me feel safe sleeping on a tiny floating piece of rock. 

Another good but tbh pretty unique example in a cozy game is Dredge. The fishing and exploration is super relaxing when you play it, but actually being out on the open ocean in a tiny wooden boat in the freezing fog is pure nightmare fuel. Just floating around in an environment like that would be really creepy, even before the strange monster fish attack you.

Kinda funny to analyze what these games are about, and what it would feel like to actually live though experiences like that. I guess it goes to show how different it is to read about or play something, compared to actually doing it yourself.

I'm at a point in my life where I have maybe an hour and a half of gaming time on a weekday if I'm lucky, sometimes two hours on a weekend night after the kid goes down, and I've slowly come to terms with the fact that massive story driven games just aren't built for people who play shorter sessions on an inconsistent schedule. I started Baldur's Gate 3 somewhere around March and I'm still in Act 2. At this rate I will literally finish it sometime next year, which is fine I guess but also kind of absurd when I think about it.

My backlog is massive and it keeps growing, because by the time I’m done with one game (BG3 in this case) like 6 other games I wanna play come out. Right now I really wanna try Esoteric Ebb, it's like a Disco Elysium style narrative RPG, but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to play 2 story based games at the same time. At this rate by the time I’m done with BG3, Hollow Home will also come out, which is another Disco clone, set in Ukraine during the war and based on real events. I really wanted to play that when it comes out but I don’t know when I will actually get to it.

The problem isn't even the playtime itself, it's the gaps between sessions. I'll put three hours into BG3 on a Saturday, get really invested in some quest line, and then not touch it again until Wednesday. By Wednesday I've pretty much forgotten what I was doing, what NPC I was supposed to talk to, what resources I’m low on etc... I spend the first 20 minutes of every session just re-orienting myself, which means my actual playtime is even shorter than it already was when you think about it.

This has naturally pushed me toward games where you can just jump in for a quick 30 minute run and not worry about story continuity. Stuff like roguelites, racing games, the occasional strategy game where each session is self-contained and a bunch of grinding in Last Epoch. ARPGs are really good for this because you are constantly slowly progressing and the story is not important, so even if you can jump in for an hour or so you can make something happen. I’ve actually probably spent way more time playing these games than the “Main” game I’m currently playing, because it just feels so much easier to sit down and play them. 

For the other slow-burners in here, I'd like to know what actually works. Some of you have prolly just accepted that one game is going to take six months and made peace with it. Also I was thinking about keeping actual notes between sessions (I’m not sure if that's a completely insane idea or not). Do you just play something different when you are low on time, or just slowly work through games patiently. What's your approach?

I've been playing CS for years at this point and I'm at the stage where I wanna take the game a bit more seriously and solo queue is starting to feel like a bit of a waste of time. Not because the players are bad (well, sometimes) but because the actual game I want to play doesn’t really happen in matchmaking. I wanna run defaults, practice site executes, fun teamwork based stuff like that. The version of CS that gets played at even a low competitive level is a completely different game from what happens in matchmaking from what I can see, and I want an opportunity to experience that a bit.

So my question is about the realistic path to get there. I've tried the obvious stuff (or some of it I guess), adding people who communicate well after good Premier games, posting on LFG subreddits, joining Discord servers that claim to be "competitive". I’ve also added CSGO to my Gameram profile to see if someone matches on there. 

The problem I had with adding randoms from MM is that someone being a good communicator in one game doesn't mean they want to commit to scheduled practice nights and things like VOD reviews. And most LFG communities end up feeling like solo queue with better comms. You end up in a 5 stack that plays like a pug anyway.

For the people who actually run in a serious long term group that practices together regularly, I want to know how you built it, like how you got your foot in the door. Did you find your teammates through FACEIT leagues and amateur tournaments, or is it actually possible to build a legit roster purely from the Premier pool? 

I feel like the type of player who wants to do anti-strats and study demos is almost exclusively on third-party platforms at this point, but maybe (hopefully) I'm wrong about that.

RPGs have been my genre since the Baldur's Gate days and I'll probably be playing them when I'm seventy but lately I have this thing for games that break the usual mold. The typical thing where you start as some nobody, you discover you're actually the chosen one (or at least part of some prophecy), and by act three you're powerful enough to solo the final boss while the entire world watches in awe. And the setting is usually this safe kind of neutral toned fantasy, without much nuance or novelty.

What I keep coming back to are the CRPGs that commit to a grounded, bleak tone and actually stick with it. 

• Age of Decadence is prolly the best example I can think of, that game killed me over a wrong conversation choice in the first town more times than I care to admit, your character is just some guy trying not to die in a post-apocalyptic Roman hellscape. And the world does not care about you at all, to the point where you can soft lock the game if you aren’t careful. It takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how to approach things but it's so immersive to have to adapt to the game instead of just being able to do whatever you want.
• Disco Elysium has this dreariness (like depression painted onto a screen, the worldbuilding is a 10/10 chief’s kiss), this is clear from all the implications of the opening scene, as you struggle to grab a hold of your tie from the ceiling fan, really sets the tone. I am hoping Hollow Home will have this realistic gritty unforgiving feeling too, maybe even more so, since it's based on the grim realities of the Ukraine war. (Pretty interesting to see an RPG based on real life events, don’t see that a lot/ at all)
• Colony Ship also gave me that feeling in a sci fi setting where you're a nobody caught between factions on a decaying vessel, and the combat is brutal enough that picking the wrong fight means you're just done. When the game doesn’t pretend you're special, that's exactly what makes the stakes feel more real, when the game puts you on a pedestal everything kind of feels inconsequential.

I think the reason this kind of CRPG is rare is that power fantasy sells (people like feeling powerful, publishers know it, and "you are the chosen one" is the easiest narrative hook to build a 40-hour game around) But when a developer commits to a world where you're just a cog in a much larger machine and the machine doesn't care if you get ground up, the storytelling gets so much more interesting because the story feels more believable and the consequences actually have impact. 

I really like games that have a nice grounded feeling and story that doesn’t treat the protagonist as the chosen one. I can’t be the only one who gets bored of being the hero every time. What are some other games that come to mind when you think about grounded CRPGs?

It feels like every game coming out right now has some form of metaprogression shoehorned into it. There's always something to unlock or upgrade between runs. When it works well it is super addicting. But a lot of the time it just feels like a cheap way to pad out the playtime.

When it works, it feels like it is pushing the game further rather than gating the actual fun. Look at Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver or simple games like Blitzkrieg Express. The whole point of those games is to use progression to kind of increase what you can do. In Vampire Survivors you want to get ridiculously powerful and melt everything on the screen faster. In Dave the Diver it lets you dive deeper and collect more stuff quicker to build up your restaurant. In Blitzkrieg your cannon gets ridiculously strong much faster. The metaprogression just kind of adds to what the game has going on instead of holding you back.

Then you have stuff like The Binding of Isaac. Isaac is brutal with its unlocks. If you want the strongest items in the loot pool you usually have to complete the absolute hardest content in the game. Playing characters like Jacob and Esau to get those completion marks can be incredibly frustrating. But it actually fits the game perfectly because the unlocks feel earned and they permanently change how your future runs play out. It's probably the only game I would give a pass on using this style of gating content, since everything feels so well thought out and designed (the unlocks are thematic and interesting etc..), that whole unlock and completion mark mechanic ends up feeling like the whole point of the game in a way.

Then there are games that just handle it in a weird way in my opinion. Take Slay the Spire for example. When you start out, you have to level up characters to unlock certain cards and relics. Since some of those relics and cards really enable specific strategies, to me it just feels like you are playing a gimped version of the character until you get those unlocks. It doesn't make me feel powerful, it just makes me feel like I am missing out on the actual full game.

Hades handles it in a way that feels pretty weird too. The mirror upgrades just make you objectively stronger over time. It feels odd because the base game actually gets easier the more you play, rather than your actual skill carrying you. You have to wait until you unlock the custom difficulty challenge options later on to get the real difficulty back, very odd.

Metaprogression can be a really cool and rewarding thing when it is done right. But it can also completely ruin my enjoyment of a game if it is implemented poorly.

I would love to hear about some games that have interesting ways of handling metaprogression if anyone has some good examples.

There's a specific feeling I'm chasing and I'm not sure what to call it exactly, but it's when a game plays like a completely different game depending on whether you're a newer player or someone who's mastered it (or just grinded enough to hit a certain power threshold). I’m not talking about Newgame+ or unlocking new abilities, prestige etc.. I’m talking about the gameplay itself changing completely based on your skill level.

ARPGs are probably one of the best examples of this. A new player is carefully fighting packs of 3-4 monsters, times his abilities and aims them and actually looks at most of the loot that drops. An endgame player with a fully built character is deleting entire screens of enemies every 0.2 seconds and the game has become more about loot filtering and map investment strategy than actual combat. Even the goals kind of shift, you no longer care about anything other than your map clear efficiency and how much currency you can farm per hour. And this is pretty consistent across games, I’ve experienced it in PoE and Last Epoch. It even becomes kind of what you aim for, getting to that phase when your build is fully “online” and you are just running around blowing everything up, really satisfying.

If we are talking more action based games the clearest example I can think of is Titanfall 2. A new player is basically playing a standard FPS - running on the ground, taking cover, aiming down sights, doing normal shooter things. Then you watch someone who's mastered the movement system and they're hopping off walls, slide hopping at insane speeds, barely touching the ground at all and using the grapple to slingshot themselves across the entire map. It's the same game but it looks like something completely different when someone who knows the advanced movement tech is playing. Warframe is another one where this happens, early game you're slowly clearing rooms and struggling with basic missions, but an endgame player is bullet jumping through tile sets so fast the game turns into this wild parkour cyber ninja simulator. You start clearing rooms so fast the enemies barely have enough time to go through their spawn animations.

I love this kind of thing because it gives you something to actually work toward beyond just bigger numbers and shinier armor. And it's super rewarding once you put in the work to get that good.

The best way for a noob to get into RTS in 2026 is to play games like Diplomacy is Not an Option or They are Billions first, it lets you build the fundamental skills gradually over time. I think the single biggest barrier to entry for traditional RTS is not the learning curve per se, it's the fact that the game never stops asking you to do five things at once from minute one. You're scouting, building, managing the economy, producing units, attacking and responding to aggression all simultaneously, and if you let any one plate drop everything tends to crumble, or at least you leave a massive opening for your opponent or the AI. 

For someone who's never played the genre that's not a learning curve they can easily overcome, if they don’t have a really good reason to stick with it I think most new players will bounce. I think this is why RTS feels like a bit of a boomer genre. Arena FPS games suffer a similar fate, huge learning curve and very unforgiving, but they are completely dead because there is no single player mode to protect you against the veterans who have been practicing for over 20 years now. Imagine if new RTS players had to play vs veterans of 20 years, would any new players even stick to the game if it was like that?

Wave based defense games bypass this almost entirely because they cater to the one instinct every new player already has, turtle up and build. Nobody needs to teach a new player to want walls and towers and a big army sitting behind them. That's the default human response to "enemies are coming." And since the enemy won't be countering this like in the typical competitive RTS (usually by out macroing you). You can build up and survive. The feedback loop is immediate and satisfying in a way that a normal RTS can’t really replicate.

The wave structure itself functions as a tutorial in a way when you think about it. The downtime between waves is where you learn macro economy, base layout, tech priorities, you can actually take your time and figure these things out slowly. And then the wave itself is where you learn micro positioning, army composition, things like that. The game literally separates the two hardest parts of RTS into distinct phases and lets you practice each one without having to multitask. This feels like a better tutorial than the typical RTS campaign where you get a slow trickle of new tech and play in a completely different way than you would in a skirmish or game against a player.

Games like Diplomacy is Not an Option and They are Billions also have the pause button, which really helps you to play at your own pace. I know old school RTS literally had a game speed slider, but that usually just felt like crap if you put it on slow. I wouldn't be surprised at all if future RTS titles start shipping with dedicated wave defense modes specifically as a tutorial type of thing. It's just too elegant a solution to the accessibility problem to ignore, there's a reason fortress defense games are selling so well.

What’s your opinion on this, is the classic slow burn campaign still the way to go, or is there some room for experimenting with RTS tutorials?

I love this game but it's just way more fun with a full crew. My regular friends only really hop on during the weekends, and even then they don't always want to play SoT. Because of that I regularly end up going two or three weeks without really anyone to play with, usually I play something else but I try open crew from time to time.

I have actually added one or two cool people from it over a few months. Most of the time it is just a massive waste of time though. You join a ship and people are either actively trolling or just completely ignoring what is going on trying to do their own thing (no mic of course). It gets pretty frustrating actually trying to get something going with a crew like that. On the rare occasion that you get some randoms that are cool it can be amazing, I add them after of course but most of time it’s been people that don’t play that much so I never really managed to find anyone consistent.

I have tried looking for groups on the official Discord. It has been kind of hit and miss, I had a few pretty good runs with a group but they dropped me when their friend started playing the game again (guess he was their 4th) and haven’t really had much luck with others (ran into people that were a bit too sweaty, I’m kind of new to the game). I also added SOT to my Gameram profile and I’m matching with people on there from time to time. So far I’ve managed to play for a few hours with one of them and it went great, even a sloop is way more fun with 2 people.

Then there is solo slooping. I like it sometimes, but you really have to be on your toes constantly. It feels like every bigger ship on the server makes a beeline for you the second they spot a sloop. I am not always in the mood to play super sweaty just to get a voyage done. It's way more chill on a larger ship with a crew sailing around ideally without having to manage everything on your own. And interacting with people is really half of the fun for me tbh, most of the game is just way more fun with a crew.

Apart from finding people on discord and gameram what other options could I explore? Overall I have about 4 people outside of my friend group that I can play with currently, it's enough to maybe get 1-2 people in my crew when I wanna play if I’m lucky. I’m just looking for a reliable way to get a full crew going so I can try out the Galleon some more.

I've been playing Dynasty Warriors on and off since DW3 on the PS2 (which was literally one of the first games I owned on that console) and I've always struggled to explain to people who haven't played it why the series is so satisfying. It's not really the story or the graphics I care about, the unique thing about DW that sets it apart is the combat. 

The way you just delete massive groups of enemies with your flashy anime style combos is so satisfying, almost every attack is big and hefty. There's also a zen quality to it that I don't think gets talked about enough, like you stop thinking and just flow through the combat and it's almost meditative in a weird way. It’s always been one of my favorite franchises, in its own little niche sub genre.

What I've realized over the years though is that I get a remarkably similar feeling from games that have nothing to do with Musou on the surface. Action RPGs for example, the first time I made a good build in Grim Dawn and I could clear rooms of enemies easily in seconds, I had the same power fantasy feeling DW games give me. It's not the same with the combat being much simpler and no strategy layer of course, but the core feeling is there for me. I still always keep an ARPG in my rotation, currently its Last Epoch and it’s one where that DW feeling is the most potent, simply because of straightforward the game is (but still giving you lots of tools to mess around with and always urginng you to reroll you character). Which is the perfect playstyle for someone like me anyway, who can’t stick to one “main” but loves cycling through dozens depending on how the mood hits.

And then there's Vampire Survivors and its clones which I think are probably the most distilled version of this feeling I've ever played. No complex combos, no build optimization in the moment, you're just walking through an infinite swarm of enemies while numbers and particle effects explode across the entire screen and your brain enters this flow state, it barely feels like you need to think. It's kind of wild that a little indie game with deliberately simple graphics and mechanics can feel so similar to DW despite the huge differences.

I can’t help but notice my love of Dynasty Warriors spilling over into my other gaming choices, I wonder if it's the same for other people. Do you also look for games that give you the same feelings?

I have been fortunate enough to see almost the full evolution of RPGs up to this stage. From the early DND adaptations, Ultima (I wasn’t born early enough to experience this one unfortunately) and then the early Elder Scrolls games and Baldur's Gate, RPGs were pretty much a foundational genre in gaming. 

Every game was so different back then and there was this feeling that the next new thing was always around the corner. Daggerfall and Diablo come out within months of each other and show us how varied the genre can be. Fallout comes out soon after showing us a traditional isometric RPG set in a really well written and designed non fantasy setting can work just as well. Planescape Torment then comes out and quickly stands out with its amazing surreal world and incredible writing, becoming somewhat of a cult classic. I could go on but you get the idea, the basic subgenres were being defined and big studios were coming up with really interesting innovative ideas and original IPs.

Then if we take a look at RPGs today the genre is still going strong, and there are so many different types of games catering to different tastes to choose from. This is especially obvious with ARPGs, where every game kind of occupies its own niche. PoE is for the truly dedicated players that want the most in depth theorycrafting. Last Epoch is a middle ground, with enough complexity to stay interesting for a long time, and very satisfying crafting and skill builds, but without the need for too much in depth theorycrafting. Diablo 4 is better for people who want to quickly jump in and have fun. The skills feel great and everything looks visually stunning, but the itemization can feel a bit simple compared to more complex games. And of course Soulslike as their own off shoot genre of Action RPG, probably one of the recent trends in gaming with the most staying power, we will be seeing them for a long time and I don’t mind that one bit.

As far as more narrative based RPGs go Baldurs Gate 3 still feels like the benchmark. We’re also seeing this massive wave of deep, narrative-heavy CRPGs or "Disco Elysium-likes" that throw out traditional combat entirely to focus on pure worldbuilding and writing. Esoteric Ebb, Citizen Sleeper, Zero Parades, all great games with rich opinionated narratives (personally I really enjoyed them all). A really interesting upcoming one is Hollow Home, it's based on real events (The war in Ukraine), which is something incredibly rare amongst RPGs. Pretty much the only other game I can think of is KCD but that's an older historical setting, not really recent history. I’m really interested to see how that turns out and would love to see more RPGs depicting real stories.

The genre seems to be in a decent spot with bigger studios still not afraid to experiment from time to time (tough a lot of focus is on remakes right now, which is fine) and indie studios cranking out really high quality titles on a regular basis, I think it's just a matter of time before someone hits on the next new big formula, something different enough to spin off its own sub-genre and I hope its as good as Soulslikes or Disco-likes.

This is going to sound bad coming from someone who's been gaming for over two decades and prides himself on at least *trying* everything, but I have a really hard time staying locked in with VNs that are just text from beginning to end. And it bugs me because I know the genre has some of the best stories in gaming. I've heard a lot about SteinsGate, Clannad and Umineko, enough to know I’m missing out on great stories that I would otherwise dive headfirst in if they weren’t all text. But every time I try something that's purely reading with the occasional dialogue choice, my brain starts drifting around the 2-3 hour mark no matter how good the writing is. It's probably my ADD but I can’t help it.

I think what it comes down to is that I need something to *do* between the story segments or blending naturally with the story itself. Some kind of active mechanic that breaks up the reading and gives my hands something to engage with, even if it's relatively simple. The closest I've come to properly enjoying VN-style storytelling was Persona 4 Golden, and that worked because the dungeon crawling and social sim management kept pulling me back between the dialogue heavy sections. Same thing with the Ace Attorney games, the investigation and courtroom segments gave me enough interactivity that I never felt like I was just passively consuming. 

I also tried Danganronpa a while back on a friend's recommendation and that clicked in a similar way, where the class trial minigames and investigation phases kept the momentum going even during the heavier exposition stretches. As far as newer games go High Times looks great so far. I liked the demo a lot, the character creator is insane and its fully voice acted. It still feels like a VN to me and the light management and cooking aspects work great to balance out the dialogue. But that's more or less where my experience ends, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what's out there in terms of VNs (or VN adjacent games) that actually blend narrative with some gameplay.

What I'm looking for specifically are games where the visual novel storytelling is front and center but there's some more involved gameplay woven in between. The story quality matters to me a lot (that's the whole reason I keep trying to get into the genre), but I also know myself well enough at this point to accept that pure reading just isn't how my brain engages with games, despite my best efforts. 

I would love to hear some recommendations for games I could try.

I come back to Grim Dawn every single year like some kind of seasonal migration pattern that I have zero control over, and every single time I end up wondering how this game still holds up so well against stuff that came out half a decade or more after it. There's something about the compactness of it, where every system feels like it belongs and nothing is there just to pad out the runtime or justify a content roadmap.

I've spent serious time with most of the modern competition at this point, Path of Exile (way too many hours, still respect it enormously but I'm done with the trade treadmill for now), Last Epoch (really smart design especially the deterministic crafting, I come back to it for every bigger update for a while), Diablo 4 (gorgeous game, shallow endgame, done with it), and probably a dozen smaller titles that came and went and Grim Dawn still holds a permanent slot in my rotation.

The dual class system is one of the most elegant designs in the entire ARPG genre and I will argue this until I'm blue in the face. The moment you pick your second mastery and start seeing how two completely different skill trees interact with each other is when Grim Dawn transforms from a good ARPG into something that permanently occupies space in your brain. My latest run was a Ritualist (Necromancer plus Shaman) and the way pet scaling interacts with totems creates this beautiful organized chaos on screen that never gets old. Before that it was a Purifier playthrough where the fire damage synergies between Demolitionist and Inquisitor felt so natural that you'd swear the classes were designed specifically to be paired together.

What always gets me is how Grim Dawn manages to feel simultaneously old school and completely modern in its design philosophy. The crafting isn't trying to be a casino (looking at you, certain other ARPGs that shall remain nameless), the loot feels intentional without being boring, and the world building has this Lovecraftian meets industrial atmosphere that nobody else in the genre has even attempted to replicate. Titan Quest laid the groundwork for sure but Crate took that foundation and built something that stands entirely on its own in every way that counts.

And the expansions, Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods might be the best DLC value wise in any ARPG. Each one adds enough content and new mechanics to almost justify being a standalone game, but instead they fold into the base experience so seamlessly that you can play base GD and have hundreds of hours of fun, and then only get the DLCs and then play it all over again and feel like you didn’t actually miss out the first time, but now you’re getting the extra courses you skipped on your last dinner date. It’s just THAT good!

Just a little bit of additional glaze on Grim Dawn as I await July and with it…you know what <3

I keep seeing guys using AI for things that can so easily be handled with normal, predictable automation. I saw someone passing entire spreadsheets through OpenAI just to capitalize first names before uploading them to their CRM. I even read a post where a guy was using ChatGPT to trigger standard webhooks based on the time of day WTF? It's like people are bragging about using a tool just to say that they “added AI to their workflow”. Basic logic handles all of that perfectly without the risk of the model hallucinating or breaking because the API is having a bad day and it's easier to set up with ordinary automation tools.

My actual workflow hasn't changed much at all compared to what I was doing before with my outreach (although this is not to say that I haven’t improved it, just that I didn’t add heavy AI). All of the messages are written by hand because AI has a very hard time replicating the quality of the human touch. I’ll give you one example - about 3 months ago, my friend and I were trying to make an AI writing tool, specifically for LinkedIn messages and email because this is where 70% of most companies’ sales lie. It was the AI gold rush time and we went with it because why not try something new. We honed the agents almost to the point where they had pages of rules, hard-coded constraints, and dozens of examples to base their style on. And it worked, the first iterations with AI were usually about 80% of the quality of the writing we’d do, manually.

This was tested within the relatively same group of people. We each pulled about 200 LI leads, who all had similar backgrounds and had two agents with the same writing quality but different styles do the sequences based on their background, product, website - everything. Mind that all of this was done by the best Codex-built agents available to us (I’m saying this because there might be more advanced models we didn’t have access to). We even tested different LinkedIn automation tools - mine were wired through Expandi, with a custom sequence for each lead (AI-written based on previous research) and Expandi’s pre-warmup of the leads, and his were wired through Dripify with the same setup (with some minor tweaks because Expandi and Dripify dont share all the same features). Similar stuff was done with emails with Instantly on my side and Lemlist on his for A/B testing.

The results for the first run were pretty good, out of these 200 the response rates were very similar - I’d even say the same - as when we did everything manually. However, after the third or fourth run, the results started falling off, and we knew it wasn’t due to the tools because they all behave the same with hard-coded automations. It was due to consistency, AI is terrible at that.

Because we had so many rules, the quality of the written sequences started declining because AI was pigeonholing into more or less the same concept over and over again. No matter how much we tried exploring different message versions and content variations, it couldn’t unhook from the already established flow. On the other hand, loosening these rules and allowing AI the creative freedom just resulted in tons of slop and AI-sounding garbage. This is why the rules were set in the first place, to limit this slop and guide the agents into writing actual quality copies.

So, it was either:

1. Be satisfied with the current system and be okay with some decrease in quality over the increase in volume to compensate.
2. Build a new agent for each variation you want to include in your copy to retain quality.
3. Abandon AI and stick to doing stuff manually for now

We opted for the third option because it made most sense for us. Option 2 would take too much time, potentially even more than manual handling. Option 1 was a no no for us from the start because we don’t want to damage our brand, or anyone’s brand who’d use our tool.

Just to note because this might sound very anti AI - I absolutely see the value and understand the hype. It does the work very well, often better than most inexperienced people. But, if your goal is to build on quality rather than compensate with quantity, AI isn’t there yet. It might be possible to have both if we decided to go with Option 2 and dedicate a few more months to actually honing each agent - that way we could have both quantity and scalable quality. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a possibility at the time, but maybe some day.