u/varnajohn

I never really cared much about the Wild West, sure I played Outlaws as a kid but it didn’t really turn me on to the setting. But everything changed when I played RDR2, that game kind of showed me how incredibly peaceful, relaxing but also exciting things can get in the frontier.

When your most advanced weapon is a revolver or lever action rifle every firefight feels more skillful and visceral. You have to actually aim your shots, not just spray in the general direction. Sadly western games are really few and far between, despite most of them being surprisingly cool it's just not a popular setting. And I’m not specifically seeking out games like RDR2 (not sure something like that even exists) but like anything in this setting.

Recently I had a lot of fun with the Outlaws remake, they did a really good job on it and even added some missions, the nostalgia was off the charts for me. The Dark West looks excellent, and I absolutely love guns in ARPGs so I’m really hyped for that but I don’t know when it's coming out, hopefully soon. But apart from that I’m not finding many new games with this flavor, so I’m scouring steam for cool games I may have missed.

If anyone has played Desperados I would love to hear what it's like, that one flew under my radar. I don’t typically play that type of tactics game, but it looks fun. Also not sure if I should start with the 3rd one or do I need to go chronologically to get the story.

What’s the most relaxing or favorite setting for you? I love this sub and I’m wondering if anyone else here is a fan of this kind of western frontier theme or am I just weird.

Modern ARPGs usually fall into a rhythm where you spend your time clearing out packs of enemies to get to a boss at the end, so you usually need to do both. Your build needs at least some AoE to shred packs efficiently and enough damage to kill the boss in a reasonable amount of time, usually some survivability as well.

For me something about the way the loot drops when you are zooming through packs is just the most satisfying part of the genre. Currently testing out some bladedancer builds in Last Epoch but generally in every game I gravitate towards some fast moving AoE build. And for some reason I don’t particularly enjoy boss fights, maybe the first time I fight a boss it can be fun, but after that I just want to get it over with.

I have seen a few ways games reduce the repetitive feeling of boss fights. Path of Exile has a decent system with the map mods and random affixes, Last Epoch does something similar with Echo modifiers carrying over to the timeline bosses and Grim Dawn has those random mutators. They are all good ideas, but for me after a while it still feels like you have seen it all. You eventually just experience most of the different modifier combinations and the fights become somewhat repetitive again.

The most enjoyable boss fights were probably when I played PoE 2 with hardcore mode, just because they really got my adrenaline pumping, and they were pretty hard since I played like that on my first try lol. Not something I can replicate again since I know them now.

I was watching some speedruns of classic games (Crash Bandicoot) and it got me thinking about how brutally difficult a lot of games used to be. I know part of it was just me being a kid and kind of sucking, and the amount of info you can find online if you get stuck these days, but the games themselves were designed to be harder as well. 

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but I’ve definitely noticed that what used to be “normal” difficulty is pretty much what “hard” is right now. We've got vastly better hardware, controllers that actually respond properly, and decades of accumulated gaming skill, yet games have never been easier. When you play something older you can feel the difference immediately.

Take for example Diablo 2, almost everyone has played it. Try doing even the nightmare difficulty without a really solid build and you will see how ridiculously hard it is. Contrast that to modern ARPGs and the difference is pretty apparent, especially when it comes to how forgiving they are with respeccing and things like that. Back then if you screwed up your build you pretty much had to start over with a new character.

I mostly like non live service ARPGs and none of them really feel that brutal compared to the old classics, even on higher difficulties (apart from No Rest for the Wicked that one is pretty hard).

 I just got done with Dragonkin and it was pretty nice to have the higher difficulties available right away (up until extreme that is, the higher ones you need to level up for). Nice that they don’t treat your first playthrough as a tutorial which seems to be the trend. I am looking at The Dark West next, the demo is fun and I love the setting (occult western), also guns are my favorite weapon in these games but not a lot of ARPGs have them. I’m just waiting for the release to play on a harder mode since the demo doesn’t have difficulty options.

The genre that this doesn’t seem to be true for are soulslikes, but to be fair we didn’t really have those back in the day. But it's one of the rare genres where high difficulty is kind of expected, which goes to show modern gamers want a challenge, but the developers are scared to actually provide that, and want everyone to be able to finish their games. I personally think the Celeste way where you can turn on an “assist mode” or some sort of cheat mode to make the game easier, for singleplayer games, is a good way to do that. Instead of just dumbing down games for everyone.

We are old enough to remember the quarter eating arcade games that were brutally difficult on purpose so it's not surprising that modern games feel easy in comparison. I’m just hoping the popularity of soulslikes helps developers realize a lot of people still want to play challenging games.

My wife has been trying to convince me to do some co-op gaming with her for a while now and I finally gave in. I don’t think I did this since I was like 14 and I totally forgot how much fun it was, we had a blast.

We played It Takes Two, that’s what she has been wanting to play for quite some time now. I thought it was a game for kids (and it kind of is) but we still really enjoyed it. After online gaming became popular, couch co-op was kind of forgotten, but it really needs to make a comeback, it's just as fun as ever.

We immediately started planning what to play next once we finished it. It’s probably going to be Split Fiction next, it looks pretty similar so I figured we can’t go wrong there. But we also found some other really nice looking games. Water Me & You looks great, my wife likes the characters and I like the building aspect (I love cozy stuff like that) so we will definitely be checking it out when it comes out. Another one that looks cool is Hela, also why do all these games have a “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” vibe (not complaining, just wondering)?

It’s weird how much the setup can impact your enjoyment of the game, I don’t think it would be nearly as fun to play these if I couldn’t see her reactions when she messes up or celebrate together when we beat a hard section or boss. Also it was pretty funny how much pressure you feel to not mess up when the person relying on you is sitting right there watching your every move.

I just wanted to post this to remind people that this is still a thing, and we can still have fun playing games together just like we did as kids, I just wish there were more games made for this. Also open for any suggestions on what we should play.

This weekend I had one of those unexpectedly profound parenting moments. I feel compelled to share it and you are the only people who'll actually get it. I was playing some Diplomacy is Not an Option at the computer when my son clambered up into my lap to watch. And I almost had a flashback at that moment to myself doing the same with my dad, while he was running around in Diablo 1.

I vaguely remember how it felt, I think I was about 4-5 years old, everything on the screen was confusing and fascinating. I think it was mostly Diablo and Doom he was obsessed with at the time. He had me press the space button to shoot and it felt so good, I couldn’t get enough. So I tried to do the same for my kid by letting him use the flashy powers in DINAO on huge groups of enemies to send them flying, he loved it. It was such a lovely full circle moment for me I nearly cried.

The next day I wanted to see if I could come even closer to the original situation by playing a similar game so I tried with Last Epoch to see if he would find that interesting. He was completely mesmerized, which isn’t surprising considering I played one of my endgame characters (devouring orb void knight) which means I run around super fast clearing hordes of enemies with pretty over the top skill effects which had him going “wooow”. I had him click around a bit and it was pretty exciting for him, I felt weirdly proud for some reason.

I guess some things about gaming never changed. Despite the hobby evolving so much it still delivers the same kind of bonding moment for me and my kid like I had with my dad. 144hz flat screens replaced the big CRT boxes and the cases are usually black instead of the cigarette stained beige we were used to, but fundamentally I’m doing the same things my dad did when he was my age and I was a rugrat.

Has anyone else had moments like this? I would love to hear about your gaming stories with your family, from back in the day or something recent with your own kids.

Trying to solve a nice little problem and figured this was the right crowd. My dad was a proper Diablo devotee back in the day, thousands of hours across diablo 1 and 2. I remember sitting in his lap while he was farming bosses and how fascinating I found it as a kid. But he basically stopped gaming years ago and hasn't touched an ARPG (or any other video games) since, so he's completely missed everything since.

Now he's got the itch again. He saw me playing Dota 2 and asked me questions about it, which made me realize he thought it was an ARPG. After explaining to him that its not at all like Diablo he kind of admitted he misses playing stuff like that, but he also said he played wayyyy too much Diablo back in the day, and he explicitly doesn’t want to play something from that franchise (Which was my first suggestion naturally). I am not that into the genre personally, the only ones I really played were Last Epoch and Grim Dawn, pretty casually too, so I wouldn’t say I’m that knowledgeable. But I loved the SSF stuff in Last Epoch and the skill trees were really fun (customizing every skill). I’m not sure if my dad would be into that though.

I think he is looking for something really simple and close to Diablo 2. I know it would make the most sense for him to play resurrected or one of the newer Diablo games but he won't budge on it, says Diablo took too much time from his life already lol. So I’m basically looking for the game that is closest to what he is used to, so I’m asking here because I figure you guys would know best which game has the closest feel.

So that’s basically what I’m looking for. A simple ARPG that will feel somewhat familiar for someone who was a casual but dedicated player of Diablo ages ago. Thanks in advance for your help.

I’m looking for something interesting and fresh after playing RPGs for decades. A bit bored of the standard protagonist, the classic DND system is great, but I’ve played pretty much all the standard classes a lot at this point. 

I’m looking for something where your character is something else, ideally different enough from the norm that it impacts all the npc interactions in the game. Old school games like Planescape Torment come to mind, or playing a low intelligence character in the old Fallout games, you could see how every NPC interaction was different because of your strange player character.

In most RPGs your identity changes what equipment you use and very little else, maybe you get some unique opening sequence or something, but a warrior and a mage still walk into the same tavern and pick from the same three dialogue options for the most part. I'm hungry for games where who your character actually is reshapes how you engage with the entire world. I would be fine with no character creator or starting options as long as the protagonist is interesting.

I’ll mention some games I’ve played that did this right. Loved how Disco Elysium did it, you're an alcoholic detective with a broken mind and the game does a great job of reacting to that and reflecting it. You really feel like you are seeing the world from his perspective, and the NPCs treat you as you would expect. Citizen Sleeper puts you in the body of an escaped android worker just trying to survive on a decaying space station. And it really feels as bleak and hopeless as the premise implies.

I’m wondering what I should play next. Since Disco was so good I’m thinking about Esoteric Ebb, heard good things about it. The protagonist seems pretty fun (An incompetent cleric) but I’m not sure how generic the setting will feel since it's pretty much standard fantasy. Looking at these disco-like games I also ran into Hollow Home. Looks pretty unique, you play a kid stuck in a demolished city in Ukraine. It’s based on true events so that’s pretty interesting, and I don’t really know of any other RPG where you play a child so that sounds cool, since combat and intimidation are probably not going to be an option here I’m wondering how most situations in the game will play out, will give it a shot when it comes out.

I’m looking for more suggestions along these lines, open to trying pretty much anything, I would even be willing to play some flawed or janky games as long as they give me an interesting unique experience.

I think I've finally reached my limit with WoW, and I mean properly reached it, after more years than I want to admit (on and off since TBC). I've bounced between retail and classic for a while now hoping one would reignite the spark, and instead I've just burned out on both tbh.

Retail is the endless gear treadmill and every expansion feels like more of the same for me at this point. Classic was nostalgic and a lot of friends came back for it, which was lovely for a while but I've now played it too much and it just feels tedious, especially if I want to actually play at a high level. I just don’t think the game has anything left to offer to me anymore, I haven’t logged in for the past week or so. 

A different theme park isn't the answer though, at least I don't think it is. I've tried FFXIV, I've tried GW2, and as good as they are, they're still fundamentally the same type of game. I end up comparing them to WoW and nitpicking a lot of the stuff that WoW does better (which for me is mostly the feel of the combat). I'm really craving something radically different, a proper palette cleanser that makes my brain work in a new way rather than just a rehash of what I’m already used to.

I’ve been looking for really unique and interesting MMOs just to see what’s out there and find stuff to try out. 

So far I found Screeps: World, which looks completely strange. It's an RTS MMO where you program your units, I know how to code so that sounds like fun. Though a lot of people are complaining that it's really unbalanced and unfair for new players. 

Dominus Automa which I find interesting because it reminds me of Runescape, but without the one thing I really couldn’t stomach in that game, the really boring repetitive grind, here it's automated. They describe it as an incremental MMO which seems pretty unique, and I’ve enjoyed a few incremental games before so I will be giving this a shot when it comes out.

And the third one I’m considering is Loftia, a friend played the beta and is nagging me to play with her when it comes out. So I will be at least giving it a try, I haven’t played any of the “casual” MMOs so far but I’m pretty curious to see how the systems and basic loop is different from what I’m used to. I’m hoping its way more relaxing and the community is more friendly than the typical MMO. According to my friend the people were really nice during the beta.

Basically I’m looking for games that don’t have anything that would remind me of WoW, a total full palette cleanser that will feel like a breath of fresh air for me. Most of the games I found aren’t actually out yet so I’m looking for some suggestions from people who know the MMO landscape a bit better, since I pretty much just focused on WoW.

I’ve been on Steam since I bought the Orange Box ages ago, but over time I feel like it's getting difficult to actually find games I want to play on the platform itself. It’s like they are changing things gradually that make it harder for you to see a game's ratings and the sheer number of releases also further complicates things. It's almost starting to remind me of the Epic store (ugh) with its non existent ratings which feels like a play to kind of trick you into buying games you wouldn’t have even looked at. I used to kind of enjoy just browsing on Steam but I’ve pretty much stopped doing that altogether.

The biggest problem with this is I feel like I’m missing games that I would have discovered easily before, usually indie games with smaller marketing budgets. Like I found Croak on reddit a couple of days ago, I’m a huge platformer fan and somehow Steam didn’t show it to me. Feels like I have to go out of my way a bit or I risk missing stuff I’m actually interested in. The algorithm mostly shows me the big obvious titles I already know about. I’ve played pretty much every popular 2 player co-op game with my girlfriend, despite owning all of them on Steam, my girlfriend found out about Water Me & You on tiktok instead of the discovery algorithm showing it to me. I really don’t get this, I literally own 90% of the games in its category.

My Steam has basically turned into a launcher and a wallet, other than maybe I read reviews of games I hear about before I buy them but that's it. Scrolling through pages and pages of popular new releases is not something I do anymore (and I used to do that almost daily). Reddit does most of the heavy lifting these days, I try to find all the relevant subreddits for what I’m interested in. There’s a few youtubers that have similar tastes to mine that I follow, and some games get recommended by friends before I see them anywhere else, this literally never even happened to me before (I used to be the guy that hears about pretty much every game first). I don’t want to bash the platform or algorithm too much, it may have something to do with the sheer number of games released nowadays or my lack of patience, but idk, something feels off.

Am I alone in this or has discovery just gotten much worse over time? Maybe there’s some trick with filtering or something I don't know about.

Getting older in this hobby is a slow exercise in humility, at one point you can literally tell your reaction times are not what they used to be. This is especially true for competitive games that rely on twitch reflexes like FPS or League. There's other ways to stay competitive but you can’t really rely on outreacting your opponents anymore.

The only genres I can still consider myself pretty good at are platformers and FPS to my surprise. What we have going for us is our patience, our experience and the years of muscle memory, but that can take you quite far.

I’ve been playing metroidvanias and platformers my whole life basically, and that muscle memory and skill never really leaves you. I was really good at games like Super Meat Boy when it came out, and I even did pretty well in Celeste (none of that golden strawberry stuff though, I’m not that obsessed). Hollow Knight was also something I had no problem with, beat it pretty easily, Silksong too recently. Haven’t really ran into a platformer that felt very hard (apart from crazy Celeste challenges and those IWBTB games). I just got done with Nine Sols and wanna check out Croak next when it comes out, the demo feels great, and I love the handrawn artsyle. The most important factor for me is that the movement tech feels fun and fluid, and it has that for sure.

As far as FPS games go I routinely do really well in Counter Strike just because I actually have the patience to hold an angle the whole round if I need to. And my experience with the game kind of manifests itself as “game sense”, I can pretty much predict my enemies movements which is always better than relying on reaction time. And the spray patterns are so ingrained in my muscle memory they are second nature at this point. And I’ve never stopped playing them so my skill never had a chance to rust, while I can’t react fast anymore I still hold my own in a firefight in pretty much any game, DayZ, CS, Tarkov etc..

I've come to think of it as trading reaction time for game sense and patience, it feels so good when you just outsmart your opponent and they stand no chance despite probably being way quicker than you. I was wondering if there's other people that have this same experience with getting older and trying to keep the rust off of your gaming skill, I feel like I’m still good.

For me there's something really fascinating in games that are so complex or randomized that everyone gets a different experience, and no two playthroughs are the same. I want a game with so many moving parts that no two people who play it end up in the same place. This can be through a complicated build system, or procedural levels and loot, things like that.

ARPGs were the first games that introduced me to this. The good ones hand you these sprawling skill trees and randomised gear. Even if you play the same build twice the characters can end up wildly different, depending on what kind of loot you find. And most of the games have systems complex enough that allow for a crazy number of combinations. 

I’ll use my two favorites as an example (but most ARPGs give me this feeling). Last Epoch has the skill trees on every skill, insane amount of options and combos you can come up with just based on that. And then you have the items as well which also open up so many options, especially when you take crafting into account. Feels really nice with the SSF (Circle of fortune faction) mechanics, I don’t really like relying on trading. And then Path of Exile famously has the huge sprawling passive skill tree which is hard to even wrap your head around. And the crafting is so complicated that for me whatever I do with it I feel like I’m probably being stupid and wasting my currency lol. The complexity makes the game really replayable but also feels a bit intimidating for some players.

The other genre that satisfies my need for being a unique snowflake are roguelikes (traditional ones). The randomized procedural mechanics are core to the genre itself. The whole point is to come up with a game that offers a different experience every time, and it works great. My favorites are Caves of Qud and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

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?