I think it is probably next up on my list once I finish tears of the Kingdom. It’s either that or Dave The Diver
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Tears intimidates me with its vastness but i’m feeling that ‘very small person in a vast uncaring world’ thing with Dark Souls anyway. I played the Dredge demo and that was fun.
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I really enjoyed Dredge - I love anything that takes a mechanic that I don’t usually like (fishing) and recontextualizes it into something that I love. It was also a really good length about 10 hours to see everything.
My approach on Tears of the Kingdom has been to just do whatever feels interesting at the time and not worry about anything else. The main plot is about gaining the power needed to defeat the looming threat of Ganon, but it feels more like I have time to focus on getting stronger, rather than finishing quickly.
What I love about it is the way that it feels more like a world then most open world games do. I love that you find things mostly through environmental clues like the smoke of a campfire on the horizon, or some weird looking building off of the distance, or a strange looking thing on your map. It’s not the usual vomit icons on to the map. When you get a quest it will often not have a quest marker other than the location of the quest giver, and the quest description itself will mention some landmarks which you may or may not have found while exploring yet.
I also love that you feel like you are a presence in the world. While just wandering the world you’ll run across other people engaged in fights with monsters and you can save them and later if you run into then at a stable, town or on the road they will remember that you helped them. In fact just yesterday I had one character apologize for repeating dialogue because she had forgotten that we talked about it before. It’s all just a really interesting way of making you feel like you are part of this world.
I like that the power fantasy in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is very much about having the power to help people. Yes there is combat, but very few of the quests have to do with that - they are about fixing things helping people, finding people that have gotten lost, and fashion. Lots of fashion related quests.
I also like that Nintendo does not care whether or not you see everything in the game.
It is absolutely unbelievable to me that I have played this game for something like 350 hours, and have still not discovered over a dozen named, tracked side quests according to the post-game completion score
You’re going to have a good time playing it even if you don’t see all of the content and they understand that it’s no fun to have everything revealed on the map to ensure that no one misses anything.
Overall to me it just feels like the opposite of what most open world games are these days, and that seems to fit right into the grooves I have worn in my brain over the years
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I love this, most open world games just don’t have the world building nuance to even attempt this (looking at you, Ubisoft).
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That seems so clear to me after finishing Breath of the Wild a few weeks ago. I’m still working on how I feel about that. Despite not being a completionist, I like at least feeling like there was a fair shot available at getting everything. Because I zagged where I probably should have zigged very early in the game, I missed something pretty fundamental. I literally had to look up what I was supposed to do with all the seeds I was collecting…
This is brilliant design, though. I just need to sit with it for a while. Something I realized over the past decade is that Nintendo games tend to appreciate over time with me. I’ll play through them once and complain about aspects of the design and something I didn’t like about how they made the particular game challenging (or not). Then I’ll return to the game a few months later, cruise through it because I’ve “figured it out” or some nonsense I like to tell myself, and then talk about how brilliant the game actually is. Because Nintendo games tend to be more thoughtful than what you get elsewhere.
But right now I’m trying out the Switch port of Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, which I’m already sure is going to make me appreciate Breath of the Wild that much more.
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I really shouldn’t have said anything remotely insulting about Dragon’s Dogma. A few days later, a few hours into the game, and this game absolutely rocks. Breath of the Wild doesn’t care that you find everything in the game, but Dragon’s Dogma seems to be more agnostic about things. The world is open, how you build and use your character is open, and then you have this whole separate character that you can also mold any which way you want. You want to take a random quest and not sure you’re ready? Well, there’s no indication of what level you need to be, and chances are you aren’t ready. You can abandon a quest at any time, and certain quests may cancel or completely remove others.
I’m having a blast despite getting lost and dying more often than I’d like.
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Dragon’s dogma is bonkers. I honestly have no idea how the first one got made, much less how they’re getting a second one made. It’s just such a weird game with so many interesting ideas that in the first game are sort of half baked, but incredibly intriguing.
Plus I can climb on monsters. Game of the year
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It does feel like a bit of a mess while also managing to be very fun. There’s a lot going on and a lot to keep track of. I’ve never played a game before where my equipment was worn in layers!
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Why even CONSIDER Florida??? My geography sucks
I dunno but Floridians I know skew pretty queer so maybe some support would be welcome?
Oh, well then. I hope the evil fuckers go out of business, though I feel bad for the dev teams that are caught up in this mess
I have finally started and I have to say it’s kicking my ass and I am having a great time.
Between Tears, BG3, Starfield, Diablo 4, and other games that are very good, but I don’t care enough about to remember right now, I think 1998 and 2007 have some competition
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Not owning a Switch, and having a sort of “let the bugs shake out for a good few months” approach towards Bethesda,I think that BG3 will be taking up most of my time. You’re very right, though, quite the year!
What did you roll up?? I dipped my toes into pre-release with a rogue, and now I’m getting bardy with it. And bard is so great that I’m having trouble imagining playing as another class. Which is how I usually feel about my TTRPG characters, so Larian must be doing something right.
I’ve only managed to get a few hours in on a few different days since it was released, but I just love it. Also, best narration in a video game. Any game that I’ve played, anyway.
At the time I really didn’t feel like figuring out the intricacies of character creation, plus I’ve been avoiding reading much about it so I didn’t know what kind of respeccing there would be etc. So, I picked Asterion, or as Remap Radio host Renata Price calls him “our bisexual theater friend”. He’s a pretty good fit. I am sure that I will replay with a custom character in the future… probably a bard
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Asterion is cool AF, and seems like a good origin character to respec if you want, since his class doesn’t seem important to his story. Which seems pretty intriguing. Shit, now I’m feeling FOMO. Why’d I ask??
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Oh no! I wouldn’t worry about it too much. A lot of the stuff that I heard from non-spoiler podcast stuff is that they actually recommend going with rolling up your own character because you will get to experience the side character stories as part of your playthrough anyway,; and there is stuff for the custom rolled character path that you won’t see otherwise.
Plus, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to play through this thing at least three times, just because I know that I’m missing so much stuff just by making choices that close off branches. I do also at least have to try a dark urge run at some point just to see what it is like
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Yeah, the game seems vast. I don’t know if approaching it with completionist expectations will work out well for me, personally. I for sure want to do a Dark Urge character, though, like you said, to see what it’s like. Not for my first playthrough, though.
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Finally decided to go back to Like a Dragon after a several year hiatus. Got my butt handed to me by a boss and did some grinding and drifted away. Mindless grinding is what I needed now, so I did a whole bunch grinding jobs and then went ahead and beat that damn boss and the story is back on track now. Maybe I’ll even finish it before the next one is out.
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I might have to give this one a try.
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Another very BoingBoing computer RPG that probably fits nicely into the Venn diagrams of many mutants. It’s a dark fantasy in which you are a librarian and you are trying to rebuild a mystical library that was ruined by a fire.
There is an entire branch of the magic system called “Hushery”. I have not started it yet (Baldur’s Gate 3 is my master now), but it is definitely on the list.
I am also interested in Stray Gods, but waiting for more reviews - on the Besties they were saying that the songs were not grabbing them (and those boys love musical theatre), which is important for a musical. I really like the mechanic I heard described where you make lyric choices during songs to guide the story, though, and music is down to taste, so…
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