Arkhive (they/she)
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There is a very well done in game journal, that is essentially the wiki. It includes crafting recipes, as well as more free form, expository writing on general gameplay and progression. Most mods also do a good job of including their own journal pages and info as well. Though there’s some things that take struggling on before the info provided fully clicks. There is a prospecting system for example to help you locate ores since they are rarer with bigger deposits. I struggled with it for a while, but eventually you develop this sort of intrinsic sense of how to use the info the tools provide. There’s a very satisfying progression in most of the game systems from floundering at first, then understanding the numbers behind it, then internalizing the optimization and it becoming instinct. Very much matching the layperson to apprentice to specialist progression. I’ll finally add that the game does have sort of RPG style classes that encourage people to play multiplayers and specialize into a particular job. There’s is a commoner class that doesn’t have any drawbacks, but also doesn’t have the bonuses the other classes get which is okay for single player, but to give a small spoiler,
Tap for spoiler
I’d suggest using the tailor class for your first solo play through. Winters are brutal and being able to repair clothes rather than always have to craft new ones is huge. Also flax, plant lots of flax as soon as possible.
Don’t be afraid to abandon a save after a few in game days and take what you learned into a new one. Or check out the difficulty settings/sliders, there’s lots of ways to tune your experience. If you don’t get your feet under you it can be grueling to try to recover.
If you know Terrafirmacraft it’s roughly that. Basically to even get to a point where you’re chopping down trees, there’s a few hours of gameplay trying to replicate fairly realistic early human technological progression. But it has a shockingly good late game with quests and dungeons and bosses. Due to the slower nature of the tech progression, and you being a relatively fragile creature in a shockingly cruel world, the game feels like it’s always going somewhere. There is always something you can be doing to prep in some way.
It uses a lot of diagetic UIs and in world crafting which I love. Modding it is as easy as clicking the install button on the mod webpage and it launches the game and prompts the install. I do suggest using some mods, even on a first play through, because a lot of them are just things that make sense, and often get worked into the full game over time.
A couple more game changing mods I’d suggest are rivers, wind, sailboats, and canoes. Basically anything that makes water a slightly more viable form of transport once you’ve got a bit of tech. The game has more or less accurate geology, so materials will only spawn in specific rock types, and those rock types only occur in specific areas due to tectonic plate interactions. This means you’ll often go on loooonnngg expeditions to find a particular material, and I find water transport to be a very balanced tool with rivers because you cannot sail or paddle up stream, but downstream is very fast. You can use this to your advantage in some ways, while still forcing you to portage your gear at other times.
Anyway, I love this game. Check out the comm for it! [email protected]
Matrix, and there’s a P2P one that just went around called PeerSuite? Both are far from perfect, but at least aren’t yucky corpo platforms. Sorry to come across so harsh in the initial comment, the tone in my head was light hearted I promise lol. More of a “I’m happy to help figure out an alternative communication stream in order to make me a useful tester.” Might be worth making your game a Mastodon account to direct people to from the Steam page? Could be a good spot to encourage people to learn about the fediverse and provide a channel for updates and a message system for testers? Idk. Discord is somewhat unique still in the type of organizational tools it provides, hence the love-hate relationship I have with it lol
EDIT: I realize I didn’t really interpret the question correctly on my initial read. This is meant more for old games, not sleeper online games that are just good in their own right without being live service. Perhaps a more fitting answer would be AssaultCube. One of the first multiplayer FPS games I played. There probably aren’t any official servers anymore, but community hosted ones were supported, so I’m sure it’s still around.
Straftat. Free to play, fast paced, 1v1 movement shooter. It’s a wildly under appreciated game that would hugely benefit from a small to medium sized, consistent player base. It does have a paid dlc, that mostly functions as a tip for the dev. The DLC has some cosmetics and a few maps, but it’s not really gatekeeping any of the fun of the game, plus it’s only $5 USD so I just bought it and considered it the price of the game.
I’m a fan of taking turns “driving” for slower paced logic or puzzle games. Titles that come to mind:
- Myst
- Curse of the Golden Idol
- Summertime Madness
- Chants of Sennar
- Superliminal
- Viewfinder
- Baba is You
I can highly recommend all of these as they almost universally benefit from more minds working on them together. I would say Baba is the only one that gets REALLY challenging, but there are good mind and logic bending puzzles throughout them all!
EDIT: I’ll also add that Myst, Golden Idol, and Chants of Sennar (Summertime Madness maybe a little) all benefit from solid note taking and map making This provides a great job for the “copilot” while the other person is managing the actual input device.
If you’re open to the idea of ditching a Microsoft product, I’d suggest Vintage Story as a Minecraft alternative that I think has a nicer aesthetic. It’s meant to be a sort of slow, “grindy” game, but if you sort of rewire your thinking to it being a slice of life game, akin to Stardew, I think it’s very fun. Fair warning the early game can be very punishing if you’re brand new to it, so explore the world and difficulty setting when you make your first save.
Somewhat cozy game with a femme lead I’m excited for is Cairn. It’s got a demo at the moment, but I’m very much looking forward to the full game. It’s technically a survival game about rock climbing, but if I had to guess the story will center the main character going through a lot of personal growth while attempting to scale a mountain (a la Celeste, also a great game) and overcoming a lot of adversity to regain some self confidence.
Among plenty of the other things mentioned, I enjoy “diagetic interfaces”. Ways of interacting with a game’s systems that stay grounded in the reality of the setting of the world. Dead Space is a prime example, but I’ve been enjoying a lot of the crafting in Vintage Story for this reason. The smithing in particular has had me hooked for a while. Hammering out my armor and weapons voxel by voxel made finally suiting up and feeling ready to take on a boss that much more satisfying.
I often get game choice paralysis, so I have extensively categorized my game library to help with both decision making, but also time management. I use numbers to force my categories to sort in the order I want rather than alphabetically by category name.
Also worth noting I only started doing this after I stopped playing an MMO and reclaimed whatever % of my life.
First is my “currently playing” category. This contains roughly one game from each other category/genre.
- A story driven RPG (Witcher 3 at the moment, the Metro series after)
- A rhythm game (McOsu, an Osu mod)
- An optimization/building game (Shapez 2 but maybe back to factorio soon)
- An action rougelike (going back to Hades before Hades 2)
- A deck builder (currently MTGA, but my group really wants to ditch WotC)
- A puzzle game (probably Blue Prince once it comes out)
- A dedicated indie game spot (the Cairn demo)
- A few other odd games that I like having quick access to because I like them
There is sort of a secret bonus game to this section, but it also sits outside of this system entirely, because I will ALWAYS go back to it. And that’s the “block game” category. For a long time this was various flavors of modded Minecraft, but I’m so fed up with Microsoft enshitifying my baby that I’ve jumped ship. I’m playing Vintage Story (also heavily modded) and it’s just a better game top to bottom in my opinion.
Then there is an “Interesred” category for games I’ve either been told I should try and also think I might enjoy. I try to keep this small, following roughly a similar “one per genre” as the previous category. I honestly don’t really touch these much, it’s more there for when a spot is freed up in the “currently playing” section. This is also where demos for unreleased games go.
Then there is a “favorite” and “liked” category which largely contain games I’ve played before or are intentionally hyper replayable. This has a lot of my favorite puzzle games, a lot of the various rogue likes with a different game as the core mechanic (think peglin and ballionaire) stuff like that. Basically things to sift through if none of my current games are sparking an interest.
After this is just genre categories used for storage essentially so I can collapse them and not be sick scrolling the whole list.
I have a decent amount of time to game, but also work a very physical job, so I need to be very into a game to prioritize it over sleeping and such.
I finally kicked my Destiny 2 habit by installing Linux, and while I absolutely miss the gameplay and my team, I haven’t really looked back. I’m involved and interested in so many other things now. I still see the odd post that gives ma a pang of FOMO, but the thought of booting into my windows install makes me want to peel my skin off with tweezers.
Not an MMORPG by any means, but I’ve been really enjoying a “Minecraft like” called Vintage Story that is giving me the same feeling. The commodification of Minecraft has finally frustrated me enough and I’m jumping ship.
Obligatory, and please please take this as the most silly of jokes: pushes up glasses UUUMMMMM akchually WINE is a compatibility layer, not an emulator, its name literally stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Again, it’s just kind of a running bit in the Wine community. The same thing is right at the top of the projects home page if my memory serves, and it is definitely easier to refer to it as an emulator. “Compatibility layer” just doesn’t have the same ring to it lol
I’ve stopped playing since Microsoft copilot was announced and I fully ditched windows, but I held on until the final raid because of the gun play, nostalgia, and the representation present in both the studio and the game. I grew up with the Marathon games, and the early Halo series. The DNA of those games is still there and I can’t help but love it. I’ve been chasing a single player experience that gets even close to Destiny’s feel for so long. The System Shock remake is getting close, but I would love a PvE only game from Bungie. For a long time (read pre-Sony-buyout) Bungie was also a sort of hold out for various minority representations I try to support. The studio’s media showed an employee base that is diverse and they often did a good job pushing back against players saying any sort of agenda was being pushed just for including diversity in the game. This made them a company I was much more willing to throw money at, compared to say, activision/blizzard. That sentiment as largely faded for me as the studio had been turned into a “for the shareholders” cow Sony can milk.
I was just recommended a video about this game earlier today. I had already opened this thread, but had not read everything yet. I’m taking it as a sign. Terrafirmacraft is one of my fav Minecraft modpacks, and Vintage Story looked to lean into what TFC was trying to do to Minecraft. Cheers for the recommendation!!
Yeah. I’m so captured by the setting and enough of the characters that I’m seeing the light and dark saga through to the end, but I largely agree with the sentiment towards the game at the moment. I’ll let the studios next release come out and really gauge my interest carefully. Bungie has set my personal style for gamefeel and almost every game I enjoy, I enjoy due to its moment to moment similarity to destiny. Robo Quest, Metal Rising: Hellsinger, Bullets Per Minute, to name a few PvE based games.
That goes all the way back to playing halo on 2 original Xbox’s wired together in the attic of my friends barn at 3am, and even back to Marathon as a younger kid. On top of that, compared to pretty much every other major FPS title, the studio stands behind a lot of causes I align with. The representation in the game, and seeing myself and people like me present in destiny’s vision of the future un-ironically gives me a warm feeling.
I was just talking with some friends that an extraction shooter with world events the complexity of destiny raids would actually be super cool. A fireteam activates a raid (like sea of thieves forts) and begins diving into it, but then other teams can follow them in as the original groups clears encounters and puzzles. Maybe the teams following them in have some smaller scale mechanics to do, then there’s a heavy fight back out with whatever loot. Could make for the gameplay loop gambit could have been. I think the studio has potential to do the PvEvP really well, but we shall see.
Red Strings Club!!! Woah!! Been a minute since I thought about that game. Very, VERY, good. Sort of a precursor to Potion Craft in a way, that really didn’t over stay its welcome. The pacing was great, difficulty curve was great, and it had a distinctly finite story that still left you satisfied. I’ve bounced off potion craft a few times because at a point the scale, and subsequent grind, is a bit much for me. Red Strings Club nails the middle ground with good increasing complexity without becoming a chore.