When I was a kid I was super into pokemon. I loved playing the games and they stood out to me for one reason: they were challenging. My first game was Black, and I got stuck on the first gym leader for a few days, but when I figured it out it was immensely satisfying. I would hit roadblock, I would struggle, and eventually I overcame it. Then my friend introduced me to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and it got even harder. I honestly think that the final dungeon of Explorers of Time made me smarter or something. It forced my dumbass child brain to think outside the box and find solutions on my own.
Then Pokemon X and Y released, and it was the most stupidly easy game ive ever played. And it kept getting easier after that. Add onto that the worsening quality and I stopped caring about Pokemon. My friend who is really into Pokemon hasnt bought a new game in years, he only plays Romhacks or replays the old games.
Anyone of my simulation/management games. Whether it’s running a hospital, creating an auto manufacturing assembly line or helping some brave adventurers find oxygen I’m always more at peace with a single player goal driven experience.
Double jumping. Something about double jumping just always feels really liberating. It’s such a strange concept as well, with no analogue in the real world.
I would not do mods your first play-through. However, what I would recommend, is just doing whatever it is you feel like doing when you play. See a cave you want to walk into? Do it. Did you get assigned a new quest that looks more interesting than the one you’re doing? Hop on it. Don’t let certain storylines drag you down if you don’t enjoy them.
I have a few, Skyrim is my biggest one. I basically maladaptive daydream Skyrim. If I’m feeling bad I play through it in my head. Some others are No Mans Sky, Vampire Survivors, and generally pixel games are always really comforting to me. I also like to go back and play dragon fable sometimes when I need some nostalgia.
Holy shit, I thought I was alone in the big gaming world!
The reason I never played it is because at the time the game was out, my PC couldn’t handle it, so I gave up after my sad attempts to sit through the unplayable frames. And by the time I upgraded, there were simply too many games to steal my attention entirely - that’s how it been ever since.
I want to play it, though. I never considered it boring - I liked it even when I wasn’t that interested in fantasy, and now I’m gravitating even more towards it. Hope to get my hands down to it one day, but with Starfield (hopefully) coming out this year, and with The Outer Worlds to beat before that happens, I think I’m not slaying any dragons any time soon.
I have spent probably hundreds of hours in Skyrim at this point, but I would say the most fun playthrough I did was actually on the Nintendo Switch. I think that I enjoyed it because I didn’t stop every hour to install a bunch more mods, since that wasn’t an option (and I guess having it anywhere was nice too…).
If you want a bit of a smoother experience, I would recommend SkiUI on PC and Alternate Start, but I would also suggest trying it vanilla too as it can be a bit prickly to get SKSE (requirement for SkyUI) set up if you’ve never done it before.
I don’t recommend doing what I did and installing 200 mods, finally getting it all working and then not actually going back to the game. Do we really need 12 million K textures?
Deus Ex, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Cyberpunk 2077. Like you said, they are games I like to get lost in, just walk/drive around in, soak in the ambience. I like to pretend I’m there; it’s a great escape, like you said, comforting.
Try not to have an overly rosy retrospection about this. There were plenty of crappy, cash-grabby games in decades past. We just don’t remember them because they were crappy, cash-grabby, and not worth remembering. They hadn’t invented microtransactions yet, but that’s just one more flavor of crappiness.
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