Yup! The GMs are a lot more active recently, adding things to the game continuously. And now there’s regular scheduled events where the GMs push stories and interaction to a level we haven’t seen in a decade.
Oh wow that’s sick! I may have to get back in to it.
When I was playing it was still in beta and I was in Jr. High. I only quit because when they started charging money I couldn’t afford it and my parents certainly weren’t paying for it.
As an adult now I can totally afford it but I’m not sure my lifestyle allows me the time for it any more.
I was a healer named Hashak. Probably won’t ring a bell, but 🤷🏻♂️
The game went to no monthly fees a long time ago. They only charge for new accounts and characters. If you have an old account you can just log in and play. There’s a player run news and link site here, that has a link to ‘Clieunk’, a client for modern macs and news since 2001. Though we haven’t always been the best at sending in news.
Dying and losing your runes in Elden Ring isn’t as big a deal as you think. The runes you collect from general enemies throughout the game areas are mostly inconsequential across the whole length of the game. The bulk of your rune income is earned by killing bosses, and there’s almost always a grace to spend those runes after you down a boss.
I used to get the same anxiety as you when playing Souls-likes. Once I accepted that losing my runes a few times is inevitable when navigating an area for the first time, that anxiety lifted and I could focus on just exploring and having fun.
This game is actually a bit before my time since it was released two years before I was born, but the original XCOM game (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it’s just gotten better over the years with fixes and modding through OpenXcom.
I like the modern Firaxis games a lot too, and Xenonauts even moreso, but nothing has quite hit the same as the OG.
Depending on your puzzle solving abilities, Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds!) should only take around 15-20 hours.
Extra bonus, it can be played in very short sessions very easily and has a great in-game log of events in case you have to put it down for a little while.
Quake III but no I or II? I see you’ve got DOOM on your list, I’m curious, did you not like the first two quake games or just didn’t play them? Otherwise you’ve got my list down pat (plus a few extras).
Yes, FF14 does have options to skip story or (most) character levels. They are, like others have stated, primarily targeted towards players who are levelling alts (which the game by nature doesn’t really need as much).
FF14’s story is amazing, but it’s long and not necessarily something you want to repeat.
And while this is effectively buying levels, FF14 is not designed as a pay-to-win game. The amount of experience required to reach maximum level is balanced for someone who is playing the game legitimately – unlike P2W games where requirements are artificially inflated to encourage you to spend money. You will get most or all of the experience you need to hit max level just from following the storyline and a moderate amount of side quests (on one class anyways.)
That said, many FF14 players say that fashion is the true endgame… and there are a lot of nice-looking items on the store. So I suppose it depends on what your definition of “winning” is. 🙃
As others have said, the story skips are kinda awful.
Plus, I gotta say that it doesn’t really make a difference. They don’t give anyone an advantage over anyone else and don’t impact the way you experience the game at all. If you don’t like them, just don’t buy them.
At worst, you’ll run into some guys who are really bad because they skipped a huge portion of the game to get to modern content. But it doesn’t give them any edge over you by any means.
Again, I can’t stress enough how these affect other players 0%.
SWTOR definitely has purchasable power, since you can sell cosmetics from the real money store on the ingame auction house for ingame currency. With that, you’ll be able to buy gear enhancements on the auction house, that are required for endgame (VM operations, etc.)
Some of the best gear in ESO come from their paid DLCs and Chapters. Technically locked behind a paywall, but you’ll still have to farm the gear yourself.
The microtransactions themselves only offer cosmetics, consumables (that aren’t more powerful than the craftable options), and utility stuff (race-change tokens, and skipping some of the skillpoint grind).
There is a player market for exchanging Crowns (microtransaction currency) for gold, and another player market for buying raid clears with gold. Raiding (called Trials) offer some of the best PvE gear. You don’t need to buy clears if you’re skilled enough to run those Trials and can find groups to do it with you.
If you just want to enjoy the game without worrying about min-maxing your build, all the base-game and craftable options will do you just fine.
Interestingly I’d say Elden Ring is the most forgiving when it came to the “death penalty” you mention compared to all the other titles. There were far more rest points and things were so much more interconnected so you can stroll through/around most of the enemies to get back to where you died. Not always but a lot of times.
Also I found that really using your summons (especially mimic!) really helped with the difficulty. Also using magic makes life way easier. A lot of people just tend to go for the pure melee build which is making life really hard for yourself.
Yeah, I have no pride about using summons for the boss fights. I figure I can be l33t and solo bosses on my New Game+ play through if I ever get that far.
I do have alt-itis bad in these kinds of games. I started with a 2h Strength build, tried dual wield, sword and board, pure int mage, pure dex sword/bow, and dex/int spellblade. So far my 2h build and my spellblade have been the most fun for me. As you mentioned, I realized that the versatility of the spellblade worked really well… the ranged magic trivialized some areas and having a melee tool let me hold my own when range wasn’t an option. I am starting to think I need a better dex sword than the Estoc/Rapier tho. The poke poke move set is really bad against groups.
I did a int/dex build as well and loved it. I used the Demi Human Queens Staff and Moonveil Katana upgraded to the max, I may have switched the staff at some point but that took me very far. You should also look into the FP physik tears, especially the Cerulean Hidden Tear + Magic Shrouding Cracked Tear which makes it so easy to blast off some big spells for free and high damage. I especially recommend using it with the Comet Azur to wreck bosses right off the bat.
Guild Wars 2 basically makes it impossible to buy power – once you’ve purchased all the expansions, at least. Which is incredibly impressive considering there’s an official way in-game to trade real-world cash for in-game gold.
That’s one of the benefits of having gear be horizontal, you can get a build geared from a fresh account in a few days, and then there’s only minor optimizations you can make (there’s a gear rarity that’s higher than the readily-accessible exotic gear but basically you have to earn it, and then there’s legendary gear which is there for fashion and qol because you can change the stats on it at any time).
There’s other quality-of-life upgrades available in the gem store (real world money store) like infinite gathering tools and inventory expansions. That’s what I spent my IRL money on. But yeah, not really accurate to call that a “power” improvement.
Can you buy fractals infusions or other equipment upgrades with gems or gold, or do you have to acquire them through fractal dailies? I never had enough friends to do the fractals content.
Gems are the premium currency and what you can turn into gold by way of the black lion trading company. They’re almost entirely used for cosmetics or convenience items, because a lot of the stuff in game that you spend gold on that WOULD be a power boost is almost always associated with a resource that cannot be purchased with gold, and usually you get the lions share of the gold you would need by way of working towards whatever those resources are.
Death is another obstacle in all the soulslike I’ve tried. I’ve learned to not put so much stock in valuing souls/xp as they come and go, but more important is upgrading gear/learning move sets
I adore the Kingdom Hearts series, but I couldn’t even get through a few worlds in KHIII due to silly and younger tone of all the cutscenes. I get that at it’s heart it is a kids game or at least was. But their core audience has grown up.
I was so excited when it came out, only to be extremely turned off with the lack of FF characters and the over the top childish tone.
I’ve got a 1080p monitor and a 4k TV in my house and have used my computer plugged into each. The TV is also better for a lot of non-resolution reasons so sometimes I’ll want to move it there for those factors but in terms of displaying the 4k visuals, I honestly don’t think it makes a difference for me at all. Rendering the image at 4k internally has all sorts of benefits for the graphics but displaying that internally 4k image on the 1080 monitor retains all those benefits so I don’t see any point in buying a higher-definition monitor.
But the thing is, I never even wanted 4k on the TV at all. I didn’t want it to be smart, either. I just wanted good-looking colors and it became impossible to find a TV that put the effort into what I cared about that didn’t come with the other features. So I suspect that when I do ever replace my monitor, it’s probably also going to strong-arm me into having a higher resolution that I don’t actually want. And I can’t help but assume this is a big portion of what’s leading to these survey results.
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