OP seems to want a very competitively focused tightly balanced experience, and Stellaris is absolutely anything but that. I enjoy the game, it’s fun, but I can’t imagine anyone considering it to be particularly balanced or enjoyable as a PvP/Versus experience.

I’ve never seen some specify that they want different second person pronouns, but hey new things every day. Man that is confusing to read, though.

I’ve sort of generally moved over to coop games in general nowadays.

Or even if I’m playing something that’s a versus sort of multiplayer- like Civ- I just try not to focus too much on winning. I’m there for the journey, not the destination. If I end up winning, cool. If I don’t, that’s also cool as long as I had fun along the way.

That GPU shortage absolutely blew. I used a 1650 the whole time, just sitting on my hands waiting for something to be vaguely affordable. Ended up snagging an RX 6600 right at the very very end of the shortage- caught it on a steep sale and paid $220 for it, and my exact model is $200 now so I did pretty good I think lol

If the most resource intensive thing you’re looking at is BG3 @ 1080p/60fps, you definitely won’t need to spend a few grand. Now is a great time to build. You can get pretty great price/performance at the moment.

Here’s a link to a build, I’d suggest buying the SSD in that list, and replacing your hybrid drive. You can keep the hybrid as a spare, if you want, but you don’t have to. If that solves your issue and gets you the performance you want, cool.

If it doesn’t solve your issues, you can just buy the rest of the parts in the list and build a new PC. It’s a PCPartPicker link for the UK, so it’ll tell you the best places you can order each part in your country. Alternatively, you can buy a prebuilt- probably wanna aim for $1000 USD or so for a prebuilt. I can’t really help you with that, not my thing.

If you do end up building your own there’s an extremely helpful very long Linus Tech Tips video that breaks down how to assemble the whole thing.

What’s your budget look like? Because if you don’t have much to spend, you’re best off just tossing an SSD in as your boot disk. That’ll help significantly. After that, I’d grab 32GB of matching RAM(make sure it’s DDR4, not DDR5) and try that.

After that, you’re basically building a new PC because to significantly upgrade your CPU- which is the next thing you’d want to- you’d need at minimum a new motherboard as well and probably a case since prebuilt cases can have proprietary layouts and be weird.

If you wanna build your own PC, but can’t figure out what parts would be good/what you actually need feel free to reply with a budget and your general location- country is good enough- and I can send you a link to a part list. I used to hang out in /r/buildapcforme and I kinda miss it lmao

I kinda like horror games. I just need some kind of mitigating factor. If it’s just me, the game, and all the spooky shit in it I have issues. Outlast was also not for me.

I’m really enjoying it quite a lot- I first played around a20, and then I picked it up again recently.

It isn’t a perfect game, but it’s a pretty decent experience that’s very unique.

I don’t think it’s worth $45. That seems a bit excessive. $20 or maybe even $30? Sure.

With that said, I haven’t followed the game’s development at all really. I could see a bunch of broken promises causing some completely understandable frustration with the devs.

Even if you don’t like horror movies, imo The Quarry is worth a try.

I don’t like horror movies, personally, and I really enjoyed The Quarry quite a lot. I like most of Supermassive’s games, but The Quarry is probably the best one, barring the newest Dark Pictures and Until Dawn as I’ve played neither.

Well, they’re gonna make you feel things if nothing else.

You have a Steam Deck- You can emulate a PS1. I have no idea how difficult to set up that would be, as I’ve never cared to play PS1 games myself. For the record, I’d be surprised if you couldn’t emulate a PS3, and RPCS3 is actually the easiest thing imaginable to get set up and working. In my experience the PS2 emulator, PCSX2 is very heavy hardware wise compared to RPCS3 so that might not actually run on a Steam Deck.

It’s for PSP/PS1. I’m not sure which you mean by PSX, because the only thing I’ve ever heard called a PSX is the weird Japanese only DVR/PS2 hybrid thing.

The sequel apparently has an english patch, but I can’t find one for the original.

Yes! With 1000hrs in Terraria, I agree. Terraria is a must-try. It might not click with you, but if it does…

As for SDV- I’d like to add that I very specifically do not like multiplayer. A large part of the fun of it, to me, is being able to play at my own pace. Having to set that pace with someone else isn’t enjoyable to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying multiplayer, I just don’t want anyone to think that there’s a ‘proper’ way to play the game. There’s not- you do you. The only exception is choosing jojamart. That is objectively wrong.

I grabbed Graveyard Keeper and I’m enjoying the hell out of it ~15hrs later. It’s kind of like if Stardew Valley dropped the focus on farming and the characters and instead added a tech tree and a very satirical dark-vibe.

A lot of games try to open with a character death and fail because they don’t really give you a reason to care about the character. The perspective swap in The Last Of Us’s intro is absolutely amazing for that exact reason- it’s hard not to empathize with someone when you’ve literally been in their shoes for a bit.

Absolutely not- you can just play TW2 which is significantly less dated than TW1, or just skip directly to TW3. Maybe watch a recap of the first two games if you do that, though.

I really gotta play Life Is Strange. I started playing it a looong time ago but didn’t get very far into it at all before I put it down- I don’t honestly remember why.

God, that game is so good.

SoD2 is a solid game! I wouldn’t describe it as amazing, but it’s pretty unique and scratches a particular itch.

I also found that weird juxtaposition interesting.

Ingame, he’s totally chill and reasonable. Outside the game he’s… a fuckin nazi? Huh?