Stonehearth was eventually abandoned, unfortunately, but the game is very much playable. The devs didn't just ghost the playerbase but had a kind of transfer of knowledge with the modders and the game lives on.

What's great about Stonehearth is it's multiplayer. A multiplayer colony management sim where two players can build an interconnected city (technically 2 separate colonies) and command an army to fend off increasingly difficult waves of goblin raids.

I've had so many fun games with my wife, we'll settle next to a cliff side, she has hearthlings (i.e. hobbits) and me as dwarves. I'd take care of mining and build all into the mountain, make us the best weapons with world-class smiths and she'd take care of the food, amazing cooks, animal husbandry, etc.

Funny you say that, Daggerfall is fondly remembered but only in spite of it’s procedurally generated overworld. Daggerfall’s openworld is extraordinarily barren, remarkably so. You literally will get lost if you walk more than 5 minutes from a town, and not in a fun way but because every direction you look is literally the exact same three tree and rock sprites and you lose sense of direction. Daggerfall’s overworld is so bare and empty and large it actively encourages you to engage in the fast travel system with fleshed out gameplay mechanics like camping supplies and vehicles.

I see what you’re getting at, I could see how someone might assume an seamless outer space based on that. As soon as you realize how much of a technical undertaking that is though, it’s easy to assume they wouldn’t go that route and not have blown that horn 2+ years ago as a huge feature. Something like that combined with a BGS RPG would be massive and I can’t imagine a world where a company like BGS or Microsoft would be wanting to keep that a secret until release.

That surprises me… each BGS game is extraordinary iteritive over the previous one ever since Morriwind. They’re like 20 years into iteritive design and arguably each iteration, while doing some interesting new things also takes a step or two back. Very obvious looking back over their history. They’re really a one-note-studio.

To all of a sudden expect Starfield would manage to be that revolutionary (to their formula) seems shortsighted. Even the concept of having a fully-realized BGS RPG with a near infinitely open space exploration system seems like an impossible feat. On a technical level, sure, but the space between planets would be empty and desolate… and even expecting an interesting procedurally generated continent is a big ask today, let alone a planet, let alone a solar system, let alone a quarter of a galaxy.

Same here,

Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don’t write or produce proper “reviews” anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot… I don’t know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5

Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer’s tilt.

I feel you on that front. I have a Steam Deck and use it over my PC 90% of the time and even have BG3 running well on it but I prefer to sit at my desk for this game because the clutter is so dense that I need that big monitor and mouse to pixel hunt for all the little items and clicky things hidden around the world… and being able to spin that camera quickly around with a mouse while traversing is super important to catching things

The Pillars and Pathfinder games are both relatively daunting in terms of world size and, at least for Pathfinder, the rules are much more gritty… remember Pathfinder is a spin-off of DnD 3.5e and sticks relatively closely to that. While BG3 is based on the much more “friendly” DnD 5e rules. Pathfinder is much closer to BG2 than BG3 is, gameplay wise.

The big differences between BG3 and the other modern CRPGs is that BG3 does an exceptional job at presenting unprecedented player choice in traversal and combat. Other games have dialogue skill checks and all that but traversing the world is flat, literally practically menu driven and combat is all measurements and numbers. BG3 has free-form qualities that, in the world of video games, have so far only been utilized in immersive sims like Deus Ex and, oddly enough, I’d say the modern 3D Zeldas.

I’ve been playing BG3 and perhaps I’m misunderstanding but you only have one action and one bonus action per turn and you only have so many spell slots per caster. Unless you have a leveled spell as an action and a separate leveled spell as a bonus action and enough spell slots for both you’d be hard pressed to cast more than a single spell per turn per character

To be honest, I’ve never been able to get over the hump in ONI. I play for hours, have a blast but eventually things start falling apart and I’m not usually able to recover. That being said, I know there’s been some updates since last I played so I may go back to it soon.

Back in 2011 or so I got really into Minecraft mods. I think it was literally just Buildcraft and Industrialcraft. It involved many steps, putting folders inside the Minecraft JAR file, deleting meta INF files, etc. I stuck with it for a few years during which the scene exploded. I actually paid to host a website for my friend’s only server that just included links to the specifics mod versions and step by step instructions how to install them. It was around the same time FTB modpacks came out that I fell off, I played one or two SP worlds with FTB Infinity Evolved and had a lot of fun but Factorio and eventually Satisfactory scratched that same itch.

They’re called management sims, or in the case of Factorio a factory builder.

Rimworld is a colony management sim… check out Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included for similar games

Rollercoaster Tycoon is a theme park management sim, the obvious suggestions are Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo but also check out City Skylines.

Factorio is a factory builder, I would recommend Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, there’s a few handfuls of those types of games. If you want to get a little wild look into Minecraft (Java edition) w/ mods - most easily something like the FTB Infinity Evolved or one of the new Direwolf packs, it’s arguably where the factory building craze started.

Maybe not my favorite game but one of the very few games I truly felt required pen and paper were some of the old Might & Magic games - most notably I think of the first 3 games.

Those were first person dungeon crawling RPGs. They didn’t have, what later became termed “automaps”, but what is now just a in-game map. So if you wanted to look at a map you had to either buy real life books they sold called Cluebooks which had maps printed in them or you had to pull out the graphing paper and get to drawing.

It wasn’t just a limitation of the time, the games back then honestly treated it like a feature. I think it was in M&M3 that you could eventually cast the spell “Wizard Eye” and the entire point of the spell was to present to you a minimap of the surrounding area. NPCs and quests didn’t put icons on your map (there was no map), you were given directions and had to figure out how to get there.

Maybe I’m mistaken because I haven’t played it as much as some people but this is pretty similar to Mount & Blade. I think if the NPC factions simply did more and were more effective at sieging one another it would be that almost exactly.

Similarly, Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode is almost exactly this but it leans deeply into roguelike survival and is still part of the old school ASCII version.

The problem is if you’re just a pawn in a dynamic procedural strategy game against NPCs it seems very easy for the factions to be procedurally put in a situation where one AI absolutely dominates another and the lack of control you would have over the bigger events would become frustrating.

I tend to lean the same way, with a kid and busy job I just don’t have enough time to finish long games. Hearing something like FF16 is not 80 hours makes me happy.

That being said, I also lean toward sandbox games as I get older with no definitive ending. Factory builders, city builders, colony management sims, etc… even though those games can last hundreds or even a thousand+ hours. The difference is sandbox style games typically always allow you to quick save or save anywhere, and I never have to worry about finishing some storyline to feel good about my playtime.

Deathloop is great, I got it right around release and played through it over the course of a few weeks.

It doesn’t take brainpower to solve. There’s a whole time loop puzzle but the most disappointing aspect of the game was that it’s a solved solution. The game spells out exactly what objectives to complete at which places and at what times. While you play through the game the first time you’re uncovering twists and clues as to how to solve the puzzle but instead of letting you deduce a solution the games builds out a step by step list of markers for you to follow.

It’s essentially the complete opposite of how The Outer Wilds, which has a similar time loop aspect with a puzzle to solve, handles it.

That being said, give Deathloop a shot because it’s still a fun shooter with neat mechanics that lean very close to immersive sim levels of freedom.

My kid is a toddler, I can’t play games around him, even on my Switch or Steam Deck because he’s too distracting and wants too much attention. My wife and I usually play games for about an hour after he goes to sleep and we finish all the chores (laundry, cooking, dishes, food prep, daycare prep).

Between about 9:00pm and 10:00pm, on weekends if either of us have the time we’ll try to get chores done during the day while he’s awake which would give us maybe one more hour.

That’s it though, probably a third of the time we spend that single hour with some other form of relaxation (TV, book, social media, maybe ½ a movie). Another third of the time we just have other obligations or extra chores - maybe we need to do taxes or buy airplane tickets or book hotels for travel. Then, probably one or two nights a week on average we’re just too tired to do anything past 9pm and go to bed early.

So… all said, maybe 3 hours of gaming a week on average. Every so often my wife or I will take the kiddo out by ourselves and the other will have an extra hour or two for whatever but that’s not every week.

I liked Skyrim and will defend it but Fallout 4 had some inexcusable problems. I still played it and had a lot of fun once the mods rolled in but the base game is a mess in terms of story, dialogue, role-playing, balance, graphics, animations, etc…

The settlement building was pure silly sandbox, there was no reason to engage with it, no benefit it provided, in fact it only introduced extra nuisance if you engaged (in the form of annoying settlement raid alerts). The dialogue options may have as well been nonexistent and all the skill check mechanics were stripped out in favor of the most bog basic charisma checks. The leveling and SPECIAL mechanics ended up meaning every character was exactly the same, there was no build variety past 10 or 12 hours. If you wanted to argue there was it by was only stealth or no stealth, melee or ranged, but the balance between them was fubar.

The game was extraordinarily disappointing as someone who was a huge fan of Fallout since the original, liked 3, and loved New Vegas. FO4 was a step back in every way EXCEPT first-person shooter mechanics which wasn’t even an true aspect of the franchise.

The one thing FO4 has going for it were mods. Like Skyrim before it, FO4 was completely reworked in multiple ways by different mods and that’s what basically saved the game for me.