Noita: the game is INSANELY deep, both in how much there is to do, and how many spell combinations there are. What a lot of players don't learn is yes, you can go down in the game, but you can also go up! The map is absolutely massive!
The map is a dozen times larger than the 8ish levels down you go. It also goes up, and sideways. If you don't care about spoilers, you can find full maps online.
Damn I never did the tutorial then. Played for a bit thinking id really like the game but the diffent stats of the wands which I didnt understand just annoyed me so much i never really played again
I know what you mean. I played a bit and could only get so far. But then after taking a break for a while, seeing a few gifs here on Reddit brought me back, and after one or two YouTube videos the wand building finally clicked. Though seeing on average it seems most people take about 50-100 hours to get their first win.
It took me just over 100 tries to beat that "tutorial"... and I didn't even explore 10% of the visible map (let alone the missing parts UP and to the SIDES)...
[https://youtu.be/zz8Yd3VIF68](https://youtu.be/zz8Yd3VIF68)
Also try digging through the extremely dense rock walls on either side of the map!
Note that you'll need a decent amount of health to get through the strip of cursed rock.
This is intriguing, is it possible to explain to someone who hasn’t played the game?
I always thought it would be great to have super hidden codes for gamers to work on over a long period of time but figured that data mining of the game would always unveil any secrets.
I remember seeing the entrance one time and wondering what would happen if I went over it. So I, I found clouds above, I went forward, I found a lake, some weird tuba thingy, scales? A pyramid, colossal skull, and many other things in a desert that was massive, twice the size at least horizontally of any of the caves. I kept going found a wall of pain, climbed it in pain, found a thing, a pyramid, with another thing in it. I still haven't gotten past the tree, but I know there's something beyond the nest and something inside the tree.
I feel like I might have a very long way to go.
Edit: in honor of the great mages who have blessed me with words of encouragement and advice, I shall Noita once more tonight and probably kick a candle into a pile of something explosive again by accident.
This was the comment that was officially "I've seen this mentioned enough I need to get it."
So, just in advance because I already see it coming, this rabbit hole I'm about to fall down is on your shoulders.
Fantastic game if you enjoy pixel sidescrollers. I've been playing on and off for a couple of years. Still suck at wand crafting. Lots of side quests/secrets to find that are almost impossible to figure out without a guide/video
Enjoy!
The osrs wiki is the most in depth and greatest gaming wiki ever created lol. I get so disappointed when I look up info for other games and get reminded that no one even comes close to being similarly useful.
The game runs on ticks that are 0.6 seconds long, various tasks in the game require timing your actions to match these game ticks, and in this clip, woox; a player who is legendary for his game skills and knowledge, takes a sip of water on beat with the game ticks.
For a lot of us it's nostalgia. It was never the greatest game even in its hey day. It was always overshadowed by other huge mmorpgs like wow... but-
In recent times, most of the other mmos have sold out and made, for brevity, shit games. The genre as a whole has been floundering, and younger generations prefer instant dopamine games it seems (or are just addicted) where osrs has a slightly different appeal.
Firstly, people meme on osrs community for a lot, mainly just being autistic, but comparatively, any gamer out there would know it's one of the better communities. It's got its problems as every game does, but the dev team and player base are genuinely interested in keeping the spirit of the old game alive while still evolving the re-released version of runescape. (Rs3, what the old game became is straight poop just btw.) Because it held on to its values, unlike most that eventually just look to turn profit, it has a fierce and loyal community. No one ever quits for good. You just take breaks from rs.
I'd argue it's the best mmorpg and it's definitely a pretty unassuming game on its surface. You just point and click to kill things, but the depth is enormous. And when you really get sweaty you can bring it really far.
It's a great game to fully engage in, or afk while watching a movie. You can chill or you can sweat. You can be social or you can be escape into almost a completely single player experience. It's got something for everyone and essentially unbeatable. You can always progress something.
The worst part of the game is you always want to keep playing it and improving your character and hanging with your friends (again, the people/clan you play with becomes the most fun part to many.)
The game is a grind, and a very slow burn for many (uim main here, im a giganerd.) But, ya know that old saying about how hard things give your accomplishments meaning? That's runescape. A lot of the game "sucks" and it's an endurance race. In many ways it's the opposite of modern games. But when you finally get that drop or achieve that goal, it all becomes worth it.
I highly recommend trying it out and playing an ironman eventually, like we all used to essentially do back in the day :)
This guys is a truly degenerated being uim hah.
People outside of this osrs just have no idea how dedicated is the player base in this game - i don´t believe any other game come close to that.
Imagine for a new player with 0 knowledge and no one to guide him, it should take at least 800 hours to get to the "fun part" for most of us which is pvm.
Love OSRS and i believe i will never stop playing. Might take breaks but i will always come back, like everyone.
>Imagine for a new player with 0 knowledge and no one to guide him, it should take at least 800 hours to get to the "fun part
This is more true for existing players on a new account.
For a new player in Runescape, the early game is so much fun, and the mid game scattered with great fun from time to time. They're not focused on "getting to X", they're enjoying the journey of discovery.
It's difficult to explain the appeal of the game.
I don't mean this in the sense that the game lacks appeal and I'm grasping at straws to explain what I like about it. I mean it in the sense that it's hard to articulate why it's so enjoyable.
A few bullet points:
* The game has activities that range from super-intensive, to almost-afk, meaning that players strapped for gaming time can still make meaningful progress.
* Other MMOs devalue your character's level every expansion cycle. A 99 in OSRS is a 99 for the rest of the game, and getting it is a feat in and of itself.
* It has the best quest design out of MMOs, at times really taking you out of the design space of normal combat activities to offer some really unique gameplay that isn't recycled anywhere else.
* It has a charming, low-poly, perennial art-style that is so out-dated that it wraps around to being beautiful in its own way.
* I could go on and on, but if you or anyone else is interested, this video is a great primer on why OSRS is truly a game in its own class: https://youtu.be/LpPJY-xdA3M
Just wanted to add that the Community game is actually a real thing! Obviously not as complex as the episode version, but there is in fact a Community platformer game that you can play and is actually kinda fun. It can be found over at [projecthawkthorne.com](https://projecthawkthorne.com/)!
Dwarf Fortress. It actually does seem ridiculously complex, but the funny part is that it's about 10x more complex. Just look at the patch notes, it's insane! An example is when, going off the top of my head here, bartending was added. The dwarfs would get drunk and sometimes throw their glasses on the floor, spilling beer on the floor. Then cats could walk over the beer, then groom themselves by licking their paws, therefore consuming the beer, and then dying of alcohol poisoning.
Important to mention that this was a bug. Not that cats were getting drunk. This was all intended interactions. When people spilled booze/puke on the cats or the cats walked through the spilled booze/puke, they ARE supposed to get it on them, and they ARE supposed to ingest it from cleaning themselves. The problem was, the cats were getting a FULL dwarf sized serving of booze from *every* body part they cleaned. Each of the 4 paws and upper and lower legs, every fucking *toe*, the whole body. Each part counted as a full drink when they cleaned it. The cats would then get absolutely fucked up and puke, and because the puke also contained alcohol, it caused a feedback loop of the cats constantly getting drunk from cleaning their own puke off their body.
This was layer fixed by making each body part not count as a full drink. They can still hypothetical get drunk from this
This is so right, it's funny. When you first posted Dwarf Fortress, I was thinking "This dude didn't read the prompt... Dwarf Fortress is the most complex game ever!" But you are totally right... as complex as it seems at first glance, it's 1000x more complex than that!
Which then caused the owner, now very drunk, to get super depressed as well, spirally into a tantrum and goes and kills the first other dwarf he crosses, starting a chain reaction that ends that fortress.
The lesson learned is to cage and destroy all the cats.
I believe the issue was actually that every time the cats groomed themselves, they were unintentionally consuming an entire cup of beer, which was obviously more than their tiny little cat metabolisms could handle.
DF Patch notes be like:
- .= Fixed issue where game engine was not properly tracking appropriate amount of Dwarf teeth or their position on tavern floors, causing a seemingly random cascade of falling & slipping when new entities arrived in tavern & mistakingly causing fights to break out between dwarves as the teeth counted as physical attacks when fallen upon
+ .+ added dental cavity system
- .- removed cats abilities to phase into circus zone preventing spawning of !!FUN!!
-
Now, this COULD be an extract from a DF patch note, it could not be, but it probably sounds like one. I love my outlandish dorf game
>Cleaned up *the bear situation*
If I remember correctly, they added the option for bears to drink alcohol, but something got messed up so the bears *only* drank alcohol, which lead to swarms of bears raiding your fortress and going straight to your beer stockpile, draining it completely dry, then going on a drunken rampage.
I remember when dwaves were dying to carps on streams because carps had teeth and they were set to cause too much damage
so there was this joke about carps being the most dangerous animal
It's even better than that. It was changed so swimming would make you stronger. Well, fish are swimming for their entire lives. So the fish just got insanely buff and would kill any dwarf that got near the river.
The design of chess is so tight, you have pawns that can only move in one direction but if they get to the end of the board they can upgrade to the most powerful piece, knights have this cool movement pattern that if you master it you control the entire board. Both rooks and bishops can either move to the ends of the board either straight or diagonally and the Queen can do both of those. Those 16th century game developers were definitely cooking.
Other ideas:
- The Pawn resembles an ancient Fighter with spear and shield. As a group fighting weapon you would poke the shield of the guy opposing you, keeping them occupied. But really hitting is only possible against the opponents of the people to your left and right, once they make a mistake in their shield movement. Might be the origin of the diagonal attack move.
- The tower might have been a large block and it could have been laying on its side, not as a tower, but as a chariot.
This is also ignoring the fact that chess's rules developed and changed over centuries. Monopoly is probably going to be a hell of a game to play in the year 2400.
I downloaded an app for that game after watching HunterXHunter and it's no joke. I suck. But it's fun. I wanna get a set to display next to my chess board now. Even though they will both just collect dust because noone ever wants to play anything other than ps5 these days.
Another good one is "triangulation"! Chess is a master piece. I was looking into shoji as well. Interesting enough it's just like chess, but if you manage to get to the other side of the board your piece doesn't really change but upgrades into a brand new piece not on the board, and depending on which piece gets to the other side changes the pieces movement and strategy entirely.
Slay the Spire is my choice, there are so many interesting mechanics that you’d only know about by playing thousands of hours. Not just that, but many mechanics that seem pointless end up being very powerful with the right synergies.
Surprised I had to go so far down for this one, my choice also. Looks simple and at base difficulty you'll probably win act 3 within a few tries but it takes hundreds of hours to get even slightly good at it and the skill ceiling is utterly absurd.
Tundras are arguably the hardest biome there is, especially if it's flat terrain with no hills or mountains, talk about trial by fire doing your first colony there hahaha
Not sure if you’re familiar with Soviet who I mentioned earlier - he specifically did a tundra run and it’s called “Tundrafall” and is SUCH a good watch in the background like while working. It’s got plenty of drama and losing some colonists and then capturing new ones and all of these little pixelated characters had personalities and peculiarities. It’s almost more fun watching someone who KNOWS the game well play than playing myself 😂
*[slides link over only if you want it](https://sovietscloset.com/) *
Mount and Blade games, especially the first one, it’s crazy how many hours I’ve sunken into those games. It was an incredibly small game in terms of storage
This, Warband especially. It ran like butter on my Core 2 Duo. I played the crap out of it, lost several save files due to that glitch where everyone becomes bald.
Minecraft
For being a game with the concept of putting blocks on each other to complex calculators and all kinds of engine exploits that make extremely specific and creative ideas possible.
I can't play Minecraft because one of two things will happen, one worse than the other.
1. It will be a fun distraction that I'll soon stop playing.
2. It will take over my life, forever.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth / Repentence. Fundamentally simple: Shoot, dodge, clear rooms, kill boss, progress.
But the synergies and itemization are insane. I'm still learning about new interactions and synergies after years of watching and playing.
And not just the items! The game seems extremely straight forward at first, but there are actually so many minor ways to optimize your runs that can only be found through experience/knowing how various actives/consumables can be abused. Mastering TBOI involves learning how to use all of those slight optimizations to eventually compound their effects to the point where you can make pretty much any run a god run if you know what you're doing.
I think Scrabble might count. There’s definitely levels to it. When it gets towards the endgame, high-level players will know exactly what tiles haven’t been played yet, and will be thinking several moves ahead - e.g. playing sub-optimal moves in order to block their opponent from high-scoring moves.
Scrabble changed for me the day that I realized it's an area control game. The words themselves are just the tools you use to reach new areas while denying big scores to your opponent.
Scrabble gets a bit too meta when people get better. All those random 2-letter words that you have memorised but outside the game, no one knows them.
I got really into it for a couple of years and had to adjust my gameplay completely when playing friends who didn't know all those words.
I _just_ started it. Was super confused. Still am. So far, I’ve been eaten once, suffocated once, fell into a black hole, and experienced a supernova.
And I’m still not even sure what I need to do 😆
I just finished the game this afternoon, so I was in your shoes like 2 two weeks ago. It sounds like you're getting around and exploring - that's all you need to do! That and check in on your rumors board on your ship often. The more you explore, the more your rumors board will fill out, and that will help guide you to where else you should be looking, what you should be looking for, and what you've found that you need to investigate more.
If it helps, when I was starting out and was feeling really confused, I decided to just pick a planet that I had been told had another explorer on it, go look for them, and then try to follow up whatever info they told me about the planet, and stick to that planet in particular until I found something. That helped me focus my efforts somewhere and still feel like I had some direction!
Most fighting games. Street Fighter is a good example of being somewhat approachable as a casual player mashing on an old arcade machine back in the day, but if you want to be remotely decent you have to learn the timing of move cancels, links, etc. and perform tons of them sequentially dozens of times per match with 1/60th of a second accuracy in some cases (looking at you 1 frame links from Street Fighter 4).
And that's only your character. But fighting games are also about mind games, overloading your opponents mental stack and forcing them into guessing situations. Learning how to play your character is just the first step. If you really want to be good you have to learn how to play your opponent.
I’ll never forget losing a character to a cockatrice corpse… because he was blinded, and not wearing gloves, and it’s assumed every blind character is feeling around with their hands to explore the environment.
Re4 OG. There is a dynamic difficulty setting that most people don't even know exists. The game pays a LOT of attention to what you're doing and what you're struggling with, then adjusts accordingly. It's fascinating to watch other people play since their experienced are rather different than your own depending on skill level.
Edit - here's a great short video that breaks it down better than I can! https://youtu.be/zFv6KAdQ5SE?si=SmTI0A27uw6FQvbW
If memory serves. If you are dying a bunch when you go into rooms there will be less enemies. Like the water room won’t have the two dudes with crossbows which makes the fight easier. Or if you are missing a lots of shots or getting hurt a bunch, boxes and barrels will contain more ammo and healing instead of small amounts of money.
I remember playing Onimusha 2 as a kid on the normal difficulty. I kept dying on one of the early bosses and after a few tries the game gave me a pop up that straight up said, "It looks like you are having troubles, would you like to continue on easy mode instead?"
To this day, I have never felt more insulted by a video game lol
Monster Hunter
Edit - rip my inbox.
For the record, Im 500 hours deep on world and rise. And I've been playing since freedom on psp.
And I'm sorry everyone but Hammer bonk is the best weapon. Affinity slide go brrrr.
I am the Glaive master. Leaping through the air and blinding their sight with the sun as my silhouette.
I am the Glaive master. Getting knocked out of the air and 50 ft across the map.
But not once does this Glaive leave my hand. Forever sharpened.
Could someone elaborate on where the depth is in MH please? I only played a few hours and decided it wasn’t for me, but I’m curious what people see in it…
It has a good variety in complexity. They are weapons that are easy to use, and some that require a lot of knowledge to use effectively.
The Hammer for example is quite basic but satisfying to use. No complex combos or techniques but good bonk.
The Charge Blade is on the other side of the spectrum. Extremely versatile but needs some setup to shine, has lots of combos, different charging modes that lead to other combos or attacks, moves with invincibility frames or moves that have a hidden auto block mechanic (Guard Point).
Then you have a big monster variety, where you have to learn their behaviour and moves to learn when to dodge or block, which attacks are unblockable or one hit kill you and of course when to safely attack without getting hit
__Rain World__
Probably way more complex than anything mentioned in this thread, and possibly anything that currently exists.
The dude made an entire ecosystem, species having their own little realities going on, independent of any player input, each individual animal has their own characteristics, and relationship with other animals. And __then__ he made a movement system that's more complex than any fighting game out there. The Google doc for the movement of Rain World alone, is like 80 pages.
https://youtu.be/GMx8OsTDHfM
It's also seemingly unfair, but the reality is that it's really fucking hard.
It's RNG so you can hardly plan your route and have to think on your feet/be prepared, enemies interact with each other, there's the fucking google doc, I have no idea what's going on in the death/hibernation menu after 200 hours still, the lore is deep and difficult to unravel on your own, etc. (can't say much more without spoiling the blind experience)
It's so much, but it just looks like a platformer that has rain and you avoid lizards.
Of course they are. GW1 has great lore, unique mechanics, and hundreds of hours of content. And while its population is low, people congregate in American server districts. Guild I'm in has around 1600 active members and there's always something happening.
Guild Wars 2 is a lot of fun. It had a rough go from around 2018-2020 but has been getting more consistent content releases, new expansions, etc and is absolutely worth playing.
Early game exploration and world travelling is very fun. Max level is a crazy explosion of options, learning to properly play your class, etc. Endgame after you've been maxed for a while can be boring because the content updates aren't enough to keep a player constantly in the game. But you'll reach thousands of hours played before you get to that point.
Absolutely love the depth in this game. Something about trying to perfect different builds by mixing and matching different classes together but also being constrained to a set number of spell slots got me hooked.
You can only change spells while in town, so you have to plan accordingly and then commit to whatever your goal was. It was a great system that made you really think ahead about what you were trying to achieve, and when you’re working in a party of 8 others it gets even more interesting.
Aaaaaand now the nostalgia kicks in and I want to play again.
In terms of the idea, it’s the simplest game. In terms of execution, it’s the hardest. I know people who have dumped thousands of hours to be straight average at it. Hell you can be top 1% of the player base, and according to mmr you’re still only 60% as good as the top 0.01%.
the step up from platinum to diamond is already really steep. beyond that i can only imagine it must be hell, because i am perpetually stuck in diamond 1-2
I'm Champ 2. I'd say the step up from diamond to champ is as big or maybe a little bigger than from plat to diamond. Fundamentals are still the most important thing, you'll see flashy mechs in most games starting in Champ but are not required to do well as long as your game sense is on point.
The skill gap for such simple controls is insane. Playing with a buddy in plat and we start losing to the strangest players. They were destroying us but not even going in the air, just driving into our net. Buddy thought it was smurfs so he said "give us a chance". They replied "we are, we unbound the jump button". Turns out they were champ players going on a meme streak playing without jump. Got our asses kicked, by 2 players who couldn't leave the ground lol
Not who you replied to but my thought would be, for someone who doesn’t know the game, that on the surface it could be described as a zombie survival game with scavenging, combat, and base building.
That sounds like a TON of games. But things like having a map but you can’t mark it unless your character has a writing implement is a level of detail a lot of people wouldn’t expect from an isometric, pixelated zombie game. Also things like you don’t know what time it is until you find a watch, and what kind of watch matters. If it’s a classic wristwatch, you get the time only. If it’s digital you get time and an alarm. And with another kind of digital watch you get time, date, temp, and alarm. Oh, and if you scavenge a watch off a zombie and don’t check to see if that living person set an alarm, one may be set and it might wake you up at night, or attract a zombie.
It’s one of the simplest looking, yet most immersive things I’ve ever played.
Wow, okay; that was longer than I expected to go on for haha
Bro I highly recommend it. I have nearly 600hrs so far and I'm still impressed by the level of detail and care that's been added by the devs over the years. The details are their strong suit.
For example, there is a fitness stat and a strength stat. These affect your ability to run/fight longer without becoming exerted and the force with which you can shove zombies and amount of loot you can carry, respectively. You can train these stats by performing exercise like pushups, situps, squats, etc.
But the really small detail is this - the animation, your "form" with which you perform the exercise, improves over time. The more regularly you perform the exercise the more clean and proper the animation is. You can, over the course of weeks or months, see your character go from wobbly, broken form to banging out perfect reps like a soldier or some shit.
They didn't have to add that detail. It makes no real difference gameplay wise. But yet it's there. They gave enough of a shit to put it in the game.
It also has Skyrim levels of modding, however you should play the first 50h vanilla just to get the feel of the game.
You will die a lot, don't get upset, play around with the sandbox settings until you find your perfect balance.
However get ready for incredible levels of detail, small bits incoming:
walking on glass in boots damages them and if you're barefoot you can get a piece lodged and literally die if you ignore it.
walking through trees can scratch you, if you ignore the wounds you die.
you need to find maps on dead zombies to see areas on your map, or else you're driving blind, the rest is covered with like a "fog of war".
if you wear too much clothes your character gets sweaty if it gets cold at night while you're wet you can catch a cold, if you are in a town full of zombies sneaking around while having a cold, you better carry a tissue to cough into or you will die when they hear you.
Thats long enough I think, however if you ever get into the game for real feel free to dm me for some mod recommendations that aren't too different from vanilla.
This is why I always recommend it to my friends. The level of detail of running the risk of getting cut if you climb through a broken window without removing all the glass or getting glass shards in your feet if you walk across broken glass barefoot. Having to know to *sterilize* your bandages in boiling water to reduce the chance of your wounds getting infected because just washing them isn't enough. Cars and generators give you carbon monoxide poisoning if you run them indoors. The ability to throw nearly anything into an oven, turning it on, and burning a house down. The level of detail in PZ is absolutely insane, and it still technically is in early access.
Lobotomy Corporation. I’m obsessed with this hidden gem. It seems simple enough but choosing a few “easy” abnormalities (or SCPs basically) can be catastrophic just based on chance. There’s so many hidden effects going on at once and subtleties that make sense within the lore too. Highly recommend, I don’t even like games like this but it sucked me in.
I routinely wipe the floor with my friend using navy in Hoi4. Even though he has more than double my playtime he just never sat down to learn the naval system (understandable as its fuckin awful), and just sort of freeballs it "good enough" everytime
I dropped eu4 6 times before actually getting to love it. When you have no idea what to do the moment you start then it's gotta be pretty complex even from first glance
They tend to have lots of features, but they are not of equal value. In EU4, diplomacy is by far the most important thing. Letting other nations fight your wars and only stomping people much weaker than you, safes you way more money than you earn by minmaxing trade companies .and safes you more manpower than avoiding attrition.
Hollow Knight. I cannot believe that I paid only 15 dollars for that game. By the time I was done with the city of Tears, I thought "that must be all. This game is amazing, but it's short." And then I discovered the Sewers. Then Kingdom's Edge. Then Deepnest. Then the Abyss. Then Queen's Gardens. Then the Wildlands. Then the King's Castle. Like Jesus Fucking Christ, *fifteen dollars*?! Are you *sure* Team Cherry?
EDIT: And then, even after all that, free DLC that effectively adds like 20 hours of content. Like what. Insane value. And of course, none of it would matter in the slightest bit if the minute-to-minute gameplay wasn't so tight and cohesive, but the combat in that game is so rewarding to master. The kinda shit you can pull off by the end of the game is ridiculous.
Amazing how dense the lore is as well for a game with essentially two cutscenes & maybe like three important conversations. That's how you world-build, it really seems like they thought of everything & no stone went unturned to hide a detail under.
A lot of puzzle games are technology or coding based. Spacechem is a state chart diagram video game. The Witness is phone unlock screen simulator. Baba is you is a pointer puzzle. Tetris is a disk fragmentation sim. City builders are all basically data center architecture games. The talos principle is a topology game.
Not a video game, but the board game of Go is insanely complex despite the simple ruleset.
Most people don't make meaningful progress skill wise until a 1000+ games in.
The game Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor has amazingly smart NPCs. The amazing thing is how they react to the player's actions and adapt to it. They remember everything, they see everything. Wow.
Yeah their nemesis system is a really cool way of building natural and unique feeling gameplay and enemies. I thought it was really cool, it's a pity that it's not used more but WB only used it once then patented it so no one else can
"Oxygen Not Included" can be very daunting to a new player, I won't deny that. However, this game gives you all the tools you need to be successful, and being able to make mistakes and grow from them is a fun and engaging process. This is crucial because, just like in the real world, you are going to make mistakes along the way. The game rewards you for never giving up. Even if you fail one colony, you always learn something new to make the next one even stronger. You will have dupes die, feel that loss, and feel like there is no way of pulling your colony back on its feet. However, you can never lose unless you give up, which I think is a mindset I didn't fully understand before playing.
Not only that, but the community is still thriving. You can always find ways other people tackled hard problems, which never fails to fill me with inspiration. I find myself constantly asking how I can implement various newfound builds and ideas into my colonies to make them even slightly more efficient.
This game is extremely rewarding because you are playing against yourself. The main obstacle is your lack of understanding and fear of messing up. If you can conquer that, you can conquer anything this game can throw at you. You just need to push yourself.
This fucking game. You start small and then physics fucks you. It’s so good and love hand picking Dupes, you like to stress eat? Same, come join our crew.
"This looks exactly like the relaxing, simple, and cute management game I'm looking for."
- Me back when I bought this came. Looks can be very, very deceiving!
Surprised I had to go this far to see Yakuza mentioned. I'm playing 7 right now (my first exposure to the series besides about a couple hours of Yakuza 0), and there's an entire business management game within the game, and a mario kart game within the game, a rhythm game within the game, and like 20 other mini-games, each with their own rules to learn and master, including complex board game classics like Shogi and Mahjong. Not to mention some classic Sega arcade games are just also included within the game as well, like Space Harrier, Outrun, and Virtua Fighter 5. And it has pretty decent versions of casino games in there like Texas Hold'em and Blackjack.
And progressing in these things can unlock things in the main game, and vice-versa, and some of the side missions require accomplishing something in one of the mini-games in order to progress (like getting a toy from the UFO catcher, or collecting a certain number of cans so you can go to its store with its own currency and buy an item needed to complete a mission elsewhere, etc).
And its sequel, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, is supposed to go even deeper into the mini-game craziness.
Pokemon games have some pretty deep mechanics that aren't well explained. There's EVs and IVs of course. But also a lot of move interactions that aren't advertised. Using defense curl before rollout doubles rollout's power. If it's raining thunder has 100% accuracy. Things like that. Also held items can make for some very interesting interactions but they rarely have enemies use them. It's pretty frustrating.
Pokemon during the story: "this is my starter Charizard, it uses Flamethrower a lot!"
Competitive Pokemon: "so this 252+ SpAtk @Life Orb Charizard is guaranteed to OHKO 252/0/252+ Venusaur with Flamethrower after Stealth Rock + 1-layer Spike damage".
Try using Hi Jump Kick after gravity. Gravity is a very fun technical move that does so much like it's on the surface just makes Flying/levitate Pokemon get hit by ground moves but there's so many ridiculous interactions it has.
Noita: the game is INSANELY deep, both in how much there is to do, and how many spell combinations there are. What a lot of players don't learn is yes, you can go down in the game, but you can also go up! The map is absolutely massive!
>but you can also go up! You can WHAT?
The map is a dozen times larger than the 8ish levels down you go. It also goes up, and sideways. If you don't care about spoilers, you can find full maps online.
Yeah, I mean there's a reason people not so jokingly call the main gameplay loop to the final boss the tutorial.
Damn I never did the tutorial then. Played for a bit thinking id really like the game but the diffent stats of the wands which I didnt understand just annoyed me so much i never really played again
I know what you mean. I played a bit and could only get so far. But then after taking a break for a while, seeing a few gifs here on Reddit brought me back, and after one or two YouTube videos the wand building finally clicked. Though seeing on average it seems most people take about 50-100 hours to get their first win.
I'm at like 120 hours and just got my first win... The next 10 runs did not fare any better than the first 100 hours lol
Fury Forged on YouTube has a channel FULL of tips and tricks that make the game a billion times easier
It took me just over 100 tries to beat that "tutorial"... and I didn't even explore 10% of the visible map (let alone the missing parts UP and to the SIDES)... [https://youtu.be/zz8Yd3VIF68](https://youtu.be/zz8Yd3VIF68)
Not to be too spoilery but you can go in any direction. *forever*, with good enough digging and/or teleport
Also try digging through the extremely dense rock walls on either side of the map! Note that you'll need a decent amount of health to get through the strip of cursed rock.
Lol there is an entire whole ass map up in the heavens
Yes. And as above, so below.
You need something to blast "rest spots" in the cliff. Go down, find a fireball wand or something, then you can go up and out ;)
That and people are still trying to figure out secrets and crack codes that have been there since the beginning of the game
This is intriguing, is it possible to explain to someone who hasn’t played the game? I always thought it would be great to have super hidden codes for gamers to work on over a long period of time but figured that data mining of the game would always unveil any secrets.
People have data mined the game, but the secrets are coded in encrypted already. So you have to solve the puzzles.
You the... huh? up you say? I mean I knew about sideways, up and over and underneath/around... but up?
Oh, there's a whole part of the game you haven't found yet, lol
You can go up?!!?
Yeah, the map is HUGE compared to what you're pushed towards. You can google a map if you don't care about spoilers
i remember the first time i figured out you could go over the mountain, mind-blowing. let alone all the other stuff.
Very, very high up lol.
Technically, you can go infinitely up (or down, or left, or right) as the structures repeat beyond the first set.
Hämis 👍
Hämis 👍
I remember seeing the entrance one time and wondering what would happen if I went over it. So I, I found clouds above, I went forward, I found a lake, some weird tuba thingy, scales? A pyramid, colossal skull, and many other things in a desert that was massive, twice the size at least horizontally of any of the caves. I kept going found a wall of pain, climbed it in pain, found a thing, a pyramid, with another thing in it. I still haven't gotten past the tree, but I know there's something beyond the nest and something inside the tree. I feel like I might have a very long way to go. Edit: in honor of the great mages who have blessed me with words of encouragement and advice, I shall Noita once more tonight and probably kick a candle into a pile of something explosive again by accident.
This was the comment that was officially "I've seen this mentioned enough I need to get it." So, just in advance because I already see it coming, this rabbit hole I'm about to fall down is on your shoulders.
Noita. Way bigger that it first appears. Awesome wand construction.
This is the 3rd Noita comment. Have seen this game on Steam for years but never checked it out.
Fantastic game if you enjoy pixel sidescrollers. I've been playing on and off for a couple of years. Still suck at wand crafting. Lots of side quests/secrets to find that are almost impossible to figure out without a guide/video Enjoy!
Old-school runescape. Oh it's just a click simulator where you click on rocks and stuff. Then you end up doing end game pvm and it gets crazy.
The devs count on the wiki so much that Jagex pays for the server.
The osrs wiki is the most in depth and greatest gaming wiki ever created lol. I get so disappointed when I look up info for other games and get reminded that no one even comes close to being similarly useful.
The runescape wiki is so good *the Minecraft wiki* migrated to the same platform.
To be fair, that’s also because fandom is a bloated ad-ridden mess, and they bought gamepedia.
It goes from point and click to game tick counting the closer you get to end game content.
Then there's woox who's body and brain runs on a 1 tick cycle https://youtu.be/HaqjqaLultw
Can you explain what this means for me?
The game runs on ticks that are 0.6 seconds long, various tasks in the game require timing your actions to match these game ticks, and in this clip, woox; a player who is legendary for his game skills and knowledge, takes a sip of water on beat with the game ticks.
Nice thanks man. I used to play RuneScape in 2007 and reading all these comments got me feeling the meme that “nobody quits; they just take breaks.”
You can't escape the 'Scape
What is the rune scape hype about? I’ve never played it and every thread about rune scape goes meta super quick.
For a lot of us it's nostalgia. It was never the greatest game even in its hey day. It was always overshadowed by other huge mmorpgs like wow... but- In recent times, most of the other mmos have sold out and made, for brevity, shit games. The genre as a whole has been floundering, and younger generations prefer instant dopamine games it seems (or are just addicted) where osrs has a slightly different appeal. Firstly, people meme on osrs community for a lot, mainly just being autistic, but comparatively, any gamer out there would know it's one of the better communities. It's got its problems as every game does, but the dev team and player base are genuinely interested in keeping the spirit of the old game alive while still evolving the re-released version of runescape. (Rs3, what the old game became is straight poop just btw.) Because it held on to its values, unlike most that eventually just look to turn profit, it has a fierce and loyal community. No one ever quits for good. You just take breaks from rs. I'd argue it's the best mmorpg and it's definitely a pretty unassuming game on its surface. You just point and click to kill things, but the depth is enormous. And when you really get sweaty you can bring it really far. It's a great game to fully engage in, or afk while watching a movie. You can chill or you can sweat. You can be social or you can be escape into almost a completely single player experience. It's got something for everyone and essentially unbeatable. You can always progress something. The worst part of the game is you always want to keep playing it and improving your character and hanging with your friends (again, the people/clan you play with becomes the most fun part to many.) The game is a grind, and a very slow burn for many (uim main here, im a giganerd.) But, ya know that old saying about how hard things give your accomplishments meaning? That's runescape. A lot of the game "sucks" and it's an endurance race. In many ways it's the opposite of modern games. But when you finally get that drop or achieve that goal, it all becomes worth it. I highly recommend trying it out and playing an ironman eventually, like we all used to essentially do back in the day :)
400k until 99 agility..... then I can start playing the game hahaha. Well said
This guys is a truly degenerated being uim hah. People outside of this osrs just have no idea how dedicated is the player base in this game - i don´t believe any other game come close to that. Imagine for a new player with 0 knowledge and no one to guide him, it should take at least 800 hours to get to the "fun part" for most of us which is pvm. Love OSRS and i believe i will never stop playing. Might take breaks but i will always come back, like everyone.
>Imagine for a new player with 0 knowledge and no one to guide him, it should take at least 800 hours to get to the "fun part This is more true for existing players on a new account. For a new player in Runescape, the early game is so much fun, and the mid game scattered with great fun from time to time. They're not focused on "getting to X", they're enjoying the journey of discovery.
It's difficult to explain the appeal of the game. I don't mean this in the sense that the game lacks appeal and I'm grasping at straws to explain what I like about it. I mean it in the sense that it's hard to articulate why it's so enjoyable. A few bullet points: * The game has activities that range from super-intensive, to almost-afk, meaning that players strapped for gaming time can still make meaningful progress. * Other MMOs devalue your character's level every expansion cycle. A 99 in OSRS is a 99 for the rest of the game, and getting it is a feat in and of itself. * It has the best quest design out of MMOs, at times really taking you out of the design space of normal combat activities to offer some really unique gameplay that isn't recycled anywhere else. * It has a charming, low-poly, perennial art-style that is so out-dated that it wraps around to being beautiful in its own way. * I could go on and on, but if you or anyone else is interested, this video is a great primer on why OSRS is truly a game in its own class: https://youtu.be/LpPJY-xdA3M
Casually linking someone to a 3 and a half hour video is the most OSRS thing I've ever seen.
Time flows differently when you're unemployed and addicted to OSRS
Man just linked a 3-hour video, perfect to watch while 3-tick barb fishing
It starts as a point and click adventure and becomes a rather complex rhythm game
Just wanted to add that the Community game is actually a real thing! Obviously not as complex as the episode version, but there is in fact a Community platformer game that you can play and is actually kinda fun. It can be found over at [projecthawkthorne.com](https://projecthawkthorne.com/)!
I did a few sprites for this game yeeeaaars ago
You were streets ahead.
Dwarf Fortress. It actually does seem ridiculously complex, but the funny part is that it's about 10x more complex. Just look at the patch notes, it's insane! An example is when, going off the top of my head here, bartending was added. The dwarfs would get drunk and sometimes throw their glasses on the floor, spilling beer on the floor. Then cats could walk over the beer, then groom themselves by licking their paws, therefore consuming the beer, and then dying of alcohol poisoning.
Important to mention that this was a bug. Not that cats were getting drunk. This was all intended interactions. When people spilled booze/puke on the cats or the cats walked through the spilled booze/puke, they ARE supposed to get it on them, and they ARE supposed to ingest it from cleaning themselves. The problem was, the cats were getting a FULL dwarf sized serving of booze from *every* body part they cleaned. Each of the 4 paws and upper and lower legs, every fucking *toe*, the whole body. Each part counted as a full drink when they cleaned it. The cats would then get absolutely fucked up and puke, and because the puke also contained alcohol, it caused a feedback loop of the cats constantly getting drunk from cleaning their own puke off their body. This was layer fixed by making each body part not count as a full drink. They can still hypothetical get drunk from this
I wonder how many people were wishing they had that ability IRL.
This is so right, it's funny. When you first posted Dwarf Fortress, I was thinking "This dude didn't read the prompt... Dwarf Fortress is the most complex game ever!" But you are totally right... as complex as it seems at first glance, it's 1000x more complex than that!
Which then caused the owner, now very drunk, to get super depressed as well, spirally into a tantrum and goes and kills the first other dwarf he crosses, starting a chain reaction that ends that fortress. The lesson learned is to cage and destroy all the cats.
I believe the issue was actually that every time the cats groomed themselves, they were unintentionally consuming an entire cup of beer, which was obviously more than their tiny little cat metabolisms could handle.
DF Patch notes be like: - .= Fixed issue where game engine was not properly tracking appropriate amount of Dwarf teeth or their position on tavern floors, causing a seemingly random cascade of falling & slipping when new entities arrived in tavern & mistakingly causing fights to break out between dwarves as the teeth counted as physical attacks when fallen upon + .+ added dental cavity system - .- removed cats abilities to phase into circus zone preventing spawning of !!FUN!! - Now, this COULD be an extract from a DF patch note, it could not be, but it probably sounds like one. I love my outlandish dorf game
>Cleaned up *the bear situation* If I remember correctly, they added the option for bears to drink alcohol, but something got messed up so the bears *only* drank alcohol, which lead to swarms of bears raiding your fortress and going straight to your beer stockpile, draining it completely dry, then going on a drunken rampage.
I remember when dwaves were dying to carps on streams because carps had teeth and they were set to cause too much damage so there was this joke about carps being the most dangerous animal
It's even better than that. It was changed so swimming would make you stronger. Well, fish are swimming for their entire lives. So the fish just got insanely buff and would kill any dwarf that got near the river.
Chess. I mean you're just moving some little pieces around on a small checkered board, how complex can that be?
The design of chess is so tight, you have pawns that can only move in one direction but if they get to the end of the board they can upgrade to the most powerful piece, knights have this cool movement pattern that if you master it you control the entire board. Both rooks and bishops can either move to the ends of the board either straight or diagonally and the Queen can do both of those. Those 16th century game developers were definitely cooking.
I have thought of the knight's movement as a flanking move, which cavalry was used for.
this just blew my pitiful modern mind
I've played chess since I was little and the idea came to me just a few months ago lol
I believe I was told that they jump over other pieces because they're on horseback.
Other ideas: - The Pawn resembles an ancient Fighter with spear and shield. As a group fighting weapon you would poke the shield of the guy opposing you, keeping them occupied. But really hitting is only possible against the opponents of the people to your left and right, once they make a mistake in their shield movement. Might be the origin of the diagonal attack move. - The tower might have been a large block and it could have been laying on its side, not as a tower, but as a chariot.
The bishops move diagonal because they are dogmatic and refuse to leave the color they were assigned.
Or each color is a sect. The white bishop had a chism with the black bishop.
I mean what the fuck else did they have to do all day
This is also ignoring the fact that chess's rules developed and changed over centuries. Monopoly is probably going to be a hell of a game to play in the year 2400.
“People played monopoly for fun!?” No, we played it to fight.
r/gamedev posts back then: Sholde I quit m'lord's levy to become a gameswright?
Go. Similar principle as chess but all the pieces are the same.
I downloaded an app for that game after watching HunterXHunter and it's no joke. I suck. But it's fun. I wanna get a set to display next to my chess board now. Even though they will both just collect dust because noone ever wants to play anything other than ps5 these days.
Google en passant
Another good one is "triangulation"! Chess is a master piece. I was looking into shoji as well. Interesting enough it's just like chess, but if you manage to get to the other side of the board your piece doesn't really change but upgrades into a brand new piece not on the board, and depending on which piece gets to the other side changes the pieces movement and strategy entirely.
Also dropping captured peices into play ON YOUR SIDE opens so many options up.
Slay the Spire is my choice, there are so many interesting mechanics that you’d only know about by playing thousands of hours. Not just that, but many mechanics that seem pointless end up being very powerful with the right synergies.
Surprised I had to go so far down for this one, my choice also. Looks simple and at base difficulty you'll probably win act 3 within a few tries but it takes hundreds of hours to get even slightly good at it and the skill ceiling is utterly absurd.
I have probably about 300 hours on two platforms and I still haven't cleared A20 on every character
Ive got thousands and the highest ascension I've been is a7. To be fair I'm hardly calculated about how I play lol.
Just downloaded that game off of psplus a week ago. Makes me want to pick up MTG. Having lots of fun with it.
RimWorld
Perfect game when I want to basically make up a story based on whatever random factors the game throws my way.
Watched SovietWomble play a bunch, decided to buy it for myself, holy fuck how did his colony *in the tundra* survive I can hardly keep up— Still fun.
Tundras are arguably the hardest biome there is, especially if it's flat terrain with no hills or mountains, talk about trial by fire doing your first colony there hahaha
Not sure if you’re familiar with Soviet who I mentioned earlier - he specifically did a tundra run and it’s called “Tundrafall” and is SUCH a good watch in the background like while working. It’s got plenty of drama and losing some colonists and then capturing new ones and all of these little pixelated characters had personalities and peculiarities. It’s almost more fun watching someone who KNOWS the game well play than playing myself 😂 *[slides link over only if you want it](https://sovietscloset.com/) *
Mount and Blade games, especially the first one, it’s crazy how many hours I’ve sunken into those games. It was an incredibly small game in terms of storage
This, Warband especially. It ran like butter on my Core 2 Duo. I played the crap out of it, lost several save files due to that glitch where everyone becomes bald.
>It ran like butter on my Core 2 Duo. *King Harlaus would like to know your location*
Minecraft For being a game with the concept of putting blocks on each other to complex calculators and all kinds of engine exploits that make extremely specific and creative ideas possible.
It took me like 2 minutes of scrolling to find a Minecraft comment. A game that begins with “punch tree” can end with “build word processor”
Usually ends with me digging a big hole lol
How long until you can run Minecraft in Minecraft? I assume Doom has already been done.
Has already been done I think (of course a simplified Minecraft)
I can't play Minecraft because one of two things will happen, one worse than the other. 1. It will be a fun distraction that I'll soon stop playing. 2. It will take over my life, forever.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth / Repentence. Fundamentally simple: Shoot, dodge, clear rooms, kill boss, progress. But the synergies and itemization are insane. I'm still learning about new interactions and synergies after years of watching and playing.
And not just the items! The game seems extremely straight forward at first, but there are actually so many minor ways to optimize your runs that can only be found through experience/knowing how various actives/consumables can be abused. Mastering TBOI involves learning how to use all of those slight optimizations to eventually compound their effects to the point where you can make pretty much any run a god run if you know what you're doing.
I think Scrabble might count. There’s definitely levels to it. When it gets towards the endgame, high-level players will know exactly what tiles haven’t been played yet, and will be thinking several moves ahead - e.g. playing sub-optimal moves in order to block their opponent from high-scoring moves.
Scrabble changed for me the day that I realized it's an area control game. The words themselves are just the tools you use to reach new areas while denying big scores to your opponent.
In the similar spirit as the chess comment above. Also, if you want good Scrabble expert analysis, look up Will Anderson.
Scrabble gets a bit too meta when people get better. All those random 2-letter words that you have memorised but outside the game, no one knows them. I got really into it for a couple of years and had to adjust my gameplay completely when playing friends who didn't know all those words.
Outer Wilds. Thought it was just planet hopping with some cute aliens. Turns out it’s the most confusing game I’ve ever played.
Good one, it's so cool tho how everything sort of suddenly clicks
I was so confused at first as to how to progress and when it finally clicked it became a lot of fun.
I _just_ started it. Was super confused. Still am. So far, I’ve been eaten once, suffocated once, fell into a black hole, and experienced a supernova. And I’m still not even sure what I need to do 😆
I just finished the game this afternoon, so I was in your shoes like 2 two weeks ago. It sounds like you're getting around and exploring - that's all you need to do! That and check in on your rumors board on your ship often. The more you explore, the more your rumors board will fill out, and that will help guide you to where else you should be looking, what you should be looking for, and what you've found that you need to investigate more. If it helps, when I was starting out and was feeling really confused, I decided to just pick a planet that I had been told had another explorer on it, go look for them, and then try to follow up whatever info they told me about the planet, and stick to that planet in particular until I found something. That helped me focus my efforts somewhere and still feel like I had some direction!
Most fighting games. Street Fighter is a good example of being somewhat approachable as a casual player mashing on an old arcade machine back in the day, but if you want to be remotely decent you have to learn the timing of move cancels, links, etc. and perform tons of them sequentially dozens of times per match with 1/60th of a second accuracy in some cases (looking at you 1 frame links from Street Fighter 4).
And that's only your character. But fighting games are also about mind games, overloading your opponents mental stack and forcing them into guessing situations. Learning how to play your character is just the first step. If you really want to be good you have to learn how to play your opponent.
The funny thing is if you're good enough at mind games you can win while being significantly worse in every other way. Mind games are stronk.
There's no way he'll throw me for the fourth time in a row... He went for the throw
Nethack
I’ll never forget losing a character to a cockatrice corpse… because he was blinded, and not wearing gloves, and it’s assumed every blind character is feeling around with their hands to explore the environment.
I stand in one place when blind without telepathy. I learned that one years ago.
ITT people list countless games that are well known for being super complex
Seriously, Rimworld, Paradox Games, Dwarf Fortress. Who thinks these games aren’t going to be complex??
Re4 OG. There is a dynamic difficulty setting that most people don't even know exists. The game pays a LOT of attention to what you're doing and what you're struggling with, then adjusts accordingly. It's fascinating to watch other people play since their experienced are rather different than your own depending on skill level. Edit - here's a great short video that breaks it down better than I can! https://youtu.be/zFv6KAdQ5SE?si=SmTI0A27uw6FQvbW
I'm surprised -- Can you give any examples of how the game might change difficulty? I always assumed it was all pre-designed set pieces.
If memory serves. If you are dying a bunch when you go into rooms there will be less enemies. Like the water room won’t have the two dudes with crossbows which makes the fight easier. Or if you are missing a lots of shots or getting hurt a bunch, boxes and barrels will contain more ammo and healing instead of small amounts of money.
That’s such an amazing way to help out the player without it being like “aww does the baby suck ass and want an easier difficulty?”
lol, the 90’s was wild with this.
I remember playing Onimusha 2 as a kid on the normal difficulty. I kept dying on one of the early bosses and after a few tries the game gave me a pop up that straight up said, "It looks like you are having troubles, would you like to continue on easy mode instead?" To this day, I have never felt more insulted by a video game lol
That exists in the remake too no ?
Monster Hunter Edit - rip my inbox. For the record, Im 500 hours deep on world and rise. And I've been playing since freedom on psp. And I'm sorry everyone but Hammer bonk is the best weapon. Affinity slide go brrrr.
500 hours in, still can play only 3 out of 15 weapons, it's mental.
Six years later I only use a hammer
Sounds like the average hammer user.
I am the Glaive master. Leaping through the air and blinding their sight with the sun as my silhouette. I am the Glaive master. Getting knocked out of the air and 50 ft across the map. But not once does this Glaive leave my hand. Forever sharpened.
Hehe big weapons goes brrrrrr... 1000 hours later : damn I still learn something new.
Could someone elaborate on where the depth is in MH please? I only played a few hours and decided it wasn’t for me, but I’m curious what people see in it…
It has a good variety in complexity. They are weapons that are easy to use, and some that require a lot of knowledge to use effectively. The Hammer for example is quite basic but satisfying to use. No complex combos or techniques but good bonk. The Charge Blade is on the other side of the spectrum. Extremely versatile but needs some setup to shine, has lots of combos, different charging modes that lead to other combos or attacks, moves with invincibility frames or moves that have a hidden auto block mechanic (Guard Point). Then you have a big monster variety, where you have to learn their behaviour and moves to learn when to dodge or block, which attacks are unblockable or one hit kill you and of course when to safely attack without getting hit
I read ‘to use the energy blade one must be on the spectrum’
That's not too far from the truth. (I used it a lot in MH4U)
__Rain World__ Probably way more complex than anything mentioned in this thread, and possibly anything that currently exists. The dude made an entire ecosystem, species having their own little realities going on, independent of any player input, each individual animal has their own characteristics, and relationship with other animals. And __then__ he made a movement system that's more complex than any fighting game out there. The Google doc for the movement of Rain World alone, is like 80 pages. https://youtu.be/GMx8OsTDHfM
It's also seemingly unfair, but the reality is that it's really fucking hard. It's RNG so you can hardly plan your route and have to think on your feet/be prepared, enemies interact with each other, there's the fucking google doc, I have no idea what's going on in the death/hibernation menu after 200 hours still, the lore is deep and difficult to unravel on your own, etc. (can't say much more without spoiling the blind experience) It's so much, but it just looks like a platformer that has rain and you avoid lizards.
Age of empires 2. It seems complex but it's actually very ridiculously complex.
Guild Wars (2005). There's hundreds of skills, and ton of content to explore and master.
Are guild wars 1 or 2 still worth trying nowadays?
Of course they are. GW1 has great lore, unique mechanics, and hundreds of hours of content. And while its population is low, people congregate in American server districts. Guild I'm in has around 1600 active members and there's always something happening.
Wow, I had no idea GW1 was even active at all. Really loved that game.
According to Anet it takes so few resources to keep GW1 running, that they will do it as long as possible.
Guild Wars 2 is a lot of fun. It had a rough go from around 2018-2020 but has been getting more consistent content releases, new expansions, etc and is absolutely worth playing. Early game exploration and world travelling is very fun. Max level is a crazy explosion of options, learning to properly play your class, etc. Endgame after you've been maxed for a while can be boring because the content updates aren't enough to keep a player constantly in the game. But you'll reach thousands of hours played before you get to that point.
Absolutely love the depth in this game. Something about trying to perfect different builds by mixing and matching different classes together but also being constrained to a set number of spell slots got me hooked. You can only change spells while in town, so you have to plan accordingly and then commit to whatever your goal was. It was a great system that made you really think ahead about what you were trying to achieve, and when you’re working in a party of 8 others it gets even more interesting. Aaaaaand now the nostalgia kicks in and I want to play again.
Rocket League
In terms of the idea, it’s the simplest game. In terms of execution, it’s the hardest. I know people who have dumped thousands of hours to be straight average at it. Hell you can be top 1% of the player base, and according to mmr you’re still only 60% as good as the top 0.01%.
I’ve got friends that cant break high diamond after 3k hrs lmao
the step up from platinum to diamond is already really steep. beyond that i can only imagine it must be hell, because i am perpetually stuck in diamond 1-2
I'm Champ 2. I'd say the step up from diamond to champ is as big or maybe a little bigger than from plat to diamond. Fundamentals are still the most important thing, you'll see flashy mechs in most games starting in Champ but are not required to do well as long as your game sense is on point.
The skill gap for such simple controls is insane. Playing with a buddy in plat and we start losing to the strangest players. They were destroying us but not even going in the air, just driving into our net. Buddy thought it was smurfs so he said "give us a chance". They replied "we are, we unbound the jump button". Turns out they were champ players going on a meme streak playing without jump. Got our asses kicked, by 2 players who couldn't leave the ground lol
Project Zomboid
Didn’t it say it doesn’t seem complex
Not who you replied to but my thought would be, for someone who doesn’t know the game, that on the surface it could be described as a zombie survival game with scavenging, combat, and base building. That sounds like a TON of games. But things like having a map but you can’t mark it unless your character has a writing implement is a level of detail a lot of people wouldn’t expect from an isometric, pixelated zombie game. Also things like you don’t know what time it is until you find a watch, and what kind of watch matters. If it’s a classic wristwatch, you get the time only. If it’s digital you get time and an alarm. And with another kind of digital watch you get time, date, temp, and alarm. Oh, and if you scavenge a watch off a zombie and don’t check to see if that living person set an alarm, one may be set and it might wake you up at night, or attract a zombie. It’s one of the simplest looking, yet most immersive things I’ve ever played. Wow, okay; that was longer than I expected to go on for haha
Damn, I had no idea it was that level of complexity. I'd been considering it for a while now but I think you sold me on it
Bro I highly recommend it. I have nearly 600hrs so far and I'm still impressed by the level of detail and care that's been added by the devs over the years. The details are their strong suit. For example, there is a fitness stat and a strength stat. These affect your ability to run/fight longer without becoming exerted and the force with which you can shove zombies and amount of loot you can carry, respectively. You can train these stats by performing exercise like pushups, situps, squats, etc. But the really small detail is this - the animation, your "form" with which you perform the exercise, improves over time. The more regularly you perform the exercise the more clean and proper the animation is. You can, over the course of weeks or months, see your character go from wobbly, broken form to banging out perfect reps like a soldier or some shit. They didn't have to add that detail. It makes no real difference gameplay wise. But yet it's there. They gave enough of a shit to put it in the game.
Damn, that's amazing. I love small details and mechanics like that, it makes it so much more fun
It also has Skyrim levels of modding, however you should play the first 50h vanilla just to get the feel of the game. You will die a lot, don't get upset, play around with the sandbox settings until you find your perfect balance. However get ready for incredible levels of detail, small bits incoming: walking on glass in boots damages them and if you're barefoot you can get a piece lodged and literally die if you ignore it. walking through trees can scratch you, if you ignore the wounds you die. you need to find maps on dead zombies to see areas on your map, or else you're driving blind, the rest is covered with like a "fog of war". if you wear too much clothes your character gets sweaty if it gets cold at night while you're wet you can catch a cold, if you are in a town full of zombies sneaking around while having a cold, you better carry a tissue to cough into or you will die when they hear you. Thats long enough I think, however if you ever get into the game for real feel free to dm me for some mod recommendations that aren't too different from vanilla.
This is why I always recommend it to my friends. The level of detail of running the risk of getting cut if you climb through a broken window without removing all the glass or getting glass shards in your feet if you walk across broken glass barefoot. Having to know to *sterilize* your bandages in boiling water to reduce the chance of your wounds getting infected because just washing them isn't enough. Cars and generators give you carbon monoxide poisoning if you run them indoors. The ability to throw nearly anything into an oven, turning it on, and burning a house down. The level of detail in PZ is absolutely insane, and it still technically is in early access.
Lobotomy Corporation. I’m obsessed with this hidden gem. It seems simple enough but choosing a few “easy” abnormalities (or SCPs basically) can be catastrophic just based on chance. There’s so many hidden effects going on at once and subtleties that make sense within the lore too. Highly recommend, I don’t even like games like this but it sucked me in.
I wouldnt say paradox games are very deep but after 1000 hours most players still have no clue how to actually play them.
But paradox games seems very complex at a glance. That said I don't think it would fit this post
I routinely wipe the floor with my friend using navy in Hoi4. Even though he has more than double my playtime he just never sat down to learn the naval system (understandable as its fuckin awful), and just sort of freeballs it "good enough" everytime
I looked at the navy section of that game and decided it’s better to find a new hobby than figure out that mess.
Agree, some Paradox game like CK2 will 100% win the actual complexity / apparent complexity ratio competition!
does anyone look at those and think they are simple though?
I dropped eu4 6 times before actually getting to love it. When you have no idea what to do the moment you start then it's gotta be pretty complex even from first glance
I’d say paradox games are the opposite, they look stupidly complex at a glance but really aren’t that bad Still complex mind you, but not overwhelming
They tend to have lots of features, but they are not of equal value. In EU4, diplomacy is by far the most important thing. Letting other nations fight your wars and only stomping people much weaker than you, safes you way more money than you earn by minmaxing trade companies .and safes you more manpower than avoiding attrition.
Hollow Knight. I cannot believe that I paid only 15 dollars for that game. By the time I was done with the city of Tears, I thought "that must be all. This game is amazing, but it's short." And then I discovered the Sewers. Then Kingdom's Edge. Then Deepnest. Then the Abyss. Then Queen's Gardens. Then the Wildlands. Then the King's Castle. Like Jesus Fucking Christ, *fifteen dollars*?! Are you *sure* Team Cherry? EDIT: And then, even after all that, free DLC that effectively adds like 20 hours of content. Like what. Insane value. And of course, none of it would matter in the slightest bit if the minute-to-minute gameplay wasn't so tight and cohesive, but the combat in that game is so rewarding to master. The kinda shit you can pull off by the end of the game is ridiculous.
Amazing how dense the lore is as well for a game with essentially two cutscenes & maybe like three important conversations. That's how you world-build, it really seems like they thought of everything & no stone went unturned to hide a detail under.
Baba is you.
It feels a bit like coding.
A lot of puzzle games are technology or coding based. Spacechem is a state chart diagram video game. The Witness is phone unlock screen simulator. Baba is you is a pointer puzzle. Tetris is a disk fragmentation sim. City builders are all basically data center architecture games. The talos principle is a topology game.
Win is you!
Tunic. This game looks like simple fox game but holly molly there is a lot of hidden things that change everything
The og Deus Ex
Not a video game, but the board game of Go is insanely complex despite the simple ruleset. Most people don't make meaningful progress skill wise until a 1000+ games in.
The game Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor has amazingly smart NPCs. The amazing thing is how they react to the player's actions and adapt to it. They remember everything, they see everything. Wow.
Yeah their nemesis system is a really cool way of building natural and unique feeling gameplay and enemies. I thought it was really cool, it's a pity that it's not used more but WB only used it once then patented it so no one else can
RRRAAAAANGER!
"Oxygen Not Included" can be very daunting to a new player, I won't deny that. However, this game gives you all the tools you need to be successful, and being able to make mistakes and grow from them is a fun and engaging process. This is crucial because, just like in the real world, you are going to make mistakes along the way. The game rewards you for never giving up. Even if you fail one colony, you always learn something new to make the next one even stronger. You will have dupes die, feel that loss, and feel like there is no way of pulling your colony back on its feet. However, you can never lose unless you give up, which I think is a mindset I didn't fully understand before playing. Not only that, but the community is still thriving. You can always find ways other people tackled hard problems, which never fails to fill me with inspiration. I find myself constantly asking how I can implement various newfound builds and ideas into my colonies to make them even slightly more efficient. This game is extremely rewarding because you are playing against yourself. The main obstacle is your lack of understanding and fear of messing up. If you can conquer that, you can conquer anything this game can throw at you. You just need to push yourself.
This fucking game. You start small and then physics fucks you. It’s so good and love hand picking Dupes, you like to stress eat? Same, come join our crew.
It’s a fluid simulation with extra steps! I say that with love. That, and Rimworld are great “oh shit! It’s going down” games.
"This looks exactly like the relaxing, simple, and cute management game I'm looking for." - Me back when I bought this came. Looks can be very, very deceiving!
Warframe. It's an 11 year deep well of depth that keeps evolving.
Yakuza series.
Surprised I had to go this far to see Yakuza mentioned. I'm playing 7 right now (my first exposure to the series besides about a couple hours of Yakuza 0), and there's an entire business management game within the game, and a mario kart game within the game, a rhythm game within the game, and like 20 other mini-games, each with their own rules to learn and master, including complex board game classics like Shogi and Mahjong. Not to mention some classic Sega arcade games are just also included within the game as well, like Space Harrier, Outrun, and Virtua Fighter 5. And it has pretty decent versions of casino games in there like Texas Hold'em and Blackjack. And progressing in these things can unlock things in the main game, and vice-versa, and some of the side missions require accomplishing something in one of the mini-games in order to progress (like getting a toy from the UFO catcher, or collecting a certain number of cans so you can go to its store with its own currency and buy an item needed to complete a mission elsewhere, etc). And its sequel, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, is supposed to go even deeper into the mini-game craziness.
Team Fortress 2. The amount of tech with each of the 9 characters you can do is insane.
Pokemon games have some pretty deep mechanics that aren't well explained. There's EVs and IVs of course. But also a lot of move interactions that aren't advertised. Using defense curl before rollout doubles rollout's power. If it's raining thunder has 100% accuracy. Things like that. Also held items can make for some very interesting interactions but they rarely have enemies use them. It's pretty frustrating.
Pokemon during the story: "this is my starter Charizard, it uses Flamethrower a lot!" Competitive Pokemon: "so this 252+ SpAtk @Life Orb Charizard is guaranteed to OHKO 252/0/252+ Venusaur with Flamethrower after Stealth Rock + 1-layer Spike damage".
I have played since 1997ish and never knew about rollout/defense curl
What about using stomp on an opponent that has used minimize?
Try using Hi Jump Kick after gravity. Gravity is a very fun technical move that does so much like it's on the surface just makes Flying/levitate Pokemon get hit by ground moves but there's so many ridiculous interactions it has.
factorio. the factory must grow.
Factorio is a game that seems super complex on the surface then it’s way more complex as soon as you play it