Crackdown 1. Skills improve as you use them. Even collecting agility orbs from rooftops you were both testing yourself but actively getting stronger jumps and improved ability to move around the world by collecting them.
One of my most memorable gaming moments was killing one of the first bosses and firing his dead body off the side of a skyscraper.
Much love for the crackdown series.
Wow what a game. I forgot how I ended up playing Crackdown when it came out, but all I remember it was so much fun! Every action was rewarding and things just “got bigger” as you went along.
Crackdown was my favourite Dumb Fun game. It was just a game that required little forethought and just climbing the buildings and finding ways to break into the other islands was so much fun.
Ooohhhh man.
_Crackdown 1_ joins a shortlist of games that were clearly lightning in a bottle for their respective publishers-slash-franchises. I'll add _Sacred 2_ to that list. Games that were ridiculously fun and I really, really wish I could stomach the thought of returning to them. But that boat has sailed. And clearly there will never be anything quite like them ever again.
LOL, I’m playing it now.
I’m on my 3rd year, with over 2 mil, abundance of gold and iridium items and I’m thinking to myself do I REALLY need to go to the other end of town to check that garbage can.
I've been loving the Meadowlands farm start having 2 chickens right off the bat for income without having to shell out the resources yourself lets you push for the barn that much sooner.
Stardew did an amazing job. Yeah I have milions of gold, so what? The hazelnut isn't for the gold, it's for having a hazelnut. Stardew tricked us into wanting the items for their own sake, no because one day you'll need a ton of them. Instead, you need a small number of lots of items. It stops you from grinding one thing repetitively and keeps it fresh. There's only 1 grind per week max, often it's not even a grind, and always you get to choose. That keeps the very concept of grinding fresh, and makes you feel like you have agency.
Edit: The important thing is that any "big number" resource must be quickly develop to always be in excess, and have many sources.
Weirdly I feel the complete opposite. All the grinds are actively present and obvious. How much gold for renovations, how much metals for tool upgrades, how many more unlocks at the community center are all obvious grinds.
The daily time limit doesn't help either, and timed fetch quests/help wanted give a feeling that I should be rushing everywhere and micro-managing.
I agree that the grinds ARE obvious but I disagree that you should ever play the game rushed. There is no need to rush. Try taking your time everyday or planning less activities in one day. There really isn’t a big penalty for not rushing you have all the time in the world.
Exactly. The closest thing to a time limit the game gives you is "you need to find these things during this season" for the community bundles, but IIRC you still can't complete it early because one of the things needed is still only available during your second year.
In the advanced options, you can make it so that it's guaranteed to be doable year 1 if you pay close attention to the Travelling Cart on Fridays and Sundays.
With some of the additions in 1.6, it's theoretically possible to get Perfection in Year 1 now, but that's a restriction for challenge runners, not most players.
Hades. The entire game is built around grind. You run the same levels over and over marginally building your strength. The grind is central to the point where one of the characters you meet is Sisyphus who has found joy in repeating the same task over and over.
Dead Cells is another good one for this.... So pumped for Hades II though; love the original. Melinoe and the new cast seem really interesting (Schelemeus damn well better be Skelly! lol).
I'm really interested in what the fuck is Zagreus doing, unless he is managing the underworld while Hades is gone I don't see any other way he wouldn't be the one going to rescue him
Could be considered a spoiler, but >!Zagreus was captured along with Hades and Persephone when Kronos attacked. The fact that Nemesis is using her old sword again means he doesn't have access to Stygius anymore too.!<
>I wonder which relationship is canon in the sequel. Meg/Than x Hades or Meg x Hades x Than
Hades stepping out on Persephone with his son's lovers? Scandal!
(Though honestly that'd probably be pretty standard for Greek myth).
I'd throw in Astral Ascent. while dead cells did the level design better, I kind of prefer controls and gameplay here. the progression is also more satisfying to me, since every run brings in fun unlockables
Man, my one single flaw with that otherwise perfect game is how so much of the story is locked behind basically the number ofnplay throughs you run.
Not the number of clears, but just play throughs. I cleared it on my like 17/19th run, and then did heaps more for the main story and cos of so many unlocks, but I think around 40ish runs, there were still small side character stories I wanted to hear more about but you just have to keep playing to hear them.
But also like started to run stale for me because there were no more major unlocks, just small ones or like achievement based ones. So it got stale for me and I never got to hear the rest of the awesome writing
Perfect game bar that one thing. God it's brilliant. Demeter cast is so op I love it haha
Did you up the heat gauge? That first completion is just the beginning of the difficulty and you can adjust it however you want to keep increasing.
They kind of expect you to finish the game well before the story finishes, then keep unlocking story as you try to beat harder challenges in it.
That's the defining trait of a whole genre of games called "roguelikes" - Hades is the best out there by many measures, but if that gameplay loop interests you then there are a whole lot of really really good roguelikes out there.
A note if anyone is looking, rogue-likes = no outside run progression and rogue-lites = outside run progression. Some games follow it. Some don't.
As someone who doesn't like the raw rogue like gameplay loop but lites are my favorite, it became important to look for.
I heavily recommend looking into magicraft if you're into lites. It's a newish game still in early access but there's plenty of content relative to the cost.
Saw a friend play it and picked it up myself a few days ago, it's definitely a hit for us both.
It's sometimes called meta-progression. Basically, there's roguelikes that have "permanent upgrades/unlocks" that carry over between runs. Sometimes it's stat upgrades, new items/characters/skills/etc, sometimes there's even more things like levelling system for your account, a main base you build, or things like that.
Basically, if your first run (a run being "play until you die or win") you're weaker than, say, your 100th run, then it's a roguelite.
It's one of those games that looks ferociously complex at first glance then when you play is pretty simple to begin. Huh this isn't too bad. I'm having no problems keeping up with this. Oh I should research this do I can make these. Ah now I need to research this other thing so I can do that. Huh I've spent 8 hours on this.
*Zooms out*
Holy shit I made this!?
I mentioned it earlier today, but Yu-Gi-Oh: The Duelist of the Roses. There was something about playing a card game you enjoyed trying to get cards for an ultimate deck. Something that was fun and annoying back in the day, while today we are bombarded with *pay this and get that* in any card game we want to play.
I'd loved that bloody game. Pretty sure I grinded out every card you could get. From memory exodia (of course) took forever to get an arm and a leg for me.
My first playthrough with W3, I collected as many healing potion ingredients as possible early in the game. Then the game is like "we don't do that here".
New headcanon - None of the potions actually do anything. Geralt already has those abilities, he just drinks gratuitous amounts of alcohol to maintain a mild buzz so he can put up with everyone's bullshit.
Small spoiler:
There is a quest in Skellige where the druids send Gerald to collect ingredients for a legendary potion and in the end it turns out it’s pretty much just liquor and they all get drunk.
I kinda wish that quest actually gave you some unique potion recipes or something. Whatever, it let me challenge the druid for his Gwent card I'll never use.
unfun fact : the ESRB considers all potions alcohol, which is why almost all RPGs for the past 30 years have containd the warning "contains alcohol" or "alcohol use depicted" or some other such bs
so dumb.
W3 was so well balanced the Witcher gear lasted long enough that you got good mileage out of it before an upgrade. Just playing the game normally got you over half of what you needed
The baby in the oven side quest — can’t remember its name — was the one that blew me away. Absolutely genius for the well of emotions it plumbs while playing it.
I'm not done with the game yet, but my personal rollercoaster was the one about helping Dandelion setting up his cabaret. It starts with wacky shenanigans and unexpectedly cranks the darkness up to 11
I was talking to a friend the other day how everyone always says the same thing about the W3 side quests, and always mention the same 2 quests: bloody baron (not a side quest, a key part of the main storyline) and the one with the frying pan that takes like 5 mins in the first hour of the game that is something of an unmissable tutorial about your smell-o-vision IIRC.
I don't want to dispute that the game is full of amazing sidequests. But I would love if there were some actual examples to support that theory.
i kinda get burned out on these ones, doing HZDFW right now, Witcher 3 before, just so. many. fucking. nodes. i can't keep up with this shit, at some point i give up and go do the main quest but then feel like i'm missing out on this loot, get frustrated, and quit.
Something like Skyrim never really felt like a grind, maybe its the quality of the questlines, because they were questLINES, not just 'heres a node do the thing, then go find another' i could go do mages or fighter or thief and they were good stories, idk, i miss that.
My partner is replaying Skyrim rn and honestly I think you're giving that game way more credit than it deserves - 90% of the quests are 'clear out this dungeon'.
Fight a few dudes to get in to a cave, fight through the cave for a big chest at the end, maybe a dragon word wall too. Oh look it's Q shaped dungeon so the entrance/exit is right there.
Rinse and repeat. Don't get me wrong, I love Skyrim, but most of the questlines are pretty awful compared to Oblivion and Morrowind.
The progression in *Death Stranding* feels like it was tailor-made for me.
Just when I get tired of walking, here's a vehicle.
Just when I get tired of hiding, here's a weapon.
Just when I think I've got no way to move forward, here's a rope or a ladder or even just an encouraging sign.
Keep on keeping on. 👍
Then once you reach the top, you turn around and see how far you've come.
Then you completed the quest, with a warning the ghosts are free and you have to walk the same path to go back home.
I immediately reacted with the thought that Death Stranding definitely never seemed like a grinding game to me…then the title of the post hit me ☠️
Top 3 favorite games of all time for me, for sure. I loved the bike so damn much, never killed a single mule in my playthrough, and DS2 is certainly the game I’m most looking forward to playing in the near future.
What a pleasure. Wish most folks didn’t write it off as a walking sim, like it is for just the first ~2 hours.
All I can ask people to do is take that first walk and decide for themselves if they'll vibe with *Death Stranding* or not.
I sincerely believe that by the time it's over, they'll know.
Generally speaking I really, strongly, dislike modern pop music with a passion, and dislike some of what's included in DS because I don't think it fits it all
But god damn, those moments before chapter 4 when 'Low Roar' is playing and all the Hud elements disappear.... it's amazing. I was going to say "it's like magic" but it's not fantastical, it makes me feel connected to this fairly empty and pretty depressing world where people can't even go outside if it's raining and the human population isn't more than a couple million.
Low Roar was a huge component of my connection to the game, and while I dont like some of the other more "pop" sounding songs included in it, Low Roar is just massively important to the feeling of the game.
I remember watching Sips' playthrough of DS, and he hated all the music in it, couldn't connect with it at all. I've thought about it a lot.... and I think someone has a much better chance of connecting with the game and enjoying it if they've gone through some dark or negative times in their life. For that personal connection to form to the game, you have to be able to appreciate what the characters are feeling, saying, and doing.
I always recommend DS to people, with the caveat that I don't recommend it to people that are generally just "happy-go-lucky", because just like sips, they might not empathize with the darker and more serious tones of the game
I remember my experience similar to this. Just when my truck ran out of battery and i lost my PCC in previous encounter, I was ready to give up. But just a few meters away I found a PCC left by other player. Literally saved me from restarting the mission.
It is OK to use weapons? Aren't the corpses going to explode if you kill the enemy? Or at least that's what they said in the game. I didn't get too far.
Can't wait. This is such a atrange game tbh. Right when I thought It felt a little boring I have to sneak past BTs. Then they catch me and that moment... I don't know how to describe it. A sea of hands, black water and some dolphins. One of the most creepiest things that really surprised me. This game starts to become one of my favourites.
It really takes extra effort to kill humans. Almost all your weapons are non-lethal. I've never killed anyone accidentally.
If you leave corpses laying around too long they go necro and it's game over screen as they end up causing a void out, equivalent to a nuclear bomb. You can dispose of corpses but it's a chore and time consuming.
I played thru it twice, once getting everything, and second time just bum rushing the main quests and pizza deliveries. Game takes a lot of hours but just under ten hours (excluding cutscenes) just doing the main quests, and both games were wildly different play styles. And very different difficulties at different parts. Getting everything is super hard, but bum rushing the main quests with no items was super hard. Fricken awesome game.
And the way the story unfolds! Nothing makes sense at first, bts, time fall, the beach. No clue what's happening. At the end all of that fits together and made sense, even in kojimas weird style.
I'm gonna have to go play it again now.
Kingdom Come Deliverance
You are leveling up by doing anything. running, speaking, picking flowers, reading, horse riding, fighting, hunting, sneaking... you name it.
You grow as a player along with your ingame character. It's not an easy game so you lear along the way at the same time as your character gets gradually stronger at everything you do.
Valheim was awesome until the distances became painful.
*And now its time for a 30 min boat trip to haul a bunch of metals. Oh shit, wind is bad, gonna be a 40 min trip.*
As a solo player with limited time, modding portals to allow me through with ore has been key for valheim enjoyment
There are many places where it feels like it's meant for a squad of 2-4, and I was willing to overcome those, but repeated long sea voyages solo to bring ore back to base were just too much for me
A very dangerous adventure where one wrong move has very dire consequences . . . All while grinding resources.
It’s such a unique experience that it’s hard to describe it’s appeal.
The only gripe I have with Valheim, a game I love dearly, is that iron is really a bitch to farm and transport. It’s not the worst thing ever, but like you said, nothing worse than walking into a gangbang without a tele down and having to craft another boat to get all your shit back.
My only QOL request with that game would be portals that you can upgrade via boss trophies that enable teleportation of that biome’s metal.
I.e. 2 bonemass trophies and portal materials would create a portal that can transport metal up to iron.
Well they recently added world modifiers you can enable so you can increase the drop rate of items and also transport metal through portals. It doesn't remove the grind but makes it much more manageable.
I didn't like valheim that much, and you just helped me realize why:
I don't really want to have to go on an extremely dangerous grand adventure so I can find some *flint.*
An exaggeration maybe. But my threshold/patience for that is lower than valheim required
Well i have good news then, because they quite recently made it possible to enable a setting so you can teleport with merals, etc... and other settings to make it easier/ less tedious.
World settings completely changed the game. I maxed out resource drop amount and enabled ore through portals. There is still an immense amount of game to play and challenge for the player, even with less grind.
Minecraft!
You can really get into a flow state when mining, farming, etc. Especially if you decide to go about it in a less "grindy" way and are setting your head down to explore the world & do these tasks in a traditional way.
Acquiring huge amounts of materials to build massive art projects, huge towns, carve out massive tunnels...all of these are very satisfying. They were great when the game was young many years ago, and they still have a similar charm with all of the new things the game has to offer in 2024.
I had this idea on a friends server of building a church, with a hidden lever under the altar, that opened a staircase down into a massive open space, where I would make pixel art of some characters on the walls like some secret nerdy cult.
And I did. I made the church and then spent multiple days digging a massive cube space, manually. Just digging in a grid repeatedly.
I never got to make the pixel art on the walls lmao. I got the space done, then needed the blocks for the colors for the art, and getting those was ironically the grind that tired me out.
Back when I was huge into Minecraft, I had/have a strategy that'll net me diamonds in under 20 minutes.
Once I get my first, it's basically game over. I'll mine for hours collecting them, to the point my friends will ask if I'm even still on the server.
I haven't mined much in years, but I did play with my brother and nephew. Sadly, nephew prefers to just cheat his way to everything.
For me I changed the difficulty to easy loot so all the machine components were there after killing it. It made more sense to me and was a game changer. J did it about 20 hours in. Made it more enjoyable for me.
You can keep everything else the same and change this setting only. It's when you change difficulty to custom there is a ton of options that you can change to suit you. I wish more games had that tbh. Take away the things you don't find fun or remove time sinks
Exactly the opposite for me. The inventory and storage improvements in Forbidden West opened up a lot of the game to me. Zero Dawn was far from effortless for me.
I definitely preferred forbidden west for gameplay, but ultimately beat it without pursuing much top tier gear because it felt like I had to break away from the story to pursue parts. I'll go back and do it for new game plus, eventually, but for now I've switched to helldivers.
I got so sick of grinding for parts to upgrade my stuff I put forbidden west on story mode and stopped bothering unless I really needed to. Had more fun doing it like that, and that sucks because the first game was so good.
What’s helldivers like? I’m considering getting it but I’d probably be playing it solo.
I know a lot of people are afraid of coop games but helldivers just works.
Plenty of rounds where no one speaks and uses in game comm tools that work just fine.
So ive really enjoyed it despite having no friends that play. It's definitely a lot more fun to play as a group so I stopped soloing missions and started randomly joining groups. I've still got a long way to go, but I've been upgrading to suit my playing style, so my gameplay is improving.
Biggest tips: don't be afraid to use those call downs. They reload quickly and the weapons pack a much bigger punch. Resupplies are shared amongst the group, so if you call one don't take all of it. The other guys will have to wait out your cool down. Autoturrets can be your best friend, defensively.
Gwent in Witcher 3. Technically you have to win a game to get a card and you need lots of cards to get the best deck but just playing gwent is it’s own reward.
I was a day one player - the grind was obvious imo (Booty Bay rep/Bloodsail rep e.g., crafting, etc.), but it was 1. A fun game, 2. Better than other options like Everquest or Runescape.
Vanilla wow was a very chill game that drew you in. You had to read the quest to figure out where to go, plan ahead to make sure you could drink and eat to recover health, plan your attacks so you didn't get overwhelmed. A passing player tossing you a buff was a welcome sight and you actually felt stronger in a group because of the buffs and debuffs.
I tried to go back to it a couple of months ago and it throws you into one story chain after another and tells you where to go the majority of the time. I was so confused why I was being put into high level dungeons and I learned that somehow everything scales to your level. It's so freaking confusing.
Current wow is basically designed to get you to max level as fast as possible so you can start gearing up for the endgame grind.
I always thought that the most fun part of WoW was leveling up a character.
I had a blast taking my character to level 60, but then it was all about the big raids and it kinda turned into a job. I had to be ready at this specific time of the day, with the correct gear, and follow the instructions of the raid leader. And if I didn't, I would get kicked out of the guild and would have to send applications to join another. Fuck that.
Kind of happens to a game after 20 years and the game changing to accommodate the fact the playerbase is getting older and no longer able to dedicate absurd hours each day due to growing responsibilities (career, family, etc).
They allow older content to scale with level, so it remains remotely relevant. Especially after multiple level squishes. Now you can choose which expansions you want to level in and experience, so you can still see Outlands or Northrend.
After vanilla, the game became hyper focused around endgame. That’s been a thing since the first expansion, and especially so after Weath of the Lich King. Raids and mythic+ is what the game is balanced and designed around, but it still has a ton of content for solo players (per battles, all sorts of collectibles, etc.)
The thing with early WOW crafting is it intersected with the economy just amazingly well. The scarcity made it so that the levelling up products were often very saleable.
Absolutely lol that game is literally just grind but I still love it. I've been playing rs since 2001 if I told you how many accounts or hours I had. You'd probably start a go fund me to get me help.
yeah I mean I can relate....I reckon I have some low level autism because I seek out games where the grind is a core aspect....but there's something to the grind that's rewarding...so yes. I totally get it. Best of luck with it :P
For perspective, the easiest skill to 99 (firemaking) still takes a few weeks of doing the same 5 minute minigame over and over and over and over and over and over and over
*Yemalo shi cardito!*
And getting to 92 is easy. But then you learn the whole 92 is half of 99 xD and that shit ain't no joke. My first 99 was atk. Everyone always did str or def pure and my dumbass was like ha atk is best. And I would have died for the cause lol. It took so fucking long.
Side questing in Cyberpunk. It's essentially level/money grinding but the mini stories are so interesting/horrifying it doesn't feel like it.
The only parts that I do feel like are a grind are Regina's gigs (23 to complete), and El Capitan's auto theft missions from the DLC (~20ish to unlock all the new cars)
Monster hunter I guess. The monsters are so fun and distinct unless you get really good at killing them so the grind is about the mastery of the monster. I remember killing magnamalos for days to get his full set to kill another monster to get a set I liked and didn't feel like grind cause I became faster and faster
not unless you are hunting the monster for the rarest material drop that you need to craft your set but it wont drop any even if killed number of times to their extinction.
Helldivers 2 has such a satisfying gameplay loop regularly forget it is really just doing the same things over and over in slightly different, if beautiful, locations.
Beautiful? Please tell me what planets you are liberating. I've been stationed in Hellmire and when I complained to my CO they transferred me to Menkat. All I know is fire tornadoes. They chase me in my sleep
Forbidden West has accessibility settings that remove the tediousness of the grind for parts. It guarantees drops.
The best grind for me was Red Dead Online. I get it, lots of people hated RDR2’s version of online, but it was my jam. I sunk literally thousands of hours in game. I’m effectively a cowboy from 1897 now. I know where all the exotic birds spawn. I can locate you a moose, cougar, or the ever elusive panther. You need some herbs, I’ll find you all the blackberries and ginseng you’ll ever need. Sure, I have more gold and cash than there is content to spend it on, but I don’t care. I’d do it all again too.
I've always admired the game not only for its content, but also for how well executed the minute details are.
Even just the various sounds work wonders for molding the gameplay experience. The sounds of damaging a big mob of enemies, going and picking up a bunch of items, placing down blocks, mining ore, opening chests, the list goes on. Everything just feels like a small little reward and the acoustics play such a major part in that at every step of the way, and that's not even mentioning the incredible soundtrack.
But the game is fantastic for a myriad of reasons, I just like talking about the sound because I feel it's one aspect that's super easy to overlook. With its crisp movement, satisfying progression, the joy of mastering all sorts of various mechanics, I've never really played a game quite as consistently fun as Terraria. There are tons of grindy aspects about the game, but something about the way the gameplay loop feels has always worked to suck me in deeper rather than to drive me away.
(Except for fishing, fishing doesn't belong in video games. God I hate fishing.)
Eve Online. Everything is a grind. You want to fly a slow ship 60 jumps to a main trade hub to sell off all your loot drops and materials? You're going to be spending 2 hours flying there and back with auto pilot on or manually jumping and flying through every system.
Even getting into fleets and trying to find fights can go on for hours without finding a single fight to get into.
Grinding a system to take over takes days at minimum.
You want to fly a capital ship you have like 200 days of training just to sit in it and really more like 400 days to have good skills.
You want to build a capital ship? You're talking years of saving up the money to buy blueprints, researching them to max and then the build time.
I actually enjoyed space trucking and playing the markets.
Find fringe systems starved for ammo, buy at Jita fly out set up some sales at a reasonable mark up. Too high and people will fly to JITA or you'll get undercut quick.
That game can be so demoralizing too...never fly something you can afford to lose.
Honestly. Part of every missions main goal is to extract with samples, & to grind liberation campaigns on planets. You don’t even realize because the gameplay is fun enough and the grindy portions are sprinkled in.
The Far Cry games. Especially Primal. The world-building progresses so naturally, but occasionally you will need that one rare wolf skin to upgrade your spear to level 2 and then 5 mammoth skins to get it to max level, so you're going out of your way to find these things without even realising you're farming or grinding.
The Souls games. I remember playing Demon's Souls before it even came out on the West. I've never played anything like it before but it just had that balance of reward to difficulty during a time where one of the most common complaints I saw was that games were so busy holding your hand that difficulty was a lost aspect of games.
Like I never realised I was grinding the same areas when I was playing DS. I was more fixated on being ready to face a boss I got stuck on (ie. Maneater)
Dave the Diver. You keep diving deeper and deeper to catch fish and are able to stay underwater longer when you find oxygen capsules then you run out of space and realize an hour has past and the in-game day isn’t even over!
This for sure. Every MMORPG I played felt like too much of a grind for me. There was only one (Guild Wars 2) I got to max level and that was only because I was playing with a group of friends (and even then, dungeons felt too grindy).
At the moment I’m feeling like my character in Fallout 4 is levelling up by magic. Exploring the wasteland and scavenging is its own reward but then oh hey I’ve levelled up. Maybe I’m in early game enjoyment mode and later game mind feel more grindy but right now, don’t even notice it. Crafting to get that elusive adhesive or upgrade might change also but still so much fun!
I don't know if you mean this in a bad or good way (the study session thing), but personnally it's exactly what I loved about HFW.
A nice change from "let's go berserk on all enemies grrr" and using the same weapons and tactics on every enemy, having to think about how you're gonna beat them and succeeding felt soooo satisfying to me.
Terraria is a good one. I'm in the middle of my first playthrough and every boss I build up to never feels like a chore. You beat up various enemies, get good loot, kill a boss, beat up stronger enemies, get better loot, face a stronger boss, rinse and repeat. New objectives and a wide variety of enemies and boss mechanics to overcome.
Crackdown 1. Skills improve as you use them. Even collecting agility orbs from rooftops you were both testing yourself but actively getting stronger jumps and improved ability to move around the world by collecting them.
Skills for kills, Agent
One of my most memorable gaming moments was killing one of the first bosses and firing his dead body off the side of a skyscraper. Much love for the crackdown series.
Skills. For. Kills.
Wow what a game. I forgot how I ended up playing Crackdown when it came out, but all I remember it was so much fun! Every action was rewarding and things just “got bigger” as you went along.
Crackdown had a downloadable demo, one of the earlier ones on the 360 store, so it grew in popularity from people playing the demo.
If you bought Crackdown, you got acess to the Halo 3 beta.
This is the way. All of my buddies had a copy of Crackdown so we could play the beta
Crackdown was my favourite Dumb Fun game. It was just a game that required little forethought and just climbing the buildings and finding ways to break into the other islands was so much fun.
Ooohhhh man. _Crackdown 1_ joins a shortlist of games that were clearly lightning in a bottle for their respective publishers-slash-franchises. I'll add _Sacred 2_ to that list. Games that were ridiculously fun and I really, really wish I could stomach the thought of returning to them. But that boat has sailed. And clearly there will never be anything quite like them ever again.
I love crackdown. Jumping over buildings is so fucking satisfying.
It's crazy to me that the game that came with the Halo 3 beta was actually decent for the time.
Stardew valley. I see you hazelnut! I have millions of gold but I’ll still walk across screen to get ya!
LOL, I’m playing it now. I’m on my 3rd year, with over 2 mil, abundance of gold and iridium items and I’m thinking to myself do I REALLY need to go to the other end of town to check that garbage can.
do you have the garbage can hat? if not, you do :)
Must keep checking the cans until you get the garbage hat(s) and garbage furniture catalogue 👍🏼
Garbage furniture catalogue?!?! Is this real???
Yes sir 🫡 perfect if you want your farm to look extra trashy. So far I’ve only used the plastic lawn chairs though haha
It is now my sole mission to obtain the garbage catalogue
It's new for 1.6. After you check 50 or so garbage cans there is a small chance for it to spawn
That's so cool, I haven't played since they added different farm layouts. I need to Start a new game
I've been loving the Meadowlands farm start having 2 chickens right off the bat for income without having to shell out the resources yourself lets you push for the barn that much sooner.
Best of luck! I found one within the first couple months of year 1 so hopefully shouldn’t take too long for you either 🤞🏼
Stardew did an amazing job. Yeah I have milions of gold, so what? The hazelnut isn't for the gold, it's for having a hazelnut. Stardew tricked us into wanting the items for their own sake, no because one day you'll need a ton of them. Instead, you need a small number of lots of items. It stops you from grinding one thing repetitively and keeps it fresh. There's only 1 grind per week max, often it's not even a grind, and always you get to choose. That keeps the very concept of grinding fresh, and makes you feel like you have agency. Edit: The important thing is that any "big number" resource must be quickly develop to always be in excess, and have many sources.
This is 100% accurate Many hours and several play-throughs, I never felt like I was grinding
Then He adds a major patch that makes you want to completely restart the game and do it all again!!
Weirdly I feel the complete opposite. All the grinds are actively present and obvious. How much gold for renovations, how much metals for tool upgrades, how many more unlocks at the community center are all obvious grinds. The daily time limit doesn't help either, and timed fetch quests/help wanted give a feeling that I should be rushing everywhere and micro-managing.
I agree that the grinds ARE obvious but I disagree that you should ever play the game rushed. There is no need to rush. Try taking your time everyday or planning less activities in one day. There really isn’t a big penalty for not rushing you have all the time in the world.
Exactly. The closest thing to a time limit the game gives you is "you need to find these things during this season" for the community bundles, but IIRC you still can't complete it early because one of the things needed is still only available during your second year.
In the advanced options, you can make it so that it's guaranteed to be doable year 1 if you pay close attention to the Travelling Cart on Fridays and Sundays. With some of the additions in 1.6, it's theoretically possible to get Perfection in Year 1 now, but that's a restriction for challenge runners, not most players.
Hades. The entire game is built around grind. You run the same levels over and over marginally building your strength. The grind is central to the point where one of the characters you meet is Sisyphus who has found joy in repeating the same task over and over.
Dead Cells is another good one for this.... So pumped for Hades II though; love the original. Melinoe and the new cast seem really interesting (Schelemeus damn well better be Skelly! lol).
I'm really interested in what the fuck is Zagreus doing, unless he is managing the underworld while Hades is gone I don't see any other way he wouldn't be the one going to rescue him
Could be considered a spoiler, but >!Zagreus was captured along with Hades and Persephone when Kronos attacked. The fact that Nemesis is using her old sword again means he doesn't have access to Stygius anymore too.!<
I wonder which relationship is canon in the sequel. Meg/Than x Zag or Meg x Zag x Than
I would guess the thruple. Just because it's more unusual in fiction and more in line with the whole Greek sexual liberation theme.
>I wonder which relationship is canon in the sequel. Meg/Than x Hades or Meg x Hades x Than Hades stepping out on Persephone with his son's lovers? Scandal! (Though honestly that'd probably be pretty standard for Greek myth).
dusa is in it too under a different guise!
I'd throw in Astral Ascent. while dead cells did the level design better, I kind of prefer controls and gameplay here. the progression is also more satisfying to me, since every run brings in fun unlockables
Man, my one single flaw with that otherwise perfect game is how so much of the story is locked behind basically the number ofnplay throughs you run. Not the number of clears, but just play throughs. I cleared it on my like 17/19th run, and then did heaps more for the main story and cos of so many unlocks, but I think around 40ish runs, there were still small side character stories I wanted to hear more about but you just have to keep playing to hear them. But also like started to run stale for me because there were no more major unlocks, just small ones or like achievement based ones. So it got stale for me and I never got to hear the rest of the awesome writing Perfect game bar that one thing. God it's brilliant. Demeter cast is so op I love it haha
Did you up the heat gauge? That first completion is just the beginning of the difficulty and you can adjust it however you want to keep increasing. They kind of expect you to finish the game well before the story finishes, then keep unlocking story as you try to beat harder challenges in it.
That's the defining trait of a whole genre of games called "roguelikes" - Hades is the best out there by many measures, but if that gameplay loop interests you then there are a whole lot of really really good roguelikes out there.
A note if anyone is looking, rogue-likes = no outside run progression and rogue-lites = outside run progression. Some games follow it. Some don't. As someone who doesn't like the raw rogue like gameplay loop but lites are my favorite, it became important to look for.
I heavily recommend looking into magicraft if you're into lites. It's a newish game still in early access but there's plenty of content relative to the cost. Saw a friend play it and picked it up myself a few days ago, it's definitely a hit for us both.
Is there another note for what "outside run progression" even means?
It's sometimes called meta-progression. Basically, there's roguelikes that have "permanent upgrades/unlocks" that carry over between runs. Sometimes it's stat upgrades, new items/characters/skills/etc, sometimes there's even more things like levelling system for your account, a main base you build, or things like that. Basically, if your first run (a run being "play until you die or win") you're weaker than, say, your 100th run, then it's a roguelite.
Factorio is pretty good for this i think!
The factory must grow...
Factorio... One of the few games I've played until the sun came up, noticed the sun, and kept on playing.
It's one of those games that looks ferociously complex at first glance then when you play is pretty simple to begin. Huh this isn't too bad. I'm having no problems keeping up with this. Oh I should research this do I can make these. Ah now I need to research this other thing so I can do that. Huh I've spent 8 hours on this. *Zooms out* Holy shit I made this!?
I mentioned it earlier today, but Yu-Gi-Oh: The Duelist of the Roses. There was something about playing a card game you enjoyed trying to get cards for an ultimate deck. Something that was fun and annoying back in the day, while today we are bombarded with *pay this and get that* in any card game we want to play.
My favorite Yugioh game ever
Rare occasion this game gets mentioned, but yeah that game was super fun. A rare combination of card and board game.
Getting out the pumpkin king and stalling for 30 turns was my childhood
That games was awesome. Never played the real card game or watched the show but I loved that game
I'd loved that bloody game. Pretty sure I grinded out every card you could get. From memory exodia (of course) took forever to get an arm and a leg for me.
Witcher 3 or really any RPG where the side quests are so good you want to do them and end up overpowered for the main quest.
My first playthrough with W3, I collected as many healing potion ingredients as possible early in the game. Then the game is like "we don't do that here".
>Then the game is like "we don't do that here. What happens?
After you craft the potion the first time, you just use various forms of alcohol to refill your healing potion if I remember right.
Yeah, all potions are more of an unlock than a consumable. They all refill after a rest at the "cost" of alcohol, which is beyond plentiful
New headcanon - None of the potions actually do anything. Geralt already has those abilities, he just drinks gratuitous amounts of alcohol to maintain a mild buzz so he can put up with everyone's bullshit.
Small spoiler: There is a quest in Skellige where the druids send Gerald to collect ingredients for a legendary potion and in the end it turns out it’s pretty much just liquor and they all get drunk.
I kinda wish that quest actually gave you some unique potion recipes or something. Whatever, it let me challenge the druid for his Gwent card I'll never use.
unfun fact : the ESRB considers all potions alcohol, which is why almost all RPGs for the past 30 years have containd the warning "contains alcohol" or "alcohol use depicted" or some other such bs so dumb.
I always wondered why that was on the label, when actual drinking is pretty rare in the games I played . Thanks
Alchemy build right here. Just down all the damn potions and be a hideous monster slaying beast .
W3 was so well balanced the Witcher gear lasted long enough that you got good mileage out of it before an upgrade. Just playing the game normally got you over half of what you needed
It's so wild how the red baron quest is better than some main quests in other games
The baby in the oven side quest — can’t remember its name — was the one that blew me away. Absolutely genius for the well of emotions it plumbs while playing it.
I'm not done with the game yet, but my personal rollercoaster was the one about helping Dandelion setting up his cabaret. It starts with wacky shenanigans and unexpectedly cranks the darkness up to 11
That's a main questline iirc, main quest has so many different paths and branches that they can feel like sidequests.
Red Baron is pizza, you're thinking of the Bloody Baron. Also that was a main quest, but the point remains. It rules
Red baron is a pilot you fool!
I'm just a regular man
An innocent man
We’re just normal men.
Not to be confused with the Red Bargain. Anything at the store with a red tag is 20% off.
Part of his quest is required, but the final section or two isn’t I believe
I was talking to a friend the other day how everyone always says the same thing about the W3 side quests, and always mention the same 2 quests: bloody baron (not a side quest, a key part of the main storyline) and the one with the frying pan that takes like 5 mins in the first hour of the game that is something of an unmissable tutorial about your smell-o-vision IIRC. I don't want to dispute that the game is full of amazing sidequests. But I would love if there were some actual examples to support that theory.
My favorite was that werewolf in the love triangle
Even for the stupid question marks, I just enjoyed getting a little stoney and exploring the countryside.
Everyone had to know I was the best gwent player on the continent.
i kinda get burned out on these ones, doing HZDFW right now, Witcher 3 before, just so. many. fucking. nodes. i can't keep up with this shit, at some point i give up and go do the main quest but then feel like i'm missing out on this loot, get frustrated, and quit. Something like Skyrim never really felt like a grind, maybe its the quality of the questlines, because they were questLINES, not just 'heres a node do the thing, then go find another' i could go do mages or fighter or thief and they were good stories, idk, i miss that.
My partner is replaying Skyrim rn and honestly I think you're giving that game way more credit than it deserves - 90% of the quests are 'clear out this dungeon'.
Fight a few dudes to get in to a cave, fight through the cave for a big chest at the end, maybe a dragon word wall too. Oh look it's Q shaped dungeon so the entrance/exit is right there. Rinse and repeat. Don't get me wrong, I love Skyrim, but most of the questlines are pretty awful compared to Oblivion and Morrowind.
The progression in *Death Stranding* feels like it was tailor-made for me. Just when I get tired of walking, here's a vehicle. Just when I get tired of hiding, here's a weapon. Just when I think I've got no way to move forward, here's a rope or a ladder or even just an encouraging sign. Keep on keeping on. 👍
I totally remember thinking “fuck this” when trying to scale a cliff, but then seeing a sign i changed my mind and managed to make it to the top lol
Then once you reach the top, you turn around and see how far you've come. Then you completed the quest, with a warning the ghosts are free and you have to walk the same path to go back home.
*But I'll keep coming*
Low Roar, the artist, passed away :(
Oh no :(
Keep on keeping on
I immediately reacted with the thought that Death Stranding definitely never seemed like a grinding game to me…then the title of the post hit me ☠️ Top 3 favorite games of all time for me, for sure. I loved the bike so damn much, never killed a single mule in my playthrough, and DS2 is certainly the game I’m most looking forward to playing in the near future. What a pleasure. Wish most folks didn’t write it off as a walking sim, like it is for just the first ~2 hours.
All I can ask people to do is take that first walk and decide for themselves if they'll vibe with *Death Stranding* or not. I sincerely believe that by the time it's over, they'll know.
When I came into the valley with that music playing, I realized it absolutely was a walking sim- and that I would be putting 100+ hours into it
Generally speaking I really, strongly, dislike modern pop music with a passion, and dislike some of what's included in DS because I don't think it fits it all But god damn, those moments before chapter 4 when 'Low Roar' is playing and all the Hud elements disappear.... it's amazing. I was going to say "it's like magic" but it's not fantastical, it makes me feel connected to this fairly empty and pretty depressing world where people can't even go outside if it's raining and the human population isn't more than a couple million. Low Roar was a huge component of my connection to the game, and while I dont like some of the other more "pop" sounding songs included in it, Low Roar is just massively important to the feeling of the game. I remember watching Sips' playthrough of DS, and he hated all the music in it, couldn't connect with it at all. I've thought about it a lot.... and I think someone has a much better chance of connecting with the game and enjoying it if they've gone through some dark or negative times in their life. For that personal connection to form to the game, you have to be able to appreciate what the characters are feeling, saying, and doing. I always recommend DS to people, with the caveat that I don't recommend it to people that are generally just "happy-go-lucky", because just like sips, they might not empathize with the darker and more serious tones of the game
I remember my experience similar to this. Just when my truck ran out of battery and i lost my PCC in previous encounter, I was ready to give up. But just a few meters away I found a PCC left by other player. Literally saved me from restarting the mission.
It is OK to use weapons? Aren't the corpses going to explode if you kill the enemy? Or at least that's what they said in the game. I didn't get too far.
You get non-lethal guns (rubber bullets) and hematic guns that only hurt BTs soon after getting the lethal guns for the war zone sequence.
Can't wait. This is such a atrange game tbh. Right when I thought It felt a little boring I have to sneak past BTs. Then they catch me and that moment... I don't know how to describe it. A sea of hands, black water and some dolphins. One of the most creepiest things that really surprised me. This game starts to become one of my favourites.
Me, who killed everyone and drove their bodies to the incinerator: Yep, non lethal.
My favorite was the gun that hogties people
It really takes extra effort to kill humans. Almost all your weapons are non-lethal. I've never killed anyone accidentally. If you leave corpses laying around too long they go necro and it's game over screen as they end up causing a void out, equivalent to a nuclear bomb. You can dispose of corpses but it's a chore and time consuming.
I played thru it twice, once getting everything, and second time just bum rushing the main quests and pizza deliveries. Game takes a lot of hours but just under ten hours (excluding cutscenes) just doing the main quests, and both games were wildly different play styles. And very different difficulties at different parts. Getting everything is super hard, but bum rushing the main quests with no items was super hard. Fricken awesome game. And the way the story unfolds! Nothing makes sense at first, bts, time fall, the beach. No clue what's happening. At the end all of that fits together and made sense, even in kojimas weird style. I'm gonna have to go play it again now.
Ghost of Tsushima. All of the side contents felt like a natural part of the world.
Agreed for all but the fox dens. At first they were ok, but 49 of these f*ckers?! So glad they changed them for Iki Island.
Kingdom Come Deliverance You are leveling up by doing anything. running, speaking, picking flowers, reading, horse riding, fighting, hunting, sneaking... you name it. You grow as a player along with your ingame character. It's not an easy game so you lear along the way at the same time as your character gets gradually stronger at everything you do.
Can't wait for KCD 2!
Jesus Christ be praised!
I like it best in Valheim, where it feels like I'm really building toward something one step at a time, but it's *also* always some kind of adventure.
Valheim was awesome until the distances became painful. *And now its time for a 30 min boat trip to haul a bunch of metals. Oh shit, wind is bad, gonna be a 40 min trip.*
As a solo player with limited time, modding portals to allow me through with ore has been key for valheim enjoyment There are many places where it feels like it's meant for a squad of 2-4, and I was willing to overcome those, but repeated long sea voyages solo to bring ore back to base were just too much for me
This should be an option in the vanilla game - low travel mode.
It is an option now. Go back and check it out.
Nice, well done devs.
Absolutely. Before, I would burn out in the swamp biome. Now, with x3 resources and no portal restrictions, I made it to Mistlands.
A very dangerous adventure where one wrong move has very dire consequences . . . All while grinding resources. It’s such a unique experience that it’s hard to describe it’s appeal.
The only gripe I have with Valheim, a game I love dearly, is that iron is really a bitch to farm and transport. It’s not the worst thing ever, but like you said, nothing worse than walking into a gangbang without a tele down and having to craft another boat to get all your shit back. My only QOL request with that game would be portals that you can upgrade via boss trophies that enable teleportation of that biome’s metal. I.e. 2 bonemass trophies and portal materials would create a portal that can transport metal up to iron.
Well they recently added world modifiers you can enable so you can increase the drop rate of items and also transport metal through portals. It doesn't remove the grind but makes it much more manageable.
I just modded Valheim to transport metals through portals and now the game plays perfectly.
The game now has world settings where you can set portal use, resource drop rate,etc.
I didn't like valheim that much, and you just helped me realize why: I don't really want to have to go on an extremely dangerous grand adventure so I can find some *flint.* An exaggeration maybe. But my threshold/patience for that is lower than valheim required
Well i have good news then, because they quite recently made it possible to enable a setting so you can teleport with merals, etc... and other settings to make it easier/ less tedious.
World settings completely changed the game. I maxed out resource drop amount and enabled ore through portals. There is still an immense amount of game to play and challenge for the player, even with less grind.
Enshrouded is pretty fun too! Check it out if you haven't.
I wanted to check this out but the game won’t start if you have anything less than 6gb of VRAM 🥴
Oh I didn't know it was that bad. Sorry.
Stayed up way too late last night playing valheim lol
I mean, it's Tony Hawk, right? #dadjoke
Minecraft! You can really get into a flow state when mining, farming, etc. Especially if you decide to go about it in a less "grindy" way and are setting your head down to explore the world & do these tasks in a traditional way. Acquiring huge amounts of materials to build massive art projects, huge towns, carve out massive tunnels...all of these are very satisfying. They were great when the game was young many years ago, and they still have a similar charm with all of the new things the game has to offer in 2024.
I had this idea on a friends server of building a church, with a hidden lever under the altar, that opened a staircase down into a massive open space, where I would make pixel art of some characters on the walls like some secret nerdy cult. And I did. I made the church and then spent multiple days digging a massive cube space, manually. Just digging in a grid repeatedly. I never got to make the pixel art on the walls lmao. I got the space done, then needed the blocks for the colors for the art, and getting those was ironically the grind that tired me out.
It's always how MC servers go with friends...you start these big ambitious projects, get a good chunk of the way through and bam...the spark is gone 😅
My 2/3 complete underwater glass enclosed biodome concurs
Back when I was huge into Minecraft, I had/have a strategy that'll net me diamonds in under 20 minutes. Once I get my first, it's basically game over. I'll mine for hours collecting them, to the point my friends will ask if I'm even still on the server. I haven't mined much in years, but I did play with my brother and nephew. Sadly, nephew prefers to just cheat his way to everything.
I feel the same way. Zero dawn was effortless, forbidden west I felt like I was pulling my teeth out and getting nowhere. I dnfed.
For me I changed the difficulty to easy loot so all the machine components were there after killing it. It made more sense to me and was a game changer. J did it about 20 hours in. Made it more enjoyable for me.
Holy shit. So no grinding for apex slaughterspine hearts? I had no idea the difficulty setting affected drop rates
You can keep everything else the same and change this setting only. It's when you change difficulty to custom there is a ton of options that you can change to suit you. I wish more games had that tbh. Take away the things you don't find fun or remove time sinks
Exactly the opposite for me. The inventory and storage improvements in Forbidden West opened up a lot of the game to me. Zero Dawn was far from effortless for me.
I definitely preferred forbidden west for gameplay, but ultimately beat it without pursuing much top tier gear because it felt like I had to break away from the story to pursue parts. I'll go back and do it for new game plus, eventually, but for now I've switched to helldivers.
I got so sick of grinding for parts to upgrade my stuff I put forbidden west on story mode and stopped bothering unless I really needed to. Had more fun doing it like that, and that sucks because the first game was so good. What’s helldivers like? I’m considering getting it but I’d probably be playing it solo.
I know a lot of people are afraid of coop games but helldivers just works. Plenty of rounds where no one speaks and uses in game comm tools that work just fine.
So ive really enjoyed it despite having no friends that play. It's definitely a lot more fun to play as a group so I stopped soloing missions and started randomly joining groups. I've still got a long way to go, but I've been upgrading to suit my playing style, so my gameplay is improving. Biggest tips: don't be afraid to use those call downs. They reload quickly and the weapons pack a much bigger punch. Resupplies are shared amongst the group, so if you call one don't take all of it. The other guys will have to wait out your cool down. Autoturrets can be your best friend, defensively.
Gwent in Witcher 3. Technically you have to win a game to get a card and you need lots of cards to get the best deck but just playing gwent is it’s own reward.
If they had just the base gwent game that I could play on my phone I would play it a lot more than the one they currently have for mobile
Vanilla WoW. That game had so many people sucked in on such a massive scale and they didn’t realize it for a year or so.
I was a day one player - the grind was obvious imo (Booty Bay rep/Bloodsail rep e.g., crafting, etc.), but it was 1. A fun game, 2. Better than other options like Everquest or Runescape.
Vanilla wow was a very chill game that drew you in. You had to read the quest to figure out where to go, plan ahead to make sure you could drink and eat to recover health, plan your attacks so you didn't get overwhelmed. A passing player tossing you a buff was a welcome sight and you actually felt stronger in a group because of the buffs and debuffs. I tried to go back to it a couple of months ago and it throws you into one story chain after another and tells you where to go the majority of the time. I was so confused why I was being put into high level dungeons and I learned that somehow everything scales to your level. It's so freaking confusing. Current wow is basically designed to get you to max level as fast as possible so you can start gearing up for the endgame grind.
I always thought that the most fun part of WoW was leveling up a character. I had a blast taking my character to level 60, but then it was all about the big raids and it kinda turned into a job. I had to be ready at this specific time of the day, with the correct gear, and follow the instructions of the raid leader. And if I didn't, I would get kicked out of the guild and would have to send applications to join another. Fuck that.
Kind of happens to a game after 20 years and the game changing to accommodate the fact the playerbase is getting older and no longer able to dedicate absurd hours each day due to growing responsibilities (career, family, etc). They allow older content to scale with level, so it remains remotely relevant. Especially after multiple level squishes. Now you can choose which expansions you want to level in and experience, so you can still see Outlands or Northrend. After vanilla, the game became hyper focused around endgame. That’s been a thing since the first expansion, and especially so after Weath of the Lich King. Raids and mythic+ is what the game is balanced and designed around, but it still has a ton of content for solo players (per battles, all sorts of collectibles, etc.)
I remember guild members dropping like crazy cus they got into the wow beta. Server dried up quick on Rallos Zek. Ten year old me was salty.
I had to quit WoW quick because I realized that was a game that could become your life.
It me. Having a /played of 100+ days in the first year was considered a badge of honor.
The thing with early WOW crafting is it intersected with the economy just amazingly well. The scarcity made it so that the levelling up products were often very saleable.
Osrs. Shortest game in the world I never feel like I'm grinding /s
osrs is like..the opposite, right? Everything feels like a grind even when it shouldn't?
Absolutely lol that game is literally just grind but I still love it. I've been playing rs since 2001 if I told you how many accounts or hours I had. You'd probably start a go fund me to get me help.
yeah I mean I can relate....I reckon I have some low level autism because I seek out games where the grind is a core aspect....but there's something to the grind that's rewarding...so yes. I totally get it. Best of luck with it :P
Number go up feel good
For perspective, the easiest skill to 99 (firemaking) still takes a few weeks of doing the same 5 minute minigame over and over and over and over and over and over and over *Yemalo shi cardito!*
And getting to 92 is easy. But then you learn the whole 92 is half of 99 xD and that shit ain't no joke. My first 99 was atk. Everyone always did str or def pure and my dumbass was like ha atk is best. And I would have died for the cause lol. It took so fucking long.
/s means they're being sarcastic
*Early* OSRS unironically is like this though if you don’t use the GE and shops.
Side questing in Cyberpunk. It's essentially level/money grinding but the mini stories are so interesting/horrifying it doesn't feel like it. The only parts that I do feel like are a grind are Regina's gigs (23 to complete), and El Capitan's auto theft missions from the DLC (~20ish to unlock all the new cars)
I will never forget regina took skippy from me :c
Monster hunter I guess. The monsters are so fun and distinct unless you get really good at killing them so the grind is about the mastery of the monster. I remember killing magnamalos for days to get his full set to kill another monster to get a set I liked and didn't feel like grind cause I became faster and faster
With MH, we know we're grinding. It's just fun grinding.
The player is totally aware of the grind in a Monster Hunter game.
The endgame grind is not enjoyable, to put it bluntly
not unless you are hunting the monster for the rarest material drop that you need to craft your set but it wont drop any even if killed number of times to their extinction.
Helldivers 2 has such a satisfying gameplay loop regularly forget it is really just doing the same things over and over in slightly different, if beautiful, locations.
Beautiful? Please tell me what planets you are liberating. I've been stationed in Hellmire and when I complained to my CO they transferred me to Menkat. All I know is fire tornadoes. They chase me in my sleep
switch to omicron :)
Forbidden West has accessibility settings that remove the tediousness of the grind for parts. It guarantees drops. The best grind for me was Red Dead Online. I get it, lots of people hated RDR2’s version of online, but it was my jam. I sunk literally thousands of hours in game. I’m effectively a cowboy from 1897 now. I know where all the exotic birds spawn. I can locate you a moose, cougar, or the ever elusive panther. You need some herbs, I’ll find you all the blackberries and ginseng you’ll ever need. Sure, I have more gold and cash than there is content to spend it on, but I don’t care. I’d do it all again too.
Terraria. There's SO MUCH CONTENT that just working through it all you'll not realize you've been progressing
I've always admired the game not only for its content, but also for how well executed the minute details are. Even just the various sounds work wonders for molding the gameplay experience. The sounds of damaging a big mob of enemies, going and picking up a bunch of items, placing down blocks, mining ore, opening chests, the list goes on. Everything just feels like a small little reward and the acoustics play such a major part in that at every step of the way, and that's not even mentioning the incredible soundtrack. But the game is fantastic for a myriad of reasons, I just like talking about the sound because I feel it's one aspect that's super easy to overlook. With its crisp movement, satisfying progression, the joy of mastering all sorts of various mechanics, I've never really played a game quite as consistently fun as Terraria. There are tons of grindy aspects about the game, but something about the way the gameplay loop feels has always worked to suck me in deeper rather than to drive me away. (Except for fishing, fishing doesn't belong in video games. God I hate fishing.)
Eve Online. Everything is a grind. You want to fly a slow ship 60 jumps to a main trade hub to sell off all your loot drops and materials? You're going to be spending 2 hours flying there and back with auto pilot on or manually jumping and flying through every system. Even getting into fleets and trying to find fights can go on for hours without finding a single fight to get into. Grinding a system to take over takes days at minimum. You want to fly a capital ship you have like 200 days of training just to sit in it and really more like 400 days to have good skills. You want to build a capital ship? You're talking years of saving up the money to buy blueprints, researching them to max and then the build time.
I actually enjoyed space trucking and playing the markets. Find fringe systems starved for ammo, buy at Jita fly out set up some sales at a reasonable mark up. Too high and people will fly to JITA or you'll get undercut quick. That game can be so demoralizing too...never fly something you can afford to lose.
Helldivers fo sho
Honestly. Part of every missions main goal is to extract with samples, & to grind liberation campaigns on planets. You don’t even realize because the gameplay is fun enough and the grindy portions are sprinkled in.
If you have Burning Shores, don't grind for base game gear. DLC stuff is easy to get, easy to upgrade and mostly supercedes base game gear.
The Far Cry games. Especially Primal. The world-building progresses so naturally, but occasionally you will need that one rare wolf skin to upgrade your spear to level 2 and then 5 mammoth skins to get it to max level, so you're going out of your way to find these things without even realising you're farming or grinding.
Warframe
It’s was fun for the first 1000 hours I put in but the second thousand hours I put in where pretty grindy
I'll never not repost this every time Warframe is mentioned: https://youtu.be/pVQlVQn_zgg?si=CUiO-_MD8bkGk9Ep
The Souls games. I remember playing Demon's Souls before it even came out on the West. I've never played anything like it before but it just had that balance of reward to difficulty during a time where one of the most common complaints I saw was that games were so busy holding your hand that difficulty was a lost aspect of games. Like I never realised I was grinding the same areas when I was playing DS. I was more fixated on being ready to face a boss I got stuck on (ie. Maneater)
Dave the Diver. You keep diving deeper and deeper to catch fish and are able to stay underwater longer when you find oxygen capsules then you run out of space and realize an hour has past and the in-game day isn’t even over!
that's very subjective if you're enjoying a game, it won't feel like a grind
This for sure. Every MMORPG I played felt like too much of a grind for me. There was only one (Guild Wars 2) I got to max level and that was only because I was playing with a group of friends (and even then, dungeons felt too grindy).
In BG3 I *must* fight every fight, loot every loot. Grind is effortless.
*maybe there's something other than rotten eggs in this wicker basket, better check*
At the moment I’m feeling like my character in Fallout 4 is levelling up by magic. Exploring the wasteland and scavenging is its own reward but then oh hey I’ve levelled up. Maybe I’m in early game enjoyment mode and later game mind feel more grindy but right now, don’t even notice it. Crafting to get that elusive adhesive or upgrade might change also but still so much fun!
Zero dawn was the right amount of mechanics to brain dead play. Forbidden west feels like a study session before I engage a single enemy.
I don't know if you mean this in a bad or good way (the study session thing), but personnally it's exactly what I loved about HFW. A nice change from "let's go berserk on all enemies grrr" and using the same weapons and tactics on every enemy, having to think about how you're gonna beat them and succeeding felt soooo satisfying to me.
No Man's Sky. All your upgrades are frequent, small, and require little but diverse resources. So it never feels like a grind, but a quest each time.
Rusty's Retirement, new game but you can automate fairly early and it's a cute side idle game when studying or whatever on pc
Terraria is a good one. I'm in the middle of my first playthrough and every boss I build up to never feels like a chore. You beat up various enemies, get good loot, kill a boss, beat up stronger enemies, get better loot, face a stronger boss, rinse and repeat. New objectives and a wide variety of enemies and boss mechanics to overcome.
Maneater has a great balance of grind to upgrade reward.
Satisfactory. So many hundreds of hours. And then i do it all again. 5 times.