Your Pokémon comparison reminds me of something I’ve noticed with gaming. Sometimes the game just has to hit me at the right time, regardless of nostalgia. I’ve had games that I bounced off of multiple times, then years later I decide to give it a go and get sucked in. I’m fairly sure this sometimes happens due to other factors in my life at the time (situations I’m currently experiencing, things I haven’t experienced, etc.).

For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.

I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.

I love the idea of GoG, but it’s also the only client that forces me to pay in local currency with local taxes when I travel too. Have to use a VPN and change my time zone in settings to get it to let me pay in USD. Steam does it based on billing address and card.

I avoided signing up for years because I thought it would lead to us only owning a revokable digital license to every new game. Oh how the turn tables.

We already do it for utilities. A financial company should not be deciding what its users are allowed to spend their own money on except within the confines of law.

0.286x damage done, 3.5x damage taken. Doesn’t scale well at all. It would be nice if it were more granular and they had separate sliders for damage done and damage taken.

To me Veilguard felt like they wanted to make a fantasy Destiny game then changed course halfway through. The free roam zones felt like destiny areas, complete with areas where you knew something would spawn but it would be random which types of enemies it would be. Then you’d find a quest swirl or character and press x and it would dump you into a story mission.

But the movement wasn’t as fun as destiny. And I’m guessing trying to cram a fantasy rpg into areas similar to a shooter causes problems with ranged combat, which would also explain the very cramped areas you’re always doing combat in.

Every story mission was also basically a hallway with a bunch of short, dead-end detours containing 1-4 things to pick up that vary between materials, lore, or equipment. It felt like a paint by numbers rpg.

Rook was essentially Master Chief and nothing your team did mattered much except thematically. I watched them beat on weak mobs for a long time without actually killing anything.

I couldn’t always logically connect outcomes to what the game was showing me, either. Like, I lost two team members because I assigned them to do specific jobs (and the game had a pop up pointing out that this was why they died), but the loss seemed completely disconnected from the actual job. It would be like assigning Gale to break a magical ward (because the tooltips and/or dialogue suggests he can do it, and historically he’s a good it), and he does an outstanding job of it, but then some random magic mirror pops up out of nowhere and teleports in a devil to kill him and the game says, “Gale died because you assigned him to break the magical ward.” Like, what does a magic mirror popping up from nowhere have to do with me assigning him to break a ward?

It also had frustrating bugs sometimes. Like moving my camera to the side when I’m trying to attack something. Or deciding to fire an attack at a nearby enemy that I’m not trying to attack. Or wasting my ultimate because it vanished into the ceiling.

93% vs 77% doesn’t strike me as polarized. 16% difference?

77% doesn’t even seem that bad if it’s a style of game I like. From about 2001 I used to see sci fi movies that looked interesting as long as they had at least a 25% Rotten Tomatoes score because my tastes were different.

Is there something I’m missing? I haven’t played either game and I haven’t looked at reviews. Won’t buy KCD (no character creation) and probably will eventually buy Avowed.

Big mainstream games that are heavy on sex, like Baldur’s Gate 3, are a recent phenomenon.

Heavy on sex? Just which mods did the author install?

I like it, but only as an alternative to very good balancing with very slow power scaling. Unless I’m playing a superhero game, I don’t want to one-shot starting enemies once I’m higher level.

This is all tied to my preference for immersion above all and my tendency to fiddle around in a game pretending I’m playing a TTRPG rather than rushing to the end.