Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate.
I received BG3 as a gift. I installed and loaded up the game and the first thing I was prompted to do is to create a character. There are like 12 different classes with 14 different abilities and 10 ability classes. The game does not explain any of this. I went to watch a tutorial online to try and wrap my head around all of this. The first tutorial just assumed you knew a bunch of stuff already. The second one I found was great but it was 1.5 hours long. There is no in-game tutorial I could find.
I just get very bored very quickly of analyzing character traits and I absolutely loathe inventory management (looking at you Borderlands). Often times my inventory fills up and then I end up just selling stuff that I have no idea what it does and later realizing it’s an incredibly valuable item/resource and now I have to find more.
So my question is this: Do you guys really spend hours of your day just researching on the internet how to play these games? Or do you just jump in and wing it? Or does each game just build on top of working knowledge of previous similar games?
E: General consensus seems to be all of the above. Good to know!
I think you know what it is you enjoy, so you’ve just got to remember not to fall into that trap of “well, everyone says it’s good, so I must try it”.
The great reviews come from the people who already enjoy that kind of game. Like, reviewers on a site usually favor specific genres. If something gets a good review, you’ve got to put it into the context of whether or not it’s something the reviewer usually plays.
You’re not often going to see an RPG review by someone who mostly plays platformers.
So if an RPG is good to an RPG-enjoyer reviewer, and most of the people picking it up are already RPG fans, then good reviews are always going to be biased in favor of people who enjoy that gaming experience.
My advice?
Take a look at the tags on Steam. I know they’re user-submitted and “RPG” is on like every fucking game now, but things like “turn-based”, “tactical”, “simulation”, “crafting”, and a few others I’m forgetting will most likely be the things you’ll want to avoid (maybe there will be some exceptions here and there).
Also, wait a bit. No need to play games immediately. Play some stuff you enjoy for a year and then see if you still want to play it.
As for how and why people play these games… Just preference really. It comes down to the energy and time someone’s willing to commit. Neither a good thing or bad thing. Some find that thrilling, others find it chore. Both perspectives are perfectly valid.
Sometimes, people just enjoy them as is without getting too deep and never bother with “the meta” or whatever. Usually one of two things happens here: either they really enjoy it because they don’t have people backseat gaming them and telling them how to play and they’re finding creative ways to do things, or they find it a miserable experience because it’s just not fun if they don’t like the core mechanics.
I personally don’t have the energy for “deep complex games”, despite enjoying RPGs and immersive sims. I don’t ever bother with crafting or strategy games (although I did get into Civ V for a while, which was nice).
Over the years, I’ve learned what I like, what I don’t like, and just wait things out. Game Pass and deep sales help a lot here, actually. (Also other options, but not strictly ones people necessarily approve of for various reasons.)
IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur’s Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.
The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You’ll never learn everything at once, so don’t try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you’ve carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don’t even need to care about whether you’ll understand everything eventually.
First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it’s almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.
A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the “Send to camp” option for items. Grab them whenever, they don’t take up inventory space.
Here’s a fun thing you can do: just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 may be very daunting at first, even with its genius tooltip system, so I just went straight into it with a Dragonborn barbarian with no real thought put into it other than “he’s hot and totes my new fursona”. You’d be surprised at how far you get and how much you pick up naturally over the next 80 hours of gameplay.
That being said, it’s still not for everyone, as much as it tries to be, and if even Overwatch is too complex for you already, it might just be that the evolving game design in the industry is becoming more misaligned with your tastes, and that gamers are becoming more and more serious about the video games they play.
I wonder how long before someone starts getting offended on behalf of cavemen for the phrase Ooga Booga.
Seriously though, perhaps RPG’s just aren’t for OP. Some people get enjoyment from taking things slow, learning all the mechanics, and building the most powerful character possible within the limits of the game.
Many people choose not to cheat in games like this to give yourself max stats because that’s where the fun is, as opposed to a a game like borderlands, where an already maxxed out character can still be challenged with the endgame content which scales to their level.
just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.
Haha I mentioned this elsewhere but that’s kinda what I did. Just picked random everything. I just feel like I’m going to get my ass kicked in the first altercation with a weak-ass character and be stuck there permanently.
Unless you do obviously dumb things, like not doing anything at all and letting the enemies hit you, you literally could not fail at baldurs gate on default difficulty. I actually find it way too easy to succeed and far too forgiving. You could genuinely go through the whole game with your “picked random everything” character. Youll get your ass kicked a few times, but youll never get stuck anywhere. The only part thats complex is the story IMO. There are dozens of alternative endings and secret story bits and hidden interactions between characters. Almost every quest, no matter how small, has multiple endings. You could probably sink 1000 hours into BG3 without going through most of the story content.
BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.
The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.
BG3 is based on arguably the most user-friendly version of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (5e). Larian themselves also do a fantastic job at easing you into the mechanics via gameplay, so you can honestly jump in and just play something that sounds cool to you without worrying about having to min-max or optimize your character. The game lays out what you get on each level-up pretty well and it defaults you to being a single class, so you won’t have to worry about multi-classing unless you want to - and because it’s based on 5e, you can honestly get away with not optimizing your build that much, if even at all, and manage to do fine as long as your main damage (STR for melee, DEX for ranged and Finesse weapons)/casting stat (INT for Wizards, CHA for Bards/Sorcerers, and WIS for Clerics/Druids) is high.
Can’t speak on OW2, but with games like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide, I found it’s best to just play it and figure stuff out slowly from experience. A lot of it can sound complicated, but I found it’s easier to digest the complexity of the mechanics and systems a bit at a time as your experience with the game grows. Like with Vermintide, as an example, I recently started really diving in deep with Cleave, Stagger, and Frontline/Heavy Frontline/Tank property mechanics and numbers for melee weapons; you literally cannot see these things from the game’s UI, and starting out I had no idea these things even existed, and it only really matters once you start playing on the hardest difficulties, Legend and Cataclysm. If I had to figure out all that stuff early on, I would nope out of the game super quick lmao.
5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.
Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.
Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you’ve gained from prior experimentation.
Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it’s an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren’t particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.
A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.
Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.
I already was a dnd fan so I understood how character creation worked but still spent a good one and a half hour in the character creator. This is something I enjoy though.
Absolutely. I spent years playing Destiny and eventually got tired of researching lore on the web because that’s what you had to do. The secret missions and guns and raids are next to impossible to figure out on your own.
As for OW, I played for a while but was just instantly slaughtered. My playmate explained it was because I was X character and Y character has Z ability and I needed to switch to V character when I respawn to counter their abilities and then I realized she had spent hours researching all these character traits on the internet and that’s around the time I bailed.
My playmate explained it was because I was X character and Y character has Z ability and I needed to switch to V character when I respawn to counter their abilities
With all due respect, your playmate knew jack shit. Particularly in Overwatch, the “countering” is a combination of personal skill and situational awareness: you can win with any character against any other one, by just using the right abilities at the right time from the right place.
It’s also mainly a team based game… or used to be… so which character you pick is much less important, than knowing which synergies you can get with your teammates. That one does take time to learn, on everyone’s part, but a well synergized team can only be “countered” by another well synergized team.
For reference, I’m part blind, and some of my favorite kills are Mercy vs. Widow, or Torb’s ballistic rivet headshots across half the map vs. whoever thought they were well behind cover.
Pulling off a Junkrat mine-assisted jump and destroying Pharah on a wide outdoor map is always glorious. Love(d) doing that shit.
Then just spring a trap and blast Mercy as soon as she immediately goes to res the dead Egyptian rocket lady, because that’s what she almost always does.
Yeah, Pharah’s weak spot was holding still while ulting, easy target for everyone.
But the trap for Mercy wasn’t a guaranteed hit, I used to “main Mercy”, and the trick was that Pharah’s “corpse” started where she got killed, however high above ground, and then began falling. Mercy’s rez (and heal/boost) had a minimum engage range, but the disengage range was about twice of that, so a Mercy could fly towards the corpse midair, hit rez while passing it by, then channel rez while still slowly hovering down, sometimes even rezzing pharah midair, not having to touch the ground.
The risk to that, was if Pharah’s corpse happened to land on a roof, while Mercy kept hovering down, she would get out of range and lose the cast… but that’s what made it interesting.
I also miss that one time when they made Mercy’s ult a speed boost; best Mercy games were always while keeping her in the air as long as possible, healing everyone while jumping among them, but the speed ult made for some fun “let’s see how many can I rez in a single game”.
But really destiny and overwatch complicated??? Those games are for children
Overwatch might seem that way because of the cartoon style and the low skill floor, but the skill ceiling is somewhat higher. I haven’t met many children who would be good at predicting behavior of high-level opponents and coordinating to counter it, for example.
I don’t know that I would call it complicated, either, except in the sense that there’s often a lot to keep track of all at once. I think I’d place it somewhere in the middle.
Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).
While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.
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Lol, some of these replies…
I think you know what it is you enjoy, so you’ve just got to remember not to fall into that trap of “well, everyone says it’s good, so I must try it”.
The great reviews come from the people who already enjoy that kind of game. Like, reviewers on a site usually favor specific genres. If something gets a good review, you’ve got to put it into the context of whether or not it’s something the reviewer usually plays.
You’re not often going to see an RPG review by someone who mostly plays platformers.
So if an RPG is good to an RPG-enjoyer reviewer, and most of the people picking it up are already RPG fans, then good reviews are always going to be biased in favor of people who enjoy that gaming experience.
My advice?
Take a look at the tags on Steam. I know they’re user-submitted and “RPG” is on like every fucking game now, but things like “turn-based”, “tactical”, “simulation”, “crafting”, and a few others I’m forgetting will most likely be the things you’ll want to avoid (maybe there will be some exceptions here and there).
Also, wait a bit. No need to play games immediately. Play some stuff you enjoy for a year and then see if you still want to play it.
As for how and why people play these games… Just preference really. It comes down to the energy and time someone’s willing to commit. Neither a good thing or bad thing. Some find that thrilling, others find it chore. Both perspectives are perfectly valid.
Sometimes, people just enjoy them as is without getting too deep and never bother with “the meta” or whatever. Usually one of two things happens here: either they really enjoy it because they don’t have people backseat gaming them and telling them how to play and they’re finding creative ways to do things, or they find it a miserable experience because it’s just not fun if they don’t like the core mechanics.
I personally don’t have the energy for “deep complex games”, despite enjoying RPGs and immersive sims. I don’t ever bother with crafting or strategy games (although I did get into Civ V for a while, which was nice).
Over the years, I’ve learned what I like, what I don’t like, and just wait things out. Game Pass and deep sales help a lot here, actually. (Also other options, but not strictly ones people necessarily approve of for various reasons.)
IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur’s Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.
However, if you want to study the mechanics, you can also consult the D&D 5th edition rules. BG3 follows most of them. https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/DnD_BasicRules_2018.pdf
Sounds to me like you just don’t want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don’t either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads
BG3 specifically: It’s D&D 5e, so… yeah It’s gonna be complex.
Complex systems more generally:
The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You’ll never learn everything at once, so don’t try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you’ve carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don’t even need to care about whether you’ll understand everything eventually.
If you’re really struggling to click with a game, I’ve found watching a “let’s play” on YouTube helps me out.
Reading the title i thought about titles like mech engineer or the like where you almost have to read a 50 pages manual. Not Deep Rock Galactic 0.0
First of all, BG3 is built on the DnD 5th Edition system, (with some slight changes) so a lot of people who have played DnD are going to be very aware of the system and how it works. But to be honest, on the easier settings, it’s almost impossible to fail the game, you can do what ever you want.
A big tip for BG3 inventory management is to use the “Send to camp” option for items. Grab them whenever, they don’t take up inventory space.
I have been playing with another person and we were both confused. just guessed my way through it.
No need to watch tutorials on how to create a character brother. Figuring things out as you play is the fun part
Here’s a fun thing you can do: just stop thinking about stats and make a character you’d like to bang, then just ooga booga it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 may be very daunting at first, even with its genius tooltip system, so I just went straight into it with a Dragonborn barbarian with no real thought put into it other than “he’s hot and totes my new fursona”. You’d be surprised at how far you get and how much you pick up naturally over the next 80 hours of gameplay.
That being said, it’s still not for everyone, as much as it tries to be, and if even Overwatch is too complex for you already, it might just be that the evolving game design in the industry is becoming more misaligned with your tastes, and that gamers are becoming more and more serious about the video games they play.
I wonder how long before someone starts getting offended on behalf of cavemen for the phrase Ooga Booga.
Seriously though, perhaps RPG’s just aren’t for OP. Some people get enjoyment from taking things slow, learning all the mechanics, and building the most powerful character possible within the limits of the game.
Many people choose not to cheat in games like this to give yourself max stats because that’s where the fun is, as opposed to a a game like borderlands, where an already maxxed out character can still be challenged with the endgame content which scales to their level.
Haha I mentioned this elsewhere but that’s kinda what I did. Just picked random everything. I just feel like I’m going to get my ass kicked in the first altercation with a weak-ass character and be stuck there permanently.
Don’t worry too much about it. It’s part of the Role-Playing charm.
After my own first couple of playthroughs with “serious characters” I just started screwing around with fun builds.
The “Double Chaos” sorceror is fun and stupid way to complete the game. Sometimes I’m a doomsday machine in battle, others times I’m a sheep…
Unless you do obviously dumb things, like not doing anything at all and letting the enemies hit you, you literally could not fail at baldurs gate on default difficulty. I actually find it way too easy to succeed and far too forgiving. You could genuinely go through the whole game with your “picked random everything” character. Youll get your ass kicked a few times, but youll never get stuck anywhere. The only part thats complex is the story IMO. There are dozens of alternative endings and secret story bits and hidden interactions between characters. Almost every quest, no matter how small, has multiple endings. You could probably sink 1000 hours into BG3 without going through most of the story content.
Thank you
Then you respec your character.
And start over completely?
BG3 is a unique example in that its built in a system many players already know and understand, AND the whole thing is so watered down that you can absolutely just wing it with a rudimentary understanding of how things function and be fine. You don’t need to min/max to enjoy the game, and if it’s too hard there are multiple difficulty levels. It’s fine to hit explorer difficulty pick a class for RP and just enjoy the game. The “GaMeR” police aren’t going to kick down your door.
The answer to the wider question is: No, I don’t. I like learning systems and I’ve practiced learning systems very rapidly. I’ve been quickly learning new systems for some 20+ years, so by now, I am just good at it. I do not spend any real length of time researching how to play these games; I load in, read and absorb what’s in front of me, and try thngs. Things that don’t work, I throw out, and I try new things. After a few iterations of this, if I am still heavily struggling I may Google some build repository so I can glance over some ideas of what other suggest work and then incorporate those ideas into my own setup, but even then, that practice is preserved for more competitive games. Games like BG3, Deep Rock, Warframe, Darktide, Inkbound, and Cassette Beasts, just to name some I’ve played in the last couple months, I’ll never look up how others build and play. This is in part because I don’t need to, and in part because crafting my own builds and finding my own solutions is a large part of the fun for me.
BG3 is based on arguably the most user-friendly version of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (5e). Larian themselves also do a fantastic job at easing you into the mechanics via gameplay, so you can honestly jump in and just play something that sounds cool to you without worrying about having to min-max or optimize your character. The game lays out what you get on each level-up pretty well and it defaults you to being a single class, so you won’t have to worry about multi-classing unless you want to - and because it’s based on 5e, you can honestly get away with not optimizing your build that much, if even at all, and manage to do fine as long as your main damage (STR for melee, DEX for ranged and Finesse weapons)/casting stat (INT for Wizards, CHA for Bards/Sorcerers, and WIS for Clerics/Druids) is high.
Can’t speak on OW2, but with games like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide, I found it’s best to just play it and figure stuff out slowly from experience. A lot of it can sound complicated, but I found it’s easier to digest the complexity of the mechanics and systems a bit at a time as your experience with the game grows. Like with Vermintide, as an example, I recently started really diving in deep with Cleave, Stagger, and Frontline/Heavy Frontline/Tank property mechanics and numbers for melee weapons; you literally cannot see these things from the game’s UI, and starting out I had no idea these things even existed, and it only really matters once you start playing on the hardest difficulties, Legend and Cataclysm. If I had to figure out all that stuff early on, I would nope out of the game super quick lmao.
5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.
Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.
Complexity gives the games depth which allows them to hold interest. You can try something, figure out how to play the game that way, and then go and start a new character to figure out how to play the game another utilizing the knowledge you’ve gained from prior experimentation.
Some of the inventory management can be annoying at times, but again it’s an opportunity to employ knowledge as a means to identify the items that aren’t particularly useful to one playstyle and could be useful under another set of abilities/attributes or some set of combinations allowed by the game.
A game that only has one right answer quickly becomes a boring precision button pushing simulator to people who prefer more complexity, variety and depth in their gaming experience.
Not that one preference or the other is inherently correct, but hopefully it can be understood that different people want different things from their games.
I already was a dnd fan so I understood how character creation worked but still spent a good one and a half hour in the character creator. This is something I enjoy though.
Wow!
You don’t need to research anything to finish Bg3. You don’t need to understand all the things to enjoy a game. You just put it on easy and enjoy.
But really destiny and overwatch complicated??? Those games are for children
Absolutely. I spent years playing Destiny and eventually got tired of researching lore on the web because that’s what you had to do. The secret missions and guns and raids are next to impossible to figure out on your own.
As for OW, I played for a while but was just instantly slaughtered. My playmate explained it was because I was X character and Y character has Z ability and I needed to switch to V character when I respawn to counter their abilities and then I realized she had spent hours researching all these character traits on the internet and that’s around the time I bailed.
With all due respect, your playmate knew jack shit. Particularly in Overwatch, the “countering” is a combination of personal skill and situational awareness: you can win with any character against any other one, by just using the right abilities at the right time from the right place.
It’s also mainly a team based game… or used to be… so which character you pick is much less important, than knowing which synergies you can get with your teammates. That one does take time to learn, on everyone’s part, but a well synergized team can only be “countered” by another well synergized team.
For reference, I’m part blind, and some of my favorite kills are Mercy vs. Widow, or Torb’s ballistic rivet headshots across half the map vs. whoever thought they were well behind cover.
Pulling off a Junkrat mine-assisted jump and destroying Pharah on a wide outdoor map is always glorious. Love(d) doing that shit.
Then just spring a trap and blast Mercy as soon as she immediately goes to res the dead Egyptian rocket lady, because that’s what she almost always does.
Man, I miss the good days of that game.
Yeah, Pharah’s weak spot was holding still while ulting, easy target for everyone.
But the trap for Mercy wasn’t a guaranteed hit, I used to “main Mercy”, and the trick was that Pharah’s “corpse” started where she got killed, however high above ground, and then began falling. Mercy’s rez (and heal/boost) had a minimum engage range, but the disengage range was about twice of that, so a Mercy could fly towards the corpse midair, hit rez while passing it by, then channel rez while still slowly hovering down, sometimes even rezzing pharah midair, not having to touch the ground.
The risk to that, was if Pharah’s corpse happened to land on a roof, while Mercy kept hovering down, she would get out of range and lose the cast… but that’s what made it interesting.
I also miss that one time when they made Mercy’s ult a speed boost; best Mercy games were always while keeping her in the air as long as possible, healing everyone while jumping among them, but the speed ult made for some fun “let’s see how many can I rez in a single game”.
Overwatch might seem that way because of the cartoon style and the low skill floor, but the skill ceiling is somewhat higher. I haven’t met many children who would be good at predicting behavior of high-level opponents and coordinating to counter it, for example.
I don’t know that I would call it complicated, either, except in the sense that there’s often a lot to keep track of all at once. I think I’d place it somewhere in the middle.
i mean any multiplayer game is “complicated” at the highest level no matter how simple it is.
Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).
While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.