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How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.
My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).
How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.
My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).
IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They’ve realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there’s no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.
Unless leadership resigns I won’t expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.
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.
Yup. D2 has the worst new player experience of any game I’ve played. But at the end of the day, it’s just about knowing where the daily solo dungeon is, so you can grind Light level. Raids are complicated though, because a lot of them are like puzzles.
Stopped playing it because of how money hungry the game is.
Skyrim, after lots of years of not playing it. Tried a couple modpacks and collections and they either have horny mods, bad performance, or are unbalanced in regards to difficulty. Like, I can accept dying a lot, I have hundreds of hours on soulslike games. What I can’t accept is dying because of jank, and as good as a mod might be made, it still interacts with a janky engine. Even scriptless mods end up janky sometimes. I’m building my own modpack instead, choosing simple mods for modularity. Not gonna bash nothing so it will probably end up a little basic, but eh. Playing this to tide me over for whenever an Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate expansion drops.
Apart from that, Baldur’s gate and Zomboid with friends. And the good ol classic, Rimworld.
Also, I’m a new DM and decided to fuck myself thrice over. I’m designing a whole new homebrew to play in an ASOIAF setting. It requires whole redesigns of classes, weapon systems, mechanics, etc. My players are excited for it though, I’ve been dropping sneak peeks and they’ve responded well.
Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there’re backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could’ve tailored the experience and they wouldn’t feel so empty.
And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There’s very little reason to go for a second playthrough.
Like, they did a good job with most of the game’s mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.
Ditto on what others have said. Hours/price is a lousy metric because nowadays lots of games have some pretty toxic mechanics that incentivize sticking with a boring experience (New World, Assassin’s Creed, etc.), inflating how much time you’d spend in a game that should be much shorter.
Games I’ve paid full price and I don’t regret: Rimworld, Baldur’s Gate III, Wasteland 2, Doom 2016, Celeste, Project Zomboid.
Yup, this. I’ve played two runs by myself and on my fourth with some buddies and I’m still finding out meaningful stuff I didn’t do on my solo runs. Starfield is an upgrade in tons of aspects over previous beth titles (big exception is planetside exploration), they fixed tons of issues both Skyrim and F4 had. Skill checks, while not as present as they should be, pop up once in a while. Skill tree isn’t as boring as F4 but build variety suffers, same as in Skyrim. Character background pops up in convos sometimes (but isn’t as deep as it could be).
That’s starfield. It has the makings of a good game, and it is, but it plays it very safe. And because of that, NPCs are boring, as is the story, as is combat, as is pretty much everything else in the game. The only thing that impressed me was that one mission in the main quest but even that one was limp dicked on the finish. And ship costumization, but if I wanted in-depth ship mechanics I’d play KSP.
Like the game was too ambitious and too chicken shit at the same time.
I was looking into Cyberpunk! Reading through my files I realized I got the sourcebook with the game. Ended up getting Carbon 2185 and already looking into making some homebrew systems to take it into a shadowrun esque bent. Will have to talk my guys into that one though, some of them aren’t interested in a cyberpunk run, maybe once I pitch those HBs they’ll get into it.
I had to take up DM duties for this run and assure everyone I’d take it easy on them, so they can learn systems and all. Turns out I really like world building and planning sessions, but RPing characters is really hard for me. I got a very monotone voice and my range of accents is very limited. Making up for it with a ton of planning though. I’ll make sure to pass on my workflow to whomever ends up DMing after me.
Even then, it’d take a lot more than just equal quality and compatibility. Folks are too used to Adobe slop to switch.
I’ve recently started using Affinity instead and ngl, it’s getting there. No AI stuff (which is a plus for me), runs better, and is capable of doing damn near the same things.