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Outer Wilds and Heaven's Vault feel the the result of two teams taking the same pitch (space archaeology in a pocket region of the universe) and going in different directions. They don't have some of the things you want but might be worth a look.
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Nov 23, 2020 05:07
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Try Endless Sky maybe, successor to the old Escape Velocity games. Or Starcom: Nexus.
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Nov 23, 2020 05:08
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How's your tolerance for ancient pc games, that come with fifteen pounds of manuals and game boards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Saga_One:_Beyond_the_Boundary
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Nov 23, 2020 05:12
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christmas boots posted:Ghost of Tsushima was really good about this Good boy, Nobu. 
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Nov 23, 2020 07:33
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WaltherFeng posted:Good boy, Nobu. Too loving soon.
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Nov 23, 2020 07:45
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WaltherFeng posted:Good boy, Nobu. Wow. 
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Nov 23, 2020 07:53
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RGX posted:This is more a criticism of a genre than an individual game, but I've been watching Star Trek Discovery recently and it made me crave a space game where I could jump in my ship, maybe order my crew around a bit, and explore the stars, come across weird and wonderful bits of space and engage in the occasional bit of space combat. Just chilling out exploring the galaxy, feeling that sense of being out in the unknown, wondering what mystery/disaster awaits me over the horizon. I don't have any good suggestion apart from those already given. I'm wondering about what it is your looking for, and perhaps you're wondering about that too? If Elite is too shallow and NMS is too much samey-procedurally-generated-infinity, I certainly see a point there. But what do you feel is missing from those two in order to make exploration fun? If it's one thing I'm pretty sure of, it's that you won't ever get genuinely interesting world building in a randomly/procedurally generated universe. OTOH, hand-written universes are never going to be big enough to "just explore". So we could only hope for huge procedurally generated games with interesting mechanics/systems, at best. While games with a story like Mass Effect will have characters and world-building but inherently be finite and less open-ended.
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Nov 23, 2020 09:27
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RGX posted:Having browsed and tested so many of these now, the thing that strikes me the most is this insistence of the genre that the most fun thing about being in space must be trading/hauling/mining materials, dogfighting pirates or picking a side in an intergalactic war. Surely the fun in being out in the unknowns of space is..... Exploring the unknowns of space? I'd love some recommendations if anyone has any. It's not quite the same thing, and you can only really play it once, but if you want exploring an unknown bit of space, and hauling materials, and getting out of fights really fast, I think Subnautica may scratch your itch. Subnautica has defined start and end points which nicely play into and off the experience, it has Lore, it has a Plot, and it's not random - which means the environments were all designed with the overall experience in mind. And also to make you poo poo yourself in terror.
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Nov 23, 2020 09:47
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Also, while The Outer Wilds was brought up before, I think The Outer Worlds is probably a little closer to the thing you're looking for. It's like classic Star Trek, if every classic Star Trek episode was about how lovely capitalism is.
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Nov 23, 2020 11:02
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RGX posted:This is more a criticism of a genre than an individual game, but I've been watching Star Trek Discovery recently and it made me crave a space game where I could jump in my ship, maybe order my crew around a bit, and explore the stars, come across weird and wonderful bits of space and engage in the occasional bit of space combat. Just chilling out exploring the galaxy, feeling that sense of being out in the unknown, wondering what mystery/disaster awaits me over the horizon. I too am tired of every space game being Age of Sail but with Lasers. I kind of unironically just want a game that, stripped down to its fundamentals, is nothing more than Ubisoft's Far Cry model adapted into spaceships and stuff.
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Nov 23, 2020 12:18
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John Murdoch posted:I too am tired of every space game being Age of Sail but with Lasers. I kind of unironically just want a game that, stripped down to its fundamentals, is nothing more than Ubisoft's Far Cry model adapted into spaceships and stuff. As terrible as this is, and you're completely right, I always liked the story that this happened because a space combat game came out that was just too good. I'm not sure on the specific accuracy of this, but I always heard that the space combat genre died because Freespace 2 blew everyone else out of the water. The subgenre as a whole looked at that game and went 'that game's outdoing all of us by a lot, we can't compete, so let's not', and everyone else either stopped or went in a different direction since it was always kind of niche; they were just willing to let Freespace have it. But then Interplay died before Freespace 3 could happen, and THQ bought Volition while not buying the Freespace property. Suddenly the genre was completely dead, since all the competition was either also dead, or instead in another field, such as the newly-developing 'Naval Trading Sim But In Space' subgenre.
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Nov 23, 2020 12:45
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Captain Hygiene posted:The heretofore unknown #blessed picture/Weird Headline combo There's a baby elephant in that picture? I don't see it.
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Nov 23, 2020 13:08
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CJacobs posted:Upsettingly good. I came to love my horse in that game more than even the one in RDR2. I thought it was really nice in AC: Odyssey that Kassandra/Alexios would speak to any horse they were riding but if it was their own horse that you get given through the plot rather than a random one you'd jumped on, they'd call it by its name too. It was a nice detail.
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Nov 23, 2020 13:17
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Lots of great suggestions here, will definitely check out everything recommended, thanks!Hippie Hedgehog posted:I don't have any good suggestion apart from those already given. I'm wondering about what it is your looking for, and perhaps you're wondering about that too? Yeah I've been thinking about this a lot. I certainly see the problem Star Citizen has where if you were to truly attempt to hand-craft the be all and end all of space universes you quickly spiral into so many systems and mechanics that the project is unworkable, a proper jack of all trades and master of none. As for Elite and NMS, procedural generation just doesn't seem ready for the big time yet and thats fair enough given the mind blowing problems the tech has to solve. Interestingly, Stellaris scratches the itch somewhat with all its nice bits of flavour text, artifacts to scan etc and I'm definitely not opposed to grand strategy, I just wish it was on a more personal scale rather than the whole take over the galaxy from above format. I guess what I'm looking for really is a halfway house, and no-one seems to be making those. I think in an ideal world you could have the ship management of FTL (a 3d version would be nice), the open universe "gosh its big out here" atmosphere of Elite, and crucially, a procedurally generated universe peppered with developer created exploration opportunities. I think the tendency is for developers to go "well obviously we can't create a huge universe by hand, so pass it off to the procedural tech and be done with it" and we are nowhere near making that compelling or workable. I don't want the moon on a stick, but how about every tenth planet/space station/anomaly or something has an element of hands on developer work with it? 40 hours or so of actual developer created content, the rest is handled by the algorithm and may or may not suck. In all honesty, I'd take everything hand created and a relatively short game if it was interesting enough, but I think you could blend the two concepts to really give it that sense of scale which is so important to the feel of a space game. I begrudge X4 massively for having so many of the elements I'm looking for while being so over-complicated and menu based that it sucks all the fun out of it, it's like they've put all the work into handcrafting a huge universe and then made it as obtuse as possible to spoil any enjoyment gained by actually exploring it. Also while I'm wishing for things I don't have and being an entitled little bitch, a gold plated Lamborghini and a few million in my bank account would be great. If everyone could get on these ideas quick as they can, I'll wait here and complain. Again, thanks for the suggestions all, I knew this thread would throw up some good ideas. RGX has a new favorite as of 15:13 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 15:00
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John Murdoch posted:I too am tired of every space game being Age of Sail but with Lasers. I kind of unironically just want a game that, stripped down to its fundamentals, is nothing more than Ubisoft's Far Cry model adapted into spaceships and stuff. Try Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, it comes pretty close to that I think.
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Nov 23, 2020 15:17
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RGX posted:Lots of great suggestions here, will definitely check out everything recommended, thanks!
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Nov 23, 2020 16:19
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My dude have you heard of Star Citizen
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Nov 23, 2020 16:19
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:As you say I don't think there's anything which will quite hit all the points you're after, but have you given Star Traders: Frontiers a shot? Y'know, that ones been sitting on my wishlist for a while. I kind of wrote it off with the whole "trading" thing being written into the title which made me think it was going to be another series of delivery missions and boredom but looking at the Steam reviews I may have written it off early. Will give it a crack and report back! food court bailiff posted:My dude have you heard of Star Citizen As I understand it, I can get much more enjoyment staring at the spaceship jpegs on Google image search and watching the occasional video from the GBS thread of people falling through the floor and being teleported into endless space water. I guess it sums up the sheer unfathomable difficulty of building the sort of game I'm theorising about, or perhaps how easy it is to grift people who want a space game with depth and scale. Fun to sit on the sidelines and throw peanuts at it though!
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Nov 23, 2020 16:51
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Kaiju Cage Match posted:There's a baby elephant in that picture? I don't see it. What the hell?! I didn't even notice that made it here until now, lol  Someday I'll learn to stop having fifty active tabs open.
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Nov 23, 2020 18:44
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RGX posted:Exploring the unknowns of space? I'd love some recommendations if anyone has any. You could try Star Control 2 and it's open source version The Ur Quan Masters. There was a great galactic war, that your side lost. Much of the game is rediscovering what happened to your allies and enemies in the years following the war.
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Nov 23, 2020 19:00
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In Assassin's Creed Valhalla you can frequently see icons on the game map denoting treasure or points of interest before you're actually able to access them in the story. This is intensely irritating to me as someone who characteristically clears out all the areas BEFORE advancing the storyline, and violates some kind of fundamental rule of video games where the player should be expected to go in the exact opposite direction as advised so that they don't miss anything.
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Nov 24, 2020 11:07
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I snapped up Katamari Damacy Reroll on release day because I always wanted to play the original, but I played every major Katamari game, and I didn't account for just how barebones it is in comparison and how much better even the soulless cash-in installments work as games. It's still a lot of fun, I just feel like €30 was a pretty hefty pricetag, considering. e: it does also seem like the katamari catches on the environment a bit more readily and a bit tighter than in later installments My Lovely Horse has a new favorite as of 13:37 on Nov 24, 2020 |
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Nov 24, 2020 13:30
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exquisite tea posted:In Assassin's Creed Valhalla you can frequently see icons on the game map denoting treasure or points of interest before you're actually able to access them in the story. This is intensely irritating to me as someone who characteristically clears out all the areas BEFORE advancing the storyline, and violates some kind of fundamental rule of video games where the player should be expected to go in the exact opposite direction as advised so that they don't miss anything. This bugs me with raids in particular since you need to keep active with those to progress your base. The best targets have big red markers but after you clear out a few they're mostly just outside safe territory, everything's suddenly 3 or 4x your level, but the markers are still sitting there taunting you.
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Nov 24, 2020 18:02
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Gerblyn posted:Try Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, it comes pretty close to that I think. I was under the impression that RGO was yet another aggressively vanilla space game, except they replaced the one actually distinctive aspect of the first game - leaning all the way into the Age of Sail influence with broadside-heavy big ship vs. big ship stuff with space functionally rendered as an ocean - with ye old personal fighter focus in full 3D. I think the closest extant game to what I'm after is probably Everspace, but ultimately that's a roguelike and not a fully designed open world.
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Nov 24, 2020 18:31
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Everspace 2 might become what you want then because they’re changing the format to be open world
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Nov 24, 2020 18:37
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Since I've sung Horizon's praises enough I'd like to know what other games execute their open-worlds well enough that they don't overstay their welcome or repeat themselves with clutter to the point of immersion breaking? (To unlock a tavern in Black Flag you have to get into ten separate barfights.)
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Nov 24, 2020 19:31
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It's sort of the opposite to what you're asking for but The Saboteur was fantastic for this, in my opinion. There were hundreds of map markers but something in the way they were all labeled the same, so you never knew if it was a missile silo, fuel dump, major base or tank depot until you reached it, was really appealing to me. It had really good emergent gameplay, with you being able to use stealth, disguise, gun play and blowing poo poo up in a variety of ways. And the unlocking if various systems was really well paced. I think I ended up 100% clearing it on three different systems. I'd love a spiritual sequel to that game with better climbing controls and a larger map.
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Nov 24, 2020 20:07
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Bogmonster posted:It's sort of the opposite to what you're asking for but The Saboteur was fantastic for this, in my opinion. There were hundreds of map markers but something in the way they were all labeled the same, so you never knew if it was a missile silo, fuel dump, major base or tank depot until you reached it, was really appealing to me. Hah, funny I was just thinking of Saboteur as I read his post. It's good! I've always enjoyed the open world of Yakuza games, because it's a) almost all optional and b) compressed into a city district, rather than an entire world you have to run back and forth across.
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Nov 24, 2020 20:42
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Check out Starsector, it's not a released game yet but quite worth a look. A big chunk of the early-to-mid game is heading out into the unexplored and uninhabited spaces to scan planets, and find ruins and the loot therein.
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Nov 24, 2020 21:18
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In AC Valhalla, how hard would it have been for Reda & co. to have a second voice line that they could use when they have no mission contracts available for you? Apparently too hard, they're all like "Oh hi, I have so many contracts for you! PROBABLY A MILLION OF EM, ALL FOR YOU, RIGHT THIS INSTANT!" [cut to "no contracts currently available"]. Every drat time, even the first time I meet some of em. It's not a big thing, it just feels stupidly sloppy for a major, high-profile release.
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Nov 25, 2020 03:13
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I haven’t played Valhalla but in the other AC games there’s just too much poo poo to do and collect and explore
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Nov 25, 2020 17:09
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Sometimes I enjoy playing older games that I never got around to before, but holy poo poo can those old save systems be annoying. It's probably mostly my fault, I'm just lazy since modern games are good about autosaving, but it's real frustrating when I do something like play GTA3 for several hours and completely forget to save before quitting the game. I just didn't have the desire to redo all those missions so I dropped the game completely. Also did that with the HD remaster of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within because of a game-ending bug a couple of hours in. Second time in recent memory that's happened to me with an older Ubisoft game (Far Cry 2 is the other one). Making multiple saves to avoid having to completely restart a game is another thing I never remember to do...
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Nov 26, 2020 08:51
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It's an old complaint but I still think my worst gaming experience was collecting all the feathers in Assassin's Creed. No one was forcing me to do it, it had no material gain, it was just subjecting myself to drudgery because I wanted that 100%. Does anyone actually enjoy doing these kinds of quests or are we all just slaves to our idiot brains.
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Nov 26, 2020 09:44
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ulex minor posted:It's an old complaint but I still think my worst gaming experience was collecting all the feathers in Assassin's Creed. I think the start of Assassin's Creed and the Ubisoft style of open world games was perhaps the definite end of the 'golden age' of collecting things as a fun thing to do in a game by itself. The thing that I think made the N64 era of collectathons so satisfying was a combination of two things: A: Variance in challenges. There's a bunch of variety in what you're doing to collect things, so collecting those things will usually be a fun, varied experience itself. A big problem with Ubisoft collectibles is that you're never really doing anything interesting for them (probably because there's hundreds of the loving things). B: A lack of completion rewards. Achievements aren't enough, you want something cool to hold up. Banjo-Kazooie's Stop'N'Swop reveal was a great one, and incremental upgrades like with Zelda's heart pieces do a lot (especially if the final amount is aesthetically pleasing), but honestly even the smaller or 'useless' ones are still cool. Yoshi giving you a hundred lives in Mario 64 was pointless, but it was still special.
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Nov 26, 2020 10:45
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I don't know, lots of people keep complaining about pointless collectathons because they are compelled to 100% a game. For me it's always nice to have some mindless side activity if I enjoy the game enough to just dick around.
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Nov 26, 2020 10:55
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Secret packages in gta III were good because for every 10 you got there was a free weapon in your base. Collecting for no reason is dumb I say as I think of my boxes of useless common magic cards.
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Nov 26, 2020 10:58
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Hirsute posted:Sometimes I enjoy playing older games that I never got around to before, but holy poo poo can those old save systems be annoying. It's probably mostly my fault, I'm just lazy since modern games are good about autosaving, but it's real frustrating when I do something like play GTA3 for several hours and completely forget to save before quitting the game. I just didn't have the desire to redo all those missions so I dropped the game completely. See, I'm the exact opposite: I hate how reliant modern games are on autosaves, to the point that there either isn't a manual save option, or it's buried under 80 menus, and for precisely the reason you just said.
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Nov 26, 2020 11:39
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Cleretic posted:I think the start of Assassin's Creed and the Ubisoft style of open world games was perhaps the definite end of the 'golden age' of collecting things as a fun thing to do in a game by itself. C: N64 levels were really small compared to the modern sandboxes
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Nov 26, 2020 12:34
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serefin99 posted:See, I'm the exact opposite: I hate how reliant modern games are on autosaves, to the point that there either isn't a manual save option, or it's buried under 80 menus, and for precisely the reason you just said.
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Nov 26, 2020 12:48
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Kennel posted:C: N64 levels were really small compared to the modern sandboxes Also true, but I think that folds into A to a degree. Consider Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild; they've both got stinking huge worlds (I'm pretty sure BotW is comparable to a Bethesda game; I don't think there's a helpful comparison for Odyssey but it's definitely big), but collecting their collectable things never gets as tedious as a lot of other sandbox games, because there's a lot of variety in what they ask you to do.
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Nov 26, 2020 13:05
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