2 picks for me: Stardew Valley, most boring shit ever, I don’t see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I’ve finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there’s nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
This was me with Space Engineers.
Fucking loved that game until I got to the moon. I was doing 10-hour sessions I loved it so much.
I played a scenario where I start in a planet, and there’s a space station orbiting the planet, and whenever I’m ready I can go to the space station and hit a button and then it’s basically zombie defense except it’s robotic drones.
Well, I started on the surface and my first thing was I had no water to make hydrogen and there were mountains on the horizon with ice caps on them so the first like 50 hours of gameplay was me building a rover and finding a path around a canyon to those mountains.
Finally I had a source of ice, hence hydrogen, hence fuel to get off the surface and into space.
After a few attempts I got a flying craft into space. Bare bones basics on it: survival kit, basic refinery so I could make repairs to my ship, and I started exploring outer space.
I tried the station with the defense thing and died instantly. So I decided I’d build up my ship, get more weapons, and try again.
So I cruised around, my ship grew, got more and more features including tons of turrets. I went and did another run at the drones and got through like 10 waves instead of 2. Then I decided to go check out the moon. This was a long journey (30 minutes at max speed as the crow flies) and I stopped many times along the way to expand my ship, so it was actually days of journeying to the moon.
Then I got to the moon, and landed, and it was cool and then … flop. All my motivation and fascination died all at once.
Apparently it’s quite common with Space Engineers. I really wish there was some major sequence of goals.
The drones goal isn’t beatable, I don’t think. And it’s the only goal like that. The reason it isn’t bearable is there’s infinite waves. I think.
What would even make it cooler is a series of challenges that you have to pass. At locations, each with their own difficulty level.
I mean there’s contracts where you can get money to trade like 50 steel plates for some space bucks.
I tried multiplayer servers but none of the worlds persist. Either the servers themselves are persistent - but the world is wiped every 6 hours - or the servers themselves are just rented servers that are up for a few days then gone.
I wasn’t able to find any public servers with long-term persistent worlds using the in-game browser.