I’m not a gamer. Suggestions?

barefootcyborg5000 said:

Another thing. I don't have any subscription services. Is there such a thing these days as a demo before I drop coin on a title? Or a subscription service with a trial period?

I don't mind paying a subscription, is that a thing? Probably gonna cancel my motortrend anyway. 

Unfortunately, I don't think Demos are really a thing anymore. However, check prices for some of these before you worry about spending coin.  Fallout New Vegas is about $10 on Steam.  The version that includes all the DLCs (which I would recommend) is $20. Steam and GOG also have sales regularly, I've seen F:NV drop down to 50% off recently. 

Set up a Steam wishlist and it will notify you when games you want are on sale.

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Good to know. Almost all of my gaming experience is from an era of memory cards and used CDs. The magazines had a disc with demos for half a dozen games and pay-to-win wasn't really a thing. 
Im older than I realize. 
 

In other news, I've watched about half an hours worth of No Mans Sky reviews and I'm not sure I want to drop $60 on it. 
Up next to check out will be something with more of a fantasy element. I just want to stay out of PvP territory if I can. Or at least something that isn't centered on domination. More skill building and exploration..

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-game-pass

First month for a buck. 405 game pass for pc titles to choose from. 

K. Talk to me about Skyrim. The closest things I've played are Diablo 1, and Fable 1. Fable much more recently (2010ish). What I'm seeing looks like that only more. Bigger world, more choices and freedom. I remember just how huge that was when it came out, or as much as I remember hearing for someone not really in the gaming community. I don't really care about having the most modern graphics. And between my two big otherworldly interests, space/fantasy, this seems like a better personal fit than NMS. 

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

The base Skyrim game, and I guess the official DLC are pretty spectacular. There's a reason it's been selling well for a decade now.

First person, by default, but can be third person I just think that looks weird. Open world exploration. Based loosely on a civil war and the return of dragons, but there is just so much stuff that losing track of the main story quests is easy to do and not really s problem. I never played the other elder scrolls games and got caught up on the lore in this fairly quickly. 

With nexusmods on pc, the mods make it an entirely new game. New missions, models, monsters, quests, etc. 

There are a good bit of universal things to the game (quest lines for armor, weapons, "random" road way run ins), but you can build and play however you want, and change things around fairly easily to try out different play styles. Wanna be sneaky?a pacifist? A mage? A combination? Go for it. Just want to explore a fantasy land full of story? Have at it, it's huge. Wanna build a house and have a family? You can do that too. 

I've put almost 4000 hours into the game since it came out across 3 different consoles and PC. Pc with mods is my favorite, but playing through vanilla is just fine. Jumping into mods is a rabbit hole. 

In reply to RevRico :

Nothing really to add except that there is enough to do in the game that my ADHD ass gets distracted and I've never really gotten more than halfway through the main quest and have a little less than RevRico's hourly count.

I only recently got RDR2, but playing online is pretty darn open to whatever you might want to do. I've only encountered problematic players a couple of times, and the respawn is so fast that I just let them get their adolescent rage out of their system and go back to whatever I was doing.

One I haven't seen mentioned is Elite:Dangerous. It's an update of the old Elite (that I was obsessed with back in the late 80s) and astonishingly huge. It's basically just a big space sandbox, and a pretty one with decent hardware. You can play with others, or you can play solo and not worry about human encounters. Sort of a grind at times, but can also be quite meditative. I haven't tried Odyssey, which introduces the ability to walk around and do stuff instead of just flying your ship, but it's gotten mixed reviews and still seems somewhat underdeveloped. Horizons is the place to start.

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

RevRico covered Skyrim pretty well. I'll add a few other points.

Skyrim really is huge and sprawling. It is a game if you want to get lost in exploring and don't mind grinding to build up abilities.

Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3 are also open-world RPG's with action elements to them. (So are Fallout 3 and 4, but New Vegas is the best of them by a HUGE margin.)

New Vegas is much more about making lots of meaningful but difficult choices in flawed situations. There are for more factions with compelling arguments and serious flaws to choose between. The world is smaller, but it is tighter and better scripted. I find it more immersive.

Witcher 3 gives you a predefined character and backstory, instead of building your own blank-slate avatar. Although this means that although you're given a more pre-defined role, the story is able to flow more naturally around it. It also has the best combat mechanics of the three.

Choose Skyrim if - you want a big, open world that you can just explore and get lost in, and stumble across interesting things. Shining Glorious Fantasy Hero.

Choose Fallout: New Vegas if - you want a compelling world that forces you to make meaningful choices that shape what happens. Satyrical Mad Max.

Choose Witcher 3 if - you want a more detailed story about this character in a darker and more political fantasy world. The Mandalorian in Westeros.

If you like exploring and strategizing you'll like the STALKER series - an open-world FPS with RPG elements and little hand-holding. The first part of the first game is a bit grindey but it gets better once you're out of the first area.

You might also like the Just Cause series which is an open-world GTA-ish game with lots of exploring, first one has awkward controls and is a bit grindey but is still very much worth playing.

Edit: Also, getting into sim racing basically only costs whatever a sim wheel you can find costs, most driving sims can run on what would now be considered ordinary office PCs.

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

If you are remotely interested in NMS stop by a used game store, I picked up my copy for $25.

Appleseed said:

Get an emulator. Nintendo for days.

This really is the right answer. What you wanna play? NES, SNES, genesis, 3DO, Virtual Boy, N64, etc etc? Grab an emulator, find a Rom pack, and relive your childhood. MAME will get you old arcade games, Atari emulators abound if you want to blow your kids mind.

Sure the graphics suck, but at least the games are complete and finished unlike anything that's been released in the last 5ish years.

They're also free. 

GameboyRMH said:

If you like exploring and strategizing you'll like the STALKER series - an open-world FPS with RPG elements and little hand-holding. The first part of the first game is a bit grindey but it gets better once you're out of the first area.

As much as I love STALKER, I would not recommend it to someone who is just getting into gaming.

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

Do the thing Rico said and get in gamepass. No man's sky is on there. 

RevRico said:

Appleseed said:

Get an emulator. Nintendo for days.

This really is the right answer. What you wanna play? NES, SNES, genesis, 3DO, Virtual Boy, N64, etc etc? Grab an emulator, find a Rom pack, and relive your childhood. MAME will get you old arcade games, Atari emulators abound if you want to blow your kids mind.

Sure the graphics suck, but at least the games are complete and finished unlike anything that's been released in the last 5ish years.

They're also free. 

Ummm, I'm pretty sure Nintendo still exists as a company, which means they aren't abandonware.

So by "free" I think what you really mean is "stolen."

The OP mentioned gaming on a PC rather than a console.  I tried Skyrim on my PS4, and using the controller, it had a fatal flaw I couldn't get past:  pushing down axially on the joystick was mapped to perform a 180d about-face, and there was no way to unmap that.  Which meant that pretty much any time I got into combat, the moment there was any tension, I found myself turning my back on my opponent and getting slaughtered.

That may just be an idiosyncrasy of my playing style, but it was enough to render the game unplayable for me.  On a PC it probably isn't an issue.  It did look beautiful and what I played was very non-linear; there were lots of opportunities for side quests of many different types.  Taking those side quests (or not) did have local repercussions in what happened in the world, too.

Myst and Riven are both good, and as someone said, Myst was remastered in recent memory, so it should run on a modern computer.

I've never played it, but there is a fairly open-world game from 3-4 years ago called Generation Zero where you are alone in an abandoned Scandinavian countryside, set in the 1980s.  You need to fight a guerilla war against a mysterious enemy.  It's definitely combat-oriented, but more of the stealth variety than plain bulk frontal assault.  Not particularly linear, and very atmospheric.

There is also a game set in Iceland called Spirit Of The North, where you play a wild fox exploring your environment, and gradually become involved with a nature spirit fox.  Pretty, non-linear, and without dialog or narrative.  We have it for the Switch, but haven't played it yet.  However, I have heard criticism of the controls, unfortunately.

In reply to Duke :

if they aren't available for sale anywhere, then they are free. 

Want me to buy a game I owned 30 years ago just to play it again? Put it up for sale again.

I'd all but stopped pirating stuff until publishers decided to start releasing half finished games with no demo or refund window. Now, I find it mandatory, because paying $60+ for some half baked maybe it'll get finished eventually turd just isn't worth it, and those business practices should be punished. Only thing I really miss about PC gaming was only paying for stuff that was worth the investment.

Sorry not sorry. Maybe if publishers didn't try to screw their audience we wouldn't have to. 

RevRico said:

In reply to Duke :

if they aren't available for sale anywhere, then they are free.

Sorry, not true. 

The way you 'punish' publishers for putting out what you consider unfinished or bad products is by NOT BUYING THEM.  But you don't get to say "this isn't good enough to pay money for, but I'll be happy to steal it."  If it's not good enough to play, then just don't play it.  If it's good enough to play, then pay for it.

I don't buy the piracy != theft argument for a hot minute.  That's a self-justification and it doesn't hold any water.  Intellectual property IS a real thing no matter how much you want to tell yourself it isn't.

But I'm going to table this part of the discussion because it's irrelevant to the OP.

ProDarwin said:

All of these are a little bit sandboxy:

 

Cities Skylines (modern Sim City)

Kerbal

Project Highrise (modern Sim Tower)

beamng.drive (car physics sandbox - controller is the suggested way of playing)

antichamber - first person puzzle game (think Portal, Quantumn Conundrum, etc)

subnautica - a weird, beautiful grind

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator looks pretty entertaining

 

I do really enjoy Sim games, but my sim rig sucks for doing anything but racing games. 

Another one I forgot about, that is somewhat like Sim City/Skylines, is Tropico. 

Like some of the others, I've put over 1000 hours in to Skyrim, vanilla, DLCs, heavy mods, the works. 

What I love most about it is the infinite ways to play.  A sneaky hunter? Ok. Heavy weapon tank? Ok. Herbalist mage? Cool.  Or my favorite ( and how EVERY one of my builds ends up) a sneaky battlemage that rains hellfire from across the map and dual wields swords, axes and maces for melee. 

My point being, if you aren't concerned with modern tech and the best graphics, Skyrim is a great place to spend hours upon hours of doing whatever you want. 

I'm a simple man.  For me it's always been first-person shooters.  I don't want to spend hours in some make-believe world looking for some goofy wizard. 

Wargaming is the answer for me.  Free to play.  A battle lasts fifteen minutes.  In that time, you will win or lose, live or die, excel or suck.  When the time is up, you can go do something else, or play a few more battles.

World of Tanks is slow enough to be do-able for me.  I've watched my son play Overwatch and Call of Duty, and his reflexes and dexterity are orders of magnitude beyond mine.  World of Warships is probably even slower paced, but the graphics on both these games are pretty awesome.

If you like to blow stuff up, check it out.

In reply to birdmayne :

Even if you are concerned about the best graphics and modern tech, nexus mods have you covered with regards to Skyrim and other Bethesda properties. 

birdmayne said:

... Skyrim is a great place to spend hours upon hours of doing whatever you want. 

It really depends what you want. What you're looking to get out of gaming, and if that aligns with what the OP wants.

Skyrim is great if what you want is to enjoyably kill hours upon hours putzing around in a fantasy world. For that, it's very fun.

What it's not great for, is if you want to dip your toe in for a limited amount of time, and achieve some sort of story progression. It's very much a product of "bigger is better" game design, although not completely going overboard the way many games that have come out since have done.

In my gaming lately, I want to be able to play for 30-90 minutes and feel like I've progressed or overcome something significant that moves towards the completiong of a story. Skyrim isn't that.

z31maniac said:

ProDarwin said:

All of these are a little bit sandboxy:

 

Cities Skylines (modern Sim City)

Kerbal

Project Highrise (modern Sim Tower)

beamng.drive (car physics sandbox - controller is the suggested way of playing)

antichamber - first person puzzle game (think Portal, Quantumn Conundrum, etc)

subnautica - a weird, beautiful grind

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator looks pretty entertaining

 

I do really enjoy Sim games, but my sim rig sucks for doing anything but racing games. 

Another one I forgot about, that is somewhat like Sim City/Skylines, is Tropico. 

Yeah my setup is a compromise because I like non-sim games as well.  A lot of the full send sim rig setups would be awful for anything else.

I'm working on a new design that allows me to rotate the monitor 90 degrees to switch between sim & normal gaming.

Hopefully VR gets good in the next few years and I can physically divorce the sim setup from the desktop setup.

Duke said:

RevRico said:

In reply to Duke :

if they aren't available for sale anywhere, then they are free.

Sorry, not true. 

The way you 'punish' publishers for putting out what you consider unfinished or bad products is by NOT BUYING THEM.  But you don't get to say "this isn't good enough to pay money for, but I'll be happy to steal it."  If it's not good enough to play, then just don't play it.  If it's good enough to play, then pay for it.

I don't buy the piracy != theft argument for a hot minute.  That's a self-justification and it doesn't hold any water.  Intellectual property IS a real thing no matter how much you want to tell yourself it isn't.

But I'm going to table this part of the discussion because it's irrelevant to the OP.

 

Maybe a separate thread?  I'm am all about paying developers $ for a game if they will sell it to me.  If its no longer available for sale in any format, that's when it gets tricky.

I have a Genesis Mini that's pre-loaded with ROMs that I happily paid SEGA for.  I also loaded a few extra myself that exist in a gray area.  I have no option to pay for them.

ProDarwin said:

Yeah my setup is a compromise because I like non-sim games as well.  A lot of the full send sim rig setups would be awful for anything else.

Could you elaborate?  Because I figure more power is more power.  I understand how certain applications might not take advantage of a sim rig's strengths, but I don't understand how it would actually be worse.  Thanks.

ProDarwin said:

Duke said:

But I'm going to table this part of the discussion because it's irrelevant to the OP.

Maybe a separate thread?  I'm am all about paying developers $ for a game if they will sell it to me.  If its no longer available for sale in any format, that's when it gets tricky.

Already started.  I'd love to discuss it there.

Duke said:

ProDarwin said:

Yeah my setup is a compromise because I like non-sim games as well.  A lot of the full send sim rig setups would be awful for anything else.

Could you elaborate?  Because I figure more power is more power.  I understand how certain applications might not take advantage of a sim rig's strengths, but I don't understand how it would actually be worse.  Thanks.

You are right RE: Power.  The desktop I use would be fine for both and generally anything beneficial for normal games helps with racing games also. 

Mostly I mean ergonomics.  The Kb tray, mouse, seat, etc. are all different between "normal" and "Sim" gaming.  For playing Doom/Quake/whatever and general office tasks, I want the KB & Mouse almost right in the middle of where my wheel would normally be with my 'sim' setup.  Thankfully I can easily slide my playseat out of the way and slide the monitor back in about 30 seconds.  The more serious sim rigs you can't do that.  Extra shifters, handbrakes, triple screens, etc. all add to the complexity.

My sim setup

My normal setup: