That’s fair- I’m not trying to say the game is for everyone. I’ve just never understood the people that seem to ruin the game for themselves by trying to be efficient to the point of making the game stressful.

Also, I definitely feel the slow walking speed sometimes. I absolutely hate having to go talk to Clint before you get the minecarts going cuz it feels like it takes forever to walk all the way across town.

You can respect a game and not enjoy it.

Yes! I really want this to be more widely accepted. There are games that I absolutely hate playing, but I still respect a lot and view as excellent games. Just not a game for me.

That’s the thing: You don’t have to micromanage either, really. The only actual timer in the daily one. Other than making it to your bed in time, you’re not on any other kind of time crunch on a macro scale. You don’t need to make the most of every day. Waste those fuckers. Wake up, water your crops, go back to bed.

The only event that doesn’t repeat, afaik, is Grandpa’s ghost judging you at the end of year 3, and honestly you might be able to repeat that too somehow. Otherwise, pretty much every time triggered event will just happen again next year.

The way the game is structured seems to inspire a need to be extremely efficient with their time in people. Never wasting time or energy.

I feel like I took the direct opposite route and promptly didn’t care even slightly. I regularly just water crops and skip days cuz I wanna sell them or get started making wine out of them or whatever else.

The Halo 3: ODST OST is so good, man.

Hades, although I refuse to call it a “patient gamer” game

Why? It’s 6 years old at this point so I think it qualifies.

Following Iron Lore Entertainment’s failure to secure funding for its next project, former members of Iron Lore announced they had created a new company on February 18, 2008.

The first paragraph of their wiki page.

I deeply dislike Nintendo.

Some of them are related. Some of them aren’t.

Black Ops and Modern Warfare are generally two separate series- the Modern Warfare games are all related.

Black Ops is a lot more complicated. Black Ops 2 is a direct sequel to Black Ops 1. Technically Black Ops 1 is sort of a sequel to World At War, as well. They share a major character, but it’s kind of a minor thing and you won’t be missing a ton.

Black Ops 3 has basically nothing to do with the rest- it takes place in 2065 and basically the only thing that links it to the previous games is a throwaway line related to a previous villain and some text logs.

Black Ops 4 didn’t have a singleplayer campaign.

Black Ops 5 is Black Ops: Cold War, it is related to 1 & 2 but it’s less of a direct continuation and more just the same characters are involved iirc.

Black Ops 6 follows up Cold War, but again is just the same characters.

Personally, I’d suggest doing World At War, Black Ops 1, Black Ops 2, Cold War, and then Black Ops 6 for the ‘full experience.’ If you wanna circle back around and do Black Ops 3, you can do that pretty much whenever because as I said it’s unrelated. You can drop World At War if it doesn’t interest you without any real issues. As I said, it just sets up a single character. Dropping any of the others you might actually be confused on plot and characters at points, idk.

Modern Warfare is a lot simpler. Just do them in order.

If you mean singleplayer campaigns: as far back as you can stomach the graphics of.

If you actually want good campaigns, Black Ops 1 is fuckin legendary. World At War was also great. As is Modern Warfare (2007) and Modern Warfare 2(2009). Modern Warfare 3 (2011) was also good. Black Ops 2 was good. I wouldn’t bother with any further Black Ops games- one of them doesn’t even have a campaign iirc.

For the much much newer titles, Modern Warfare (2019) was good. Modern Warfare (2022) was also solid. Modern Warfare 3 is ‘last years title’ being referred to in the OP.

None of these are narrative masterpieces exactly- the closest is probably the Black Ops games. With that said, they’re very much ‘action movie’ videogames. Tons of crazy set pieces, unique segments, and then the cutscenes that usually tie together a reasonable enough plot to be interesting.

If you mean multiplayer: honestly just jump into Black Ops 6. None of the older titles are likely to be a great experience at this point. Or just spend your time on a better game lol

It’s not even a Bungie game, that’s the worst part. They licensed the IP to NetEase.

For anyone else that’s vaguely interested at first: It’s a mobile game.

Afaik, if there’s not a legitimate way to purchase the game it becomes a grey area in the US. I’d be shocked if the EU didn’t have a similar exception, but idk.

there is no legal way to get around that.

That’s debatable.

To elaborate further on grand strategy games, pretty much all Paradox games can be played… sort of cooperatively?

Generally the maps are large enough that you can kind of just pick your corners and only rarely interact.

In a single game of Europa Universalis 4 one player might conquer all of Asia, while another consolidates Europe and a third player is in Africa. You can’t generally actually disable PvP, you can just not go to war. Same is true for Crusader Kings 2/3, and Stellaris. You can coexist and mutually stay out of each others way while possibly helping each other out.

All the Total War titles that support multiplayer (so everything past Shogun 2 in 2011) are coop friendly afaik. I’m particularly fond of the Total War: Warhammer games.

Also, I’d add some of the survival crafting/sandbox titles to the list of stuff you can play cooperatively. They don’t all work for it, but some of them are definitely friendly to a coop group play style. 7 Days To Die works brilliantly like that, though it will be absolutely trivial with multiple players unless you turn the difficulty up. Ark: Survival Evolved can be pretty fun coop (especially with the Primal Fear mod- you will need friends.)

OP seems to want a very competitively focused tightly balanced experience, and Stellaris is absolutely anything but that. I enjoy the game, it’s fun, but I can’t imagine anyone considering it to be particularly balanced or enjoyable as a PvP/Versus experience.

I’ve never seen some specify that they want different second person pronouns, but hey new things every day. Man that is confusing to read, though.

I’ve sort of generally moved over to coop games in general nowadays.

Or even if I’m playing something that’s a versus sort of multiplayer- like Civ- I just try not to focus too much on winning. I’m there for the journey, not the destination. If I end up winning, cool. If I don’t, that’s also cool as long as I had fun along the way.

Yeah, sure. I’m not saying the epilogue was too long, just the game overall.

Consider it: did they really need every scene in the game? Are you honestly gonna tell me that every. single. mission. was plot critical or would’ve made the game lesser in any significant way?

There was a lot they could’ve trimmed down or removed.

Which, to clarify, it’s not like I think the length is a great crime or significantly detracts from the game. I just feel like it would’ve been better if it was a bit shorter. I’m not trying to compare it to something like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey where it’s a 100+ hour game and 70hrs of it is narratively irrelevant.

Yeah kinda my take.

I would’ve been fine with RDR2 being a bit shorter, frankly, I was kinda dragging along by the end.

I kinda like horror games. I just need some kind of mitigating factor. If it’s just me, the game, and all the spooky shit in it I have issues. Outlast was also not for me.