A bit of a weird title, but basically what’s a game that’s more than a year old but still considered “modern” that you love? There’s no real strict definition for modern, I’d just like to see some discussion around great games that aren’t quite classics yet (but probably will be one day).
The nature of this community typically attracts discussion around decade-old games (which is what I mostly play too), but I’d like to see some newer (but not too new) games on this post.
I have just gotten into baldurs gate 3 and holy shit it has consumed my soul.
… Which is kinda fitting considering the themes of the game
Recently got Mad Max from GOG. It’s pretty great for Open World car combat and Arkham style brawling. It also runs great. Too bad it didn’t get more attention.
Kerbal Space Program
Cataclysm DDA, if it counts. There’s usually a lot of time between stable releases, and by the time they come out, it usually feels like a completely different game.
CDDA, takes awhile to get comfortable with the controls, but it does scratch a certain itch once one can get setup and start to test one’s luck in search of the good stuff.
One has to make their own objectives for it though otherwise one can sort of just get to a point and not know what to do. But getting to a point where you can just walk into a city and be the most dangerous thing there does have a certain charm to it considering the journey getting there. It certainly rewards exploring though as one can find all sorts of craziness hidden away waiting to be found.
Deep Rock Galactic. I love the progression, the community and the humor.
Rock and stone, brother!
Rock and Stone! To the Bone!
If you don’t rock and stone, you ain’t goin’ home.
Rimworld.
I just wish it was multithreaded so that i could maintain a colony for more than a week without slowing to potato speeds.
My n00b theory on it, with the proviso that I am not a developer and only have a basic understanding of multithreading, is that you would break up the map into regions, and have each regions pawns and environment handled independently by separate threads/cores while one master thread handled interactions between regions and kept them all in sync.
Regions could dynamically scale depending on how computationally intensive they are, such that when the master/watchdog thread has to wait for one thread significantly longer than any of it’s adjacent region threads, it remaps the boundary iteratively until it acheives minimal wait-time and the load is evenly balanced.
As it stands, I’ve got one core maxed out and the game running slower than realtime while my 15 other cores sit at idle like suckers.
Definitely a classic.
Hades is absolutely the culmination of so much experience in modern rogue-lite games and game development.
It’s sequel comes out soon and I’m not going to be patient about jumping head first into it.
Available in early access now with plenty of content already, just no ending
I hated roguelikes until I played Hades, decided to give roguelikes a try again. Realized It’s just Hades that I like.
Definitely a legit take, there are very few people I wouldn’t recommend Hades to, if only for enough playthroughs to get to the “end” of the story. Though there is so much past that
Minecraft believe it or not. Every few years I come back and install a mod pack and it’s like an entirely new game almost. Plus I love the factory and automation mods. The game just never seems to die.
Pretty stoked for the upcoming Vault Hunters “vanilla” mod.
Disco Elysium
I know it is cliche to say but it took me the longest time to really knuckle down and play it, but boy once I did - I basically started up another playthrough right after to see what I missed and the shift in perspective when I played a different type of character was interesting to say the least.
So started as a skeptical intellectual who had to pull themselves from a sorry cop to a regular cop and approached things logically with a touch of eccentricity and pangs of regret and then compared to a wishy-washy communist with fascist leanings (which characters called the character out on) psychic superstar cop with an alias he truly believed was his name and I enjoyed and saw a completely different side of the game which was unexpected.
I have this one sitting on my digital shelf, should probably play it!
@cybervseas @cod
Disco Asylum
Titanfall 2. I could keep playing that all evening. Its just a shame its not as popular as it was in its heyday.
Obligatory Fuck EA for the bullshit they pulled.
They buried the game launch intentionally behind Battlefield 1.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t 4-8 times longer! I could have kept going for a very long time
Subnautica
Satisfactory. It’s been in early access for a few years now, 2019 I think? At the beginning of this year (2024) they announced the next update would be the 1.0 release. I’ve been playing it on/off for years, especially recently with all the strides they’ve made in development.
The game is like Factorio, but presented as an FPS. You get dropped onto a planet in a pod straight out of Halo: ODST by a space-future megacorp called Ficsit, with the goal of harvesting the planet’s resources for Ficsit off-planet divisions.
I have almost 1500hrs in Satisfactory since I got it, there’s no shortage of gameplay. Coffee Stain (devs) have been posting videos regularly, updating the community on new/discontinued features, revamped recipes and production rates, and even just being silly as much as being helpful, to the point where Coffee Stain is my go-to example of good devteam-community interaction.
Oh, and it also has a really good modding community, so if there’s anything that’s not in game, that you want in game, it’s probably already been made by one or two modders.
And trains! Those are the best part. Both a joy, and a nightmare.
There are mods? Dude, I have been playing this game for the past month, and I am almost done with the game. Thanks for the info man!
Control
Cyberpunk 2077 (with phantom liberty)
Definitely second both of these. Cyberpunk 2077 post 2.0 is very solid, with an engaging, 100+ hour story. Similarly, control is a spectacular single player narrative, easily 20-30 hours of mindfuckery and atmospheric storytelling.
Control is a really special game. I only got around to playing it last year but it was a wild ride!
I hope Alan Wake 2 goes on sale later this year so I can scoop that up. I got about halfway through AW1 (after getting it for ~£2 on steam) but the gameplay was too repetitive for me in the end.
Personally, my favorite games in the last few years were the talos principle (1 and 2), and Grow: song of the evertree. They aren’t really popular but I’ve replayed them a lot. Also have over 400 hours in core keeper.
Talos Principle is a master piece. Kinda hoping they make a third one, but would be interested to see what Croteam does after even if it’s not Talos 3.
I’ve been looking to get core keeper for quite some time…
It’s an adorable game, and has multiplayer!
Dredge.
A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.
Honorable mention: Ronin.
Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved “go until you die, then try something different” gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.
Honorable mention: Valley.
Smooth and thrilling first-person mechanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.
