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.
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.
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.
Disco Elysium
I have this one sitting on my digital shelf, should probably play it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know of it's considered a classic or if it will ever be, but to me Crysis 2 generally looks way better than most of the stuff you see nowadays.
Otherwise, I think Halo Reach is the best looking Halo and it doesn't show its age too much, if you look at the MCC/PC version.
Crysis 2 doesn't fit the 10 year timeframe OP mentioned ;)
Shut up, I'm not old stop lying
The Witcher 3. It's not far from being 10, but got a very nice graphics update for free and has 2 DLC. The game and the DLC and the free graphics update and a very recent mod kit, all for around 10-15 USD right now on GOG . it's a steal! I highly recommend it. It became my favorite game of all time, very fast. And it will offer around 100h, and it will also offer replayability. What is there not to like?
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Every 2-3 years I'll fire up Terraria again
Me too, thinking I'll finally have some enlightenment as to how to kill the first night or twos zombies without getting killed and rage quitting.
I've even watched "beginner tutorials" on that game game, and conveniently they ended the first video just after nightfall of the first night, and started the second video during the second day, but that's not how it friggin works, you need to murder the enemies lest they murder you, and in 5 different starts of the game, across 3 different devices, I've yet to kill the first or second nights horde without them breaking down my doors and wrecking my shit.
That game is one of my biggest regrets, I bought the 4 pack when it first came out thinking my friends and I would all have a great time, it makes me feel like I'm old and disconnected that I can't enjoy that stupid (supposedly fantastic) game.
If you dig a 2x3 pit immediately adjacent to your door outside the zombies can't break in
got death stranding when it was free for a day on epic a while ago, been playing it for the last few weeks pretty nonstop and just finished the story. i've always been a kojima fan for mgs but oh my god this is magnificent. an absolute masterpiece, imho. i get it's not for everyone but i've had a blast and may immediately do a very hard offline second playthrough. definitely recommend, especially if you can grab it free or heavy discount.
It’s the game I would have hated as a young adult but absolutely love as a… less young adult.
No Man's Sky dragged me back in again recently. There's an expedition going on for another few weeks that was lots of fun. I've also started a permadeath save that I'm really enjoying.
Trine 5 was probably the best Trine to date. It‘s almost a year old, but already discounted to 15ish bucks in sales. Took a friend and I 20 hours to platinum and we had so much fun cheesing the puzzles and doing stupid stuff. I wish there just was no combat in the game tbh, it‘s just there to gatekeep you from having fun with the puzzles lol. I also wish there had been more achievements related to playing a level in a specific way that you gotta figure out. There‘s one for crossing all rivers in a specific map without touching water, and one where you gotta beat any map without destroying boxes. These two were a lotta fun to do.
I was also obsessed with HITMAN (Jan 2022 according to Steam, was a year exclusive to EGS IIRC). Now it‘s just some crappy liveservice-esque thing, but when they actually did new maps and stuff I had tons of fun walking around the crazy detailed levels and looking for small npc skits the devs put in there, doing looney toons banana peel assassinations etc. Agent 47 being that unfeeling killing robot trying to destroy the world controlling illuminati makes all the slapstick so much funnier.
Calling HITMAN a crappy live service thing is hardly fair. True, the always online part feels really unnecessary, but beyond that it is a stellar single player game with the best Hitman gameplay of the last two decades, a large selection of excellent maps with variants and extra missions, as well as a really impressive rogue-like mode added later for free.
The elusive targets and seasonal content can be completely ignored, and the game would still be a major milestone in modern singleplayer games.
Vampire Survivors isn't that old yet, right?
It's such a good Robotron clone.
Trying not to pick titles with sequels/franchises
Slay the Spire
Returnal
Stardew Valley
Elden Ring
Death Stranding
Honorable mention : Overwatch 2 (I honestly can't see it as a true sequel, just an update)
I'm not sure if this counts because it's >10 years old, but also still developed:
Europa Universis IV
It's like this game was built exactly for what I like most in games.
But for something more in the spirit of your question, I'll go with Manifold Garden. I love M. C. Escher, and this feels like a puzzle game in one of his worlds.
I wouldn't expect to see EU4 here, but I must vouch for it—once it clicks it is engaging, thrilling, and addictive. I just wish there was a better way to get all the dlc. And a better UI lol
Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin
Waited for the steam release and played through it almost fully with a friend in co-op, all DLC's included. My GOTY last year. Fantastic gameplay (shoutouts to Team Ninja), with a story that starts off as a shitpost but evolves into (in my opinion) something really beautiful, I can only recommend this game to any Final Fantasy fan. Having played through FF1 is not required, but makes it a little bit more fun. Best protagonist.
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.
I keep coming back to Insurgency: Sandstorm's PVE modes. Man, what a underrated shooter!
I wish it had some better AI enemies, though.
Grim Dawn.
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
The Hex! By Daniel Mullins, of “Inscryption” game. The Hex is HORRIBLY overlooked because of its graphics, but they’re not… really… its graphics? It’s a marvel of creative game design and I love it so much. The graphics make sense almost immediately when playing. MORE PEOPLE PEAS PLAY THE HEX it is so good
Hot take for me: I thought going into Inscryption was going to be a pure deck builder game with a goal of beating the first guy. Then I really enjoyed the deck building in the 2d zone, and wanted so much more of that, but after beating the game, it has next to no replay ability. It turns very ARG centric and to get the whole story required going outside of the game into the "real world" (internet) to learn the rest of the story. It never stuck with me, or striked me right. It felt like I was being led on and thrown into something I didn't really care about.
I know that they added an infinite mode, but I think that's just in the first zone, not all of them. .
In any case, the game was just ok, since it's not the Slay the Spire esque card builder I thought it'd be.
A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
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