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.
Voices of the Void, slow horror
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.
Kerbal Space Program
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!
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.
Titanfall 2. I could keep playing that all evening. Its just a shame its not as popular as it was in its heyday.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t 4-8 times longer! I could have kept going for a very long time
Obligatory Fuck EA for the bullshit they pulled.
They buried the game launch intentionally behind Battlefield 1.
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
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.
Disco Elysium
I have this one sitting on my digital shelf, should probably play it!
@cybervseas @cod
Disco AsylumI 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.
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.
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.
Grim Dawn.
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.
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
I keep coming back to Insurgency: Sandstorm’s PVE modes. Man, what a underrated shooter!
I wish it had some better AI enemies, though.
Am I thinking of that game with the awesome scope mechanics? That game has PVE modes?
Love the scope mechanics! And yes!