Hi!
To Preface in past 18 years I have quite some experience with RPG's ranging from Baldurs Gate, to DragonAge, to ElderScrolls, to Souls series, to Fallout, to Pilars of Eternity. I have played quite a few of them and quite a few times.
I am currently going trough Pathfinder: Kingmaker. And while the formula is understandable, I think I am getting a bit tired of it. Every fight consists of pre-buffing the same spells, chugging the same potions and pulling enemies into chokepoints. I don't mind the formula. But what I do mind is the limited choice of spells. Like i need to rest to write spells, and there is only so few spells that I can use per rest. It gets very annoying that I need to rest between every encounter, sometimes rest doesn't cure everything. For this reason and some longer dungeons i am ready to stop playing the game. While intersting, i cannot just cut trough all the trash mobs, use all spells and find a way out of cave to rest.
For this reason I really liked PoE1 &2. The resource management felt much more in tune with how the game should feel like. Wizards and clerics had plenty of spells that didn't require such a meticulous memorizing of spells. You could simply adapt in process.
Looking for suggestions for games that have come out in past ~10 years that I could have a look at. I haven't tried Solasta.. Maybe I should try some JRPG, But which one? I don't mind for a more linear game with less dialogue options.
BG3 is not possible for me at the moment. My pc is not running it.
Thanks!
I'll give you my obscure elitist weeaboo shortlist for the last decade or so:
Starsector - Mount and Blade in space. 2D realtime with pause tactics + personal control of a flagship (or you can let AI fly that too) You can take missions, hunt bounties, fight in wars, scavenge, trade, smuggle, explore, all that fun shit. Your captain and officers gain levels, you can found your own colonies, and there are a metric fuckton of mods with amazingly good content. Also, the game is pretty as fuck. Even if you don't think the gameplay sounds fun, try watching some recordings of the tournaments they hold every year or so. Lasers go pew. Oh, and it's not on steam, you'll have to google it and buy it straight off the dude's website. Don't sweat over that, he's legit and the game has been for sale for years as it gets closer and closer to completion, which it nearly is.
Also, anyone interested in game development should go there and just read his devblog posts. Really good insightful stuff, I enjoy reading every one of them.
Troubleshooter Abandoned Children - Turn based tactics game. It's got a lot of dialogue, but if you're a combat fiend, you can honestly skip all that and get lost in the combat and build optimizing. This is a game where the numbers have numbers. Something as simple as your hit rate will be influeced by distance, weather, lighting, passive skills and buffs on you and the enemy, support skills from allies, equipment... and that also applies to damage, crit rates, movement, and a ton of other things. If you want a game with a million details to optimize that have big impacts, check this out for sure. Easily the best straight up tactics game I've ever played. It is Korean, so the art style / cultural stuff might be offputting to you.
X-Piratez. Check out my LP! It's a total conversion of the original X-Com where you control a faction of mutant amazon pirate babes in post apocalyptic earth. Ridiculous amounts of content. My new favourite game. Don't confuse my lack of description for lack of interest, it really is the best thing I've played, ever. I'm just sick of describing it after writing so much in the LP and plugging it in other places on the interwebs.
Crystal Project - One of those one man indie passion projects from a master of gameplay. The game is a unique blend of metroidvania and traditional jrpg genres. Combat is entirely turn based, which a really solid set of mechanics and a lot of depth. There's a whole multiclassing system that is just really great there. The metroidvania side of things is in the way the world is wide open, and full of secrets and incentives to explore. You unlock new classes by finding objects in the world, as well as new mobility options that let you explore further, and really powerful gear with effects like vampirism or doubling your max health at the cost of being perpetually poisoned, which is part of what makes the build munchkin aspect so good. Story is basically non existent, and you're pretty much expected to go off the rails and sequence break things at least once in a while.
Star Traders: Frontiers - Awesome game if you want something a bit lighter, mechanics wise. A mesh of a whole bunch of systems, with crew combat, trading, ship combat, and a bunch of minigames for things like smuggling, derelict scavenging, piracy, anti-piracy, and planet surveying that all tie into the stats of your captain and crew. Game has been getting steadily updated for years, with over a hunder updates. Like, real ones too, not that "We adds a new colour of underwear and fixed a typo" shit you get from Bannerlord. Man, fuck those guys. I personally like playing the game in ironman mode, but I think it works well softcore as well. There's a bunch of lore and stuff to explore as well if you're into that. The game (especially character models) is ugly as sin though. Wish someone would mod that for them.
Labyrinth of Touhou 2 - Incredibly combat focused dungeon crawler. Basically plays like an old wizardry game, albeit you get a topdown view so the mapping isn't an issue. You also get a party of 12 pretty customizable characters, of which 4 will be on the front line in actual combat at any time. That's 12 members in the dungeon out of a roster of like 50 you'll gradually recruit as you explore, each one with a unique list of spells and special traits. There's also a simple but impactful equipment system. Anime as all hell, but again, if you just want great gameplay, it's a slice of heaven.
Crosscode - This one is mostly an action game, with light RPG elements. You get equipment and level up and such, but it honestly plays more like a faster version of a classic 2D Zelda clone. So why is it here? Well, first, the combat is actually really, really good. So is the puzzle stuff. It's all just really well integrated, giving you a lot of freedom to fight in different ways in combat and the puzzles just involve a plethora of neat mechanics. None of that lame block pushing shit that just wastes time, you'll actually have to think about some of these, and executing some of them is tricky too. Second- it's got the best story I've seen in a video game in, well, forever frankly. Honestly it'd be worthy of a full on novelization or movie or anime adaptation or something, but it works even better through the medium of a videogame. I don't want to spoil shit but if the gameplay is at all up your alley, I can't recommend this enough.
Astlibra Revision - This is also mostly an action game. Arguably the RPG elements are a bit stronger than crosscode, with equipment and learned passive skills having a bigger impact on your character. This one is just really high quality if you want a sidescrolling beat-em-up violence fest. Has just enough loot whoring, min-maxing and exploration to keep the pacing just right. I really enjoyed the story too, but YMMV.
Monster Sanctuary - Another blend of Metroidvania and jrpg, but the jrpg in question is pokemon. But, like, pokemon for rpg grognards who want to minmax a party with hundreds of potential synergies. The metroidvania elements are actually pretty light, you have a fair bit of freedom but really this is another game all about the turn based combat drowning in rich systems. You can make a team that revolves around stacking a million buffs, or heals itself while triggering passives that injure the enemy while you heal, or just alpha strikes things with a massive combo, or applies a wither set of debuffs, or combines buffs, debuffs, passives and synergies to minman your critical hits specifically, or using some unique monster traits that make the party stronger as combat drags on combined with extreme defensive specialization. So much freedom. Excellent game. Story is crap but whatever. Game is also pretty.
Siralim Ultimate - Fourth iteration of a one man passion project. A game with systems on systems on systems, just drowning in depth. You literally can't even make use of all of them at once, there's just too much. You have a character class, which influences the part of monsters you recruit, monsters which you also customize with equipment and spells, equipment and spells you can also customize, using a stronghold you also customize, using a dozen different resources acquired from your dungeon delving which can also be customized, plus there are gods and a piety system, monster fusions, mini quests, a battle chaining mechanics... I just can't even describe it all. The game is minimalistic and streamlined in the extreme, it has a turbomode for grinding through combat at like 50x speed and outright removing text from a lot of interactions in the dungeon. It's just pure numbers go up munchkin gameplay with more freedom to tweak things than anything I've ever seen by several orders of magnitude.
Eador Genesis - A kind of roguelike grand strategy-strategy-tactics game all rolled into one. You've got a top level campaign where you select worlds to conquer which reward you with unlocking parts of your tech tree and passive bonuses to help conquer worlds. Then you've got the world maps the next level down where you'll build up a city each time and recruit heroes and an army for them that can all level up, then the lowest level which consist of dozens of provinces which you can indivdually explore and fight tactical battles in and find encounters with random monsters and shopkeepers and such, along with little quest vignettes where you can bless a baby or sacrifice it to the dark gods depending on your alignment, which trickles back up into the highest layer where it influences the story and your relationship with other demigods. A masterpiece of marrying multiple layers of gameplay together. There's also an amazing mod called New Horizons that goes with it, the culmination of years of tweaks and added content from a dedicated fanbase. The mod does wildly alter the basic gameplay balance though, making recruitable units and wizards much more powerful and high level invincible warriors decked out in relics much less invincible. I feel like both the modded and base game have their merits, but the campaign is so incredibly long I've never found the time to get anywhere close to finishing it either way.
Actually I think I'm going to copy this whole damned thing into it's own thread. These games are all way too obscure for how good they are.
Edit: Added three more.
