Euro Truck Simulator 2 / American Truck Simulator for me.
Spending a week installing Skyrim mods and playing the actual game for a week before running into a game-breaking bug that I cannot get around.
League of Legends.
Holy carp you do. Once I hit about level 20 the culture of that community just went crazy. Everyone was just a complete shithead and cared so much.
I wish I could have capped myself at about level 10 and hung around with the other casuals forever, but instead I quit once I got enough counseling to put down the mouse and stop running bottom route sup.
The problem is 9 out of 10 games are just misserable… but than that one game hits and it hits different, so good you forget the other 9 games and makes you crave more.
But I’m clean now… since January I got my League fix only from the eSports…
I hear that. It’s been over a decade (or so) since I’ve played and I still remember a few of the games very specifically. The rest are a blur with a general feeling of annoyance left over.
Since I never spent the hours of learning how to min/max my build against every conceivable combination of enemies and teammates, I never could do well at the higher levels. The net result was mediocrity in my style and huge waves of anger from the random people I was teamed with.
To be able to compete you have to invest huge efforts into learning the builds and styles to match. I just didn’t care enough, but with the XP system always climbing (by sheer games played), I was pinched out just because the system has room room for casual play.
The spikes of reward from the mid level games were quickly dwarfed by the constance negative experiences as I was forced to level up.
High five as fellow recovering ex-LoL players!
so brave
Anything Zelda. Stardew Valley. Civ 6. RDR2.
For now it’s Oblivion Remastered.
Once that’s done I have no idea, probably back to Skyrim.
Same here. Skyrim was cool when it came out cause graphics but Oblivion is king when it comes to gameplay. Having graphics and gameplay now there’s just no contest anymore IMO.
Super Metroid, especially on a dark and rainy day
OG Doom and some random WADs.
MyHouse.wad
Rimworld. It’s like having a fishtank, but with really sociopathic fish. Only game I can think of where the #1 enemy you struggle with, that which shapes your core strategy and approach to every problem, is its single threaded performance.
I really don’t mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but as is tradition with most things in Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress did it first. “FPS Death” was a common end condition for resilient forts. If natural dangers or greed didn’t kill you first, boredom would as your FPS crawled down into the single digits or, if you were really dedicated, this could become seconds per frame.
Rimworld has kind of done it’s own thing now with the third or fourth DLC expansion but for a majority of its lifespan so far it could charitably be called a DF clone with a readable UI. Now DF has its own readable UI and Rimworld has cybernetics and psychic magic so they’ve sort of both become individual titans of their own genre.
Er… isn’t DF multithreaded (now)?
But anyways: while Dwarf Fortress isn’t quite Zork I in terms of influence, there’s a good reason people are pushing to have it added to the game canon. Tynan has never denied that Tam Adams was an inspiration, or tried to hide the influence DF had on Rimworld’s development (hell, the highest difficulty in Rimworld has always been called ‘losing is fun’). And while the two games are clearly similar, the core design philosophy is pretty different. Rimworld’s goal has always been a compelling story through fairly structured gameplay, where DF has always emphasized emergent gameplay and adherence to the simulation. I’ve played both since pretty much they came out (oh fuck I’m old…), but rimworld’s gameplay loop, core modability and not-awful-UI really won me over for casual gameplay. In their current incarnations, both are amazing games, but the question was “comfort game”, and this is my answer.
Nitpick
I really don’t mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but
(slightly-patronizingly-phrased linguistic tip: including the ‘but’ there is an implied contradiction that severely undercuts the sincerity of the preceding sentiment. I believe your sincerity, many people just don’t know about that weird semantic quirk.)
(And in a ‘hey dude’ moment, FPS death was a thing way way before DF. I remember it killing my cities in SimCity 2000, for example.)
Alright fair point on the nitpick. I meant that less as an attack on Rimworld and more of an expression of respect to Dwarf Fortress. That’s where that load-bearing “but” came in to play. Point taken though. I have great respect for both games and the developers of them. I admit I am on Team Dwarf if we come to blows though, I played that one first and it is, to date, one of the most genuinely incredible pieces of software I’ve ever encountered.
Absolutely no hate for Rimworld though. It’s a good game through and through.
Morrowind.
Factorio
The factory must grow.
I turn off biters and play on 100x research because it’s calming.
Red Dead Redemption 2 story. Every time I go back and play through it provides a month+ of joy and comfort.
American Truck Sim is a good one too.
Chrono Trigger. Beaten hundreds of times on tens of devices. Short, sweet, doesn’t outstay its welcome but is always, always good.
Yay, on of my top 5 games of all time! :-) I just cannot play it as a comfort game, when I replay it, I have to have time for uninterrupted immersion and enjoyment of this masterpiece! :-)
I’ve played more Team Fortress 2 than anything else. I can always go back to community servers there.
Man I really wish there was a version of TF2 with all the cosmetics and weapon unlocks disabled.
Valve recently released the source code so that’s probably really easy to do now
Factorio
i love factorio, but I cannot see it as a comfort game.
I’ve got so many things to do, i need to massively increase processing on novice, gleba is a wrek, all my space platforms suck, everything needs to be reworked, and I won’t have the tech to fix fulgira or vulkanus until after I ve beat the game.
very stressful.
#2 most hours of any game on steam.
I got 355 hours in the game and haven’t launched a rocket yet. I just built my first silo like an hour ago. I thought I was like minutes away from doing it. Nope. I have a whole new fucking chain to learn. Oh well. I love it. It’s not stressful at all to me. This is the type of shit I live for. My OG answer to this question is SimCity 4. The endless replay value and modding in that game got me well over 5k hours of play. Factorio is the only game since then that has come even close to that feeling.
I think I launched my first rocket around 500 hours, but that was long before the 1.0 release and before achievements were added. Played a lot of modded factorio since then, particularly seablock. Not sure how many hours into my current expansion save, but my total is 1440 hours. I still don’t have the “beat the game” cheevo.
I do enjoy seeing the great works that I’ve built, and watching number go up (in this case the tech progress). Quite satisfying, to such a degree that I’ve largely stopped playing incremental games. Watching a new build come to life and begin churning useful product, just, cheffs kiss.
I find it stressful, but I also find it worth it.
Og doom, Duke nukem 3d and Unreal tournament
Kerbal Space Program. I mostly just make fighter jets using the procedural wings and BDArmory mods now.
