I know, culture war and all that crap needs to be discussed, but i think some of us long for the content of old. So i'll start with this one:
https://www.gamebyte.com/cyberpunk-2077-wants-your-feedback-on-its-quests/
CDPR asks for feedback on cp2077.
"Paweł Sasko, the lead designer for quests on Cyberpunk 2077, is asking for players’ feedback to help improve the game. It may even influence future CDPR projects."
...patches have been added and it’s returned to the PS Store. In addition, CD Projekt Red has committed to continue to work to improve Cyberpunk 2077, 40% of CDPR’s staff are working on CP77, with a big release tentatively scheduled for the end of this year. And 25% are reportedly working on DLC for the game.
Currently working on a retrospective look at #Cyberpunk2077 quests for my team: going to analyze the reception of our players — the goal is to improve, identify what worked well, what didn't, and why.
Could you help? Write what #Cyberpunk2077 Quest has really stayed with you?🤔 pic.twitter.com/a7hspB77ki — Paweł Sasko (@PaweSasko) September 25, 2021
I'm old and beaten down and my attention span is destroyed so I can't muster enough interest in a new game to teach myself how to play it.
So im gravitating toward skill-less grind-fests in recognition of the fact that I'm using gaming to fill the time until I get to find out what kind of cancer kills me.
Specifically I'm doing Genshin Impact dailys and events to get gaming mostly out of my system for the day. Even though the combat is really repetitive it is satisfying to think that my "skill" in timing the cooldowns and switching toons and positioning is optimizing my damage output.
The game is AAA+ in terms of environment, animation and content bredth. The depth of mechanics is fairly shallow compared to its inspiration Breath of the Wild but there is just enough meat to it from getting tedious unless you really grind it out.
The stories tend to be lighthearted "fun" a lot of which revolve around food. Even the "serious" stories have hopeful aesops. That kind of positivity is something I didn't even realize I missed in game stories.
You earn plenty of premium currency in the beginning just going through the story. And the combat scales well and generally isn't challenging until you are ready to grind for top-end gear/leveling consumables. The free characters and whatever you roll up in terms of gear/new chars from your currency rewards should be plenty to complete the stories and 2nd from the top tier farming instances.
One thing that is amazing, particularly if you are into game dev, is how they made the game perfectly playable on mobile. Even though touch controls always suck the graphic fidelity is perfect on my mid tier phone.
Overall I can absolutely say the game is worth the download and account creation. You should be able to get 20 hours easily before you feel the need to grind at all, and most of that is the fun part of exploring the huge maps.
Not to criticize your pastimes, but have you tried the genre of RPGs? 80% of them are skill-less grind-fests, but at least have passable writing half the time. Should be simple to emulate no matter how rusty of a toaster you run. Specifically, the Disgaea series comes to mind for being a shocking grind.
If it's a facade of action you need, the Tale of ___ series would fit. If you want more action, then the genre of Action RPGs has a lot of neat stuff in it (scattered over many consoles and years).
Mostly curious how you'd end up on Genshin being the only game you play.
I played a ton of rpgs going back to Ultima 1, either story based or action. Maybe got 900 hours into Path of Exile. And found i definitely prefer action over turn based, no matter howuch of an illusion the "skill" portion of action rpgs are.
Played a metric assload of Disgaea 1 on ps2 and that always degenerated into only leveling items and promoting characters and never bothering to finish the story.
My issue isnt so much with the games but that im burned out on learning new gameplay systems.
Genshin impact ended up being so "light" that it didnt require any willpower at all or really have any "challenges" outside of a couple of "try all combinations" puzzles.
Hm, I was hoping to be able to provide some recommendation, but there are few "light" games I have memorized that aren't also mainstream enough that you've surely heard of them already.
It's kinda funny, you've got basically the opposite problem as I do: I get restless playing a game I understand, so I'm constantly looking for new gameplay systems and leaving games unfinished.