Nah. Even if Starbound and Terraria were alonestanding, one would still say that Starbound has an awful combat feel among it's stiff movement and physics. It's a laundry list of minor flaws that dim the glow it would have, which only compound and stabilize the major flaws to make them more glaring.

It's difficult to say, it might've gotten a free pass for a while at least due to the novelty of it all, had it not been for Terraria. I can't really remember the movement bothering me too much, but I definitely didn't enjoy the combat. But most of all it was the emptiness of the world that bothered me, even when it was filled with characters and buildings. It seemed incredibly superficial somehow. Except for the Outpost at least, which I always enjoyed visiting.

This is a fun topic, reading people's almost favorite games.

I think Hollow Knight could use less backtracking. That's the most recent really good game IMO, I'e played that I've had minor quips about.

It seems like a lot games could have used more polish/time/budget, which is both too bad, but also a testament to what was made with was available.

E: to add to others' posts. Starbound could have been amazing if it was more fleshed out. I dropped it and Terraria's not so chill second part of the game deterred me from playing too far. DQ 6 has amazing music, didn't get too far into cause I was too young to figure much out. I liked the monster recruiting. I didn't think the class castle was too far in, but I also don't remember too much about it.

Btw, Starbound is great with the FrackinUniverse mod. It adds like 250% more content and balances it.

To me, the thing that would help Hollow Knight is if it switched to a manual save system, so that you don't have to save the consequences of death if you don't want to (the trade-off would be losing everything since your last save).

Also, an assist mode would help. At the very least, an option to restart at the last room you were in when you die would be helpful to some players.

The DS remake of DQ6 took away monster recruiting, and it also made at least two changes that made game balance worse (strengthing one of the most useful skills and weakiening a skill whose usefulness was marginal at best is not how you improve game balance). It did, however, speed up combat and add party talk.

The point where you can change classes is pretty far in, after the first *major* boss fight (which you fight twice, at the end of 2 different dungeons, and the second fight is a 2 phase battle IIRC, which is a bit much that "early" in the game), and I suspect the part of the game leading up to that point is longer than the entirity of SaGa 1. (Then again, SaGa 1 is very short by RPG standards.)

I'm perfectly aware. But even it fails to fix the inner mechanics which eventually killed my total interest. Anything further to fix, and they'd have to start doing DLL hacking.


Like the fact that you can't change your character's appearance during gameplay outside of cosmetic items. In a universe where cloning and teleporters exist.

All the X games
On paper these games are everything I want in a sandbox game. But every iteration is plagued with poor design choices. The (recent) games all have some shitty controller support but a lot of functionality is only available on a keyboard. Some actions are hardcoded making rebinding keys a chore. The worst offender is X-Rebirth.

For example, to get anywhere in Rebirth you need to trade. To get trade offers you need to gain access to a trader on a station. This requires you to be next to a random NPC which might speak some utter nonsense after a few minutes resulting in one of the worst (timebased) minigames in existence. However, if no NPC speaks you can't do the minigame and trading becomes a pain in the ass.

Furthermore, all X games are plagued by poor pathfinding (autopilot crashes), badly designed NPC models and insane friendly fire repercussions.

Witcher 1
Really wanted to like this game but goddamn it's such a slog to get through. It's hammered by poor gameplay choices. For example, you can upgrade your items and weapons only once or twice. To make things worse, this is only available at the end (90%) of the game making the upgrades largely useless. There a lots of shitty quests, like collect X item of Y, but also quests where you know option B is the right choice but because you missed a dialogue option a few hours ago this option is no longer available.

The dice minigame is badly designed around luck where the computer cheats to win. The difficulty can't be changed and the whole group combat stance does not make sense.

visual novels , they just short of nonexistent then they would be great

Pretty much every Ultima game, except the first, has an annoyance that wasn't in the previous game; removing said annoyance would make these games truly great IMO. Specifically, changes like these would help:
* Ultima 1: Remove the mandatory real-time space battle minigame, or make it optional.
* Ultima 3: Let characters share inventory, and get rid of the food mechanic.
* Ultima 4: Remove the need to mix reagents to cast spells. (Also, the need for reagents should be removed for all later Ultima games as well, or modified so that only Mandrake is required, and only for spells that currently require it.) Also, allow the Fighter to use some powerful magical ranged weapons, to compensate for their inability to cast spells (and that class doesn't look like an intentionally weak class, unlike Shepherd). Adding Solo Mode (like in Ultima 5-6) would help in dungeon rooms.
* Ultima 5: Make Shadowlords not spawn in town, and provide a way to force Lord British to appear while resting. Also, get rid of the "limited visibility at night" mechanic.
* Ultima 6: Get rid of inventory limits, and make the distances between towns smaller. Also, I think this game needs an optional combat focused dungeon.
* Ultima 7: Use Ultima 6's battle system (making everything turn-based). Also, get rid of the need to eat; instead, perhaps make food provide a bonus effect, like faster health regen, instead of characters starving if not fed. Also, improve the atrocious inventory system; past Ultimas were better.
* Ultima 7 Part 2: Serpent Isle: See Ultima 7, but also give the player a spellbook and some reagents at the start, so that the player doesn't need to wait too long to get magic. (Also, from what I understand, the developers were running out of time later on, so perhaps restoring that part would help.)

Edit: Maybe I'll go through all of the Final Fantasy games I've played enough to fairly judge later.

if there had been any point to building in Starbound (aside from expanding your ship) that pull wouldnt have been so strong.

I'll keep it short.

Wasteland 3: I want to love it and sometimes I do, but then something comes along, like an unbalanced encounter, and I loathe it.

The Outer Worlds: Too short and too few locations, the characters are paper thin, they don't have the time to develop and the story is rather bland, but the way the story is presented is great. The gunplay is fun, but the weapon variety is too limited.
If Obsidian had a reasonable time frame to develop the game, this could have been New Vegas in space.
Fuck every single publisher that puts Obsidian on a schedule that is way too tight.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Great gameplay, the rest (story, characters etc.) is pure shit...wait, that makes it decent on the verge of being good...at times...my bad. :P
The animations of the robots are great though.

There was some point to in Terraria sure, but even so, construction-wise, I went far beyond what was necessary or useful in Terraria. The difference being that I was building a cool base in a world I cared about. The puzzling emptiness / inconsequetnial-ness of Starbound couldn't quite foster the same connection with any of the dozens of worlds I landed on.
Perhaps we're even talking about the same issue here. Something in the world that provides a point to building, might necessarily also give the world extra flavour / sense of purpose.
Navigation wise? Yes that was definitely a bit of a pain. But I liked that the outpost at least felt alive compared to the rest of the game. And I suspect there was something nostalgic about the 2D platforming against a dark starry sky backdrop.
I'm not familiar with FrackinUniverse though - might have to check it out in future.

We. The Revolution is my most recent pick from the GOG catalogue. The first 10 hours are amazing, historically accurate, and is very edutaining for life under the French Revolution. Fantastic themes, beautiful art, underrated music, and unapologetic in its subtext.

However, the last act of the game undoes nearly everything about it. The gamedevs shoehorned both a board game and an unbalanced turn-based tactics game that I didn't really understand or felt belonged in the game. Gives off an impression they worked on five different games and tried to combine everything into one title. Also, I wasn't a big fan of the story's ending either. Had they removed it and pushed the game towards a different ending and more focus on the cases, it would've easily been a strong 9/10 from me.

I strongly disagree. You don't buy a VN for gameplay - you buy it for its story. There are some VNs that are pretty shallow, but there are other examples of story-rich VNs. The most notable one are Umineko's Question and Answer arcs:

- https://www.gog.com/game/umineko_when_they_cry_question_arcs
- https://www.gog.com/game/umineko_when_they_cry_answer_arcs

The average time to complete both is 113.8 hours. The closest equivalent would the entire Harry Potter series in terms of word count, representing 96% of Umineko's. I've read the manga and it's one of the greatest things I've ever read in my entire life.

Even if you don't want to play a 100+ hour VN, other games like The House in Fata Morgana (28.5 hours) and the Silver Case series also rank highly for stories, having a combined 30.5 hour story. Valhalla: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is also a good one too.

Careful with Frackin'; it's a one way Total Conversion that requires a complete universe wipe. It also basically changes everything that isn't nailed down or set on fire.