Intellectually I know it’s fine. I know there’s plenty of time to complete the game. I just can’t stand a ticking clock counting down, constantly. It makes me anxious and completely ruins my enjoyment of the game. I also have this problem with Stardew Valley where I constantly feel like there’s not enough time and I’m being pulled in several directions at once and I can’t focus on anything. It’s a nightmare.
With Stardew, really?
You can start making friends at year 58 if you want, there’s no consequence to anything in that game… You can forget your animals for a year and start giving them love again and they’ll start producing again… It’s a game where each day you can decide to focus on one thing and it doesn’t matter if you forget about the rest…
It’s not about worrying that I won’t be able to do stuff again, just the existence of the ever-looming timer is stressful. And you have to water your crops every morning, and harvest them when they’re ready. You can only plant certain crops in certain seasons. There are requests on the bulletin board that have time limits. Shops are only open on certain days, and I know if I don’t do that thing today I won’t be able to tomorrow because it will be closed. If the timer didn’t matter, then there wouldn’t be a timer.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Stardew Valley. But I stopped playing it, partly because I found it too stressful. Which isn’t great cause people always advertise it as this really relaxing game, and I’m sure it is for them, but I guess my brain just works differently. And I really want to like Stardew Valley more, I want to be able to play it and relax.
I’m not even trying to minmax or anything, I try to take my time, but it doesn’t really work. I can’t just ignore the timer, cause then I’ll pass out and wake up with hardly any stamina.
Edit: Also “you can just focus on one thing” sure, but then what do I do for the rest of the day?
I know people say it doesn’t matter but I’m the same way with Stardew. I ended up downloading a cheat mod that lets you freeze time because I realized it’s supposed to be a nice, relaxing game, and I wasn’t feeling that way. I don’t use the freeze much, but it lets me enjoy the game without stressing.
That’s less of an issue with the second game, as you can ignore the timer, but yeah that’s part of why I never really tried the first game.
I think its harder to ignore in the second game, since the shaman dude constantly telepathically calls you up like “So uh, you find that GECK yet? Shit’s starting to get kinda bad up here.” Every now and then. The first game just has the post-it note with how many days you got left that you can ignore.
You would have hated the original Stardew Valley Gramp Pa, would give you a stern talking too and declare his immeasurable disappointment (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I can somewhat understand though, I like the timer aspect even if I do not like the feeling of being “rushed”. But I understand, you would hate pathfinder:kingmaker though
I’m a huge fan of the OG Fallouts, played them many times. I replayed Fallout 1 just a week ago and it’s great but… I would be hasitant to recommend it to someone who never played it. It is really archaic and I’m not talking about the graphics as that’s fine. It can simply be a bit hard to operate to people used to modern games.
You don’t have any tutorials telling you how to play it. If you actually find a quest log in Pip Boy, it turns out it only lists some quests and doesn’t have any details on them, only a vague one-liner title.
Figuring out that a randomly found item called Junk with an absolutely general description is actually an item needed to fix some machinery and that you need to hold right button on said machinery, from the drop-down select backpack, scroll to said junk and click it to use… isn’t really straight forward. Same goes for using some skills (repair, science etc.)
The game is also incredibly unforgiving and even when using all 10 save slots you can get locked out. Saying the wrong thing often causes an NPC to attack you, and when you kill them, everyone around turn hostile. Sometimes you don’t even need to talk and get attacked on sight.
You go to the Glow without a stock of Rad-X and you can go through it thinking everything’s fine and you’ll heal that radiation later. Your character seems to be fine, until you try to leave the location and you just keep dying in the Wasteland, seemingly for no reason. This happened to me last playthorugh and after 20 attempts I finally managed to survive by eating every drug I had with me xD. Only some (real) hours later I noticed that my SPECIAL stats were permanently lowered. The game makes it really hard and rare to permanently increase those stats and easy to lower it (drug addiction will do the same, or I think attacks from the Master and/or his Nightkin).
There are also bugs. It’s super frustrating when a BoS companion blocks you elevator exit in Mariposa Base. Had to force them to run through force fields multiple times so they die…
These are just some examples and even though some of these issues get fixed or improved in Fallout 2, they illustrate what I mean - a modern gamer can simply bounce back from OG Fallouts and I wouldn’t blame them.
Also - since when anyone cares what “tik tok says”?
I started playing FO1 for the first time on my steam deck. Maybe I ought to have a walkthrough handy as push my way through it.
I didn’t like the 3D Fallouts but I had fond memories of the original two, so I tried to replay Fallout 2 a few years ago. The writing is great but the gameplay has not aged well. Combat is simply tedious, especially against many enemies at once. You have to wait for them to slowly take their turns one by one, then on your turn you often just stand still and shoot once. Outside of combat, there’s a lot of running back and forth which gets quite tedious too. I guess I had more patience twenty five years ago than I do now…
I kind of did the opposite but ended up in the same place - I loved the newer Fallouts so I thought I’d give 2 a shot and combat was just so bad that I couldn’t get more than a couple of hours in. I tried it again a couple years later and same thing. I know a lot of people would riot, but I kind of wish they’d remake the exact same story/writing with modernized gameplay so I could experience it.
There are some fan made 3D remakes as mods for FONV and FO4 to poke around at.
Are they decent? Or complete, as in it has the entire main story at least in? I’d be very interested. Played fo1 halfway through when I was playing a lot of the infinity engine classics some years ago, it was great, but a lot of fairly simple QoL stuff was needed for me to finish it. I’m now playing the fo3 and new Vegas in the TTW mod (with the Begin Again modlist) and it has been great with all the QoL stuff baked in. Never played fallouts other than the first before now, kind of amazed it took me so long to give the threes a go, seeing as I’ve had them in my steam library for ages…
Fallout 1 and 2 are the only games in the series I’ve put any significant time into.
Boy are you in for a treat! 3 is amazing. 4 is good (I’m not a fan of base building) but the far harbor dlc specifically was great
Been having a hell of a time installing the resoration patch for Fallout 2 with WINE. The last issue I noticed was with the inconsistent character case in the config and install files.