I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Your problem is with yourself, I’m afraid.
You can play Minecraft however you want. I once just travelled in a straight a line as possible for as far as possible, sometimes building mine cart tracks, sometime glass tunnels underwater, lighting beacons along way. I´d stop every once in a while to farm wheat, chicken, and eggs, and then I’d keep moving. The real dopamine hits came in discovering caverns, so many beautiful caverns.
(If anyone’s interest in similar voxel-based games for free, Luanti is an excellent and moddable open source project.)
I had a problem with Dwarf Fortress because I´d played it long enough with the goal of surviving, so I´d build a fort and seal all the possible entrances so no fun could get in. What I couldn’t design out (vampires), I modded out. It is quite accomplishment to keep a fort up and running and attracting goblins every season, and you find projects to keep you busy and happy, but it does get boring after a bit. Ultimately I couldn’t emotionally handle losing all my effort because I´d consciously fail to foreclose a risk, so I haven´t gone back to it.
Consider looking at these games not as games, but as windows into your soul.
Edit: Damn replied to the wrong comment again. @BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net
Sure, but i need -some- content. Can’t just be caves with a toothless zombie poking its head out every so often. If you want just beautiful scenery and no actual gameplay might as well go play “Prologue: Go Wayback”
I love exploration games where wanderlust is the main hook, but even I need more than Minecraft offered on that front. It needs some unexpected things to show up periodically to keep it fresh and dispell the procedural stink.
What are some of your game recommendations for exploration+?
I remember playing Elite back in ray-tracing days and getting really excited when I found some missions that tied together in a thoughtful way, though I think the rest of the universe was basically procedural.
Terraria hit a good spot for me. Was minecraft with things to actually discover underground. Can get to be more action-y when you do the bosses and such… but overall the game was magical just digging endlessly in a direction to see what weird stuff came up.
But my top tier is heavily modded Bethesda games. The vanilla games are… fine… but the moddability really opens up to make it what you want. Id layer on hundreds of mods, some survival, some just cool additions like a mod that might make autumn leaves fall from certain trees, or add nature sounds throughout the whole world, mods to make your character get tired the more they run so you have to set up camp in a safe spot every so often, spells require components so you have to learn the native plantlife to know which to scavenge for, that kind of thing. You use the mediocre quests the base game gives you as a reason to start traveling in a direction, but you end up setting up camp in the wilderness staring at the stars outside a random castle ruin you found that you might explore in the morning. It requires a good bit of willpower to set up the mods how you like em, but there’s nothing like it once you do.
Wabbajack is a project nowadays that let’s you clone super stable modlists. Might find some good baselines through that. I wouldn’t know… I got down the modding rabbit hole a decade ago and havent gotten out to actually play in ages.
There’s a game called Eastshade that I might play sometime that looks like skyrim exploration… but instead of quest being combat, they’re instead quests to paint various scenes across the land. Seems like a quality wanderlust game. Haven’t yet played though
7 Days to Die is another one that requires some elbow grease. It’s a pretty shitty zombie Sim game that devolves into silly base defense every 7 days with waves of zombies and turrets and stupid pit traps, etc. But I installed a mod called Undead Legacy, tweaked the spawn/difficulty settings to my liking, and installing a custom worldgen instead of using the base map, and then played it on ironman mode where I literally restarted if I ever died. It was pretty janky, but somehow magical. Exploring through the wilderness, scouting out towns and scavenging for supplies, taking everything leisurely/slow and methodical so I didn’t get myself killed. Ended up being very calming but paranoid wanderlust feel with spikes of adrenaline survival. I want to give project zomboid a go sometime for the same feel/goals
That’s my problem, though, no one’s truly made a perfect wanderlust game… so I’ve always had to twist games that are close to my liking. I think the wanderlust genre is a bit of a personal genre in that way. The ambience and various dials need to be just right for you as an individual to truly lock in and get lost in it. And it almost always takes some mentality shifts on your part too. Not fast traveling, maybe even just walking slowly and smelling the flowers, etc. But its nice to have a compelling game ecosystem around that too.