Jozape

Have you played all of those games in your signature? Seems that Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld are absent from the list. I'm going to recommend them again.

The Outer Worlds sounds like a wild west as a space opera sort of thing. That would be interesting but no reavers or Rivers please.

Game consoles are bad for games where aiming in real-time is important, games where the player types, or games where the player presses an infinite number of keys an infinite number of times per planck time. I can definitely see the dumbing-down arguments for those games. Not for Pillars of Eternity though. Such games are well suited to game consoles as they're very slow paced; You are supposed to pause the game and issue commands while paused and so on. That does not require an interface with a dozen shortcut keys. That's nice to have but not necessary. Many RTwP games can be played entirely or almost entirely with a mouse.

Well I've been playing through Hong Kong slowly but I finally completed the first campaign. I really like the plot in this one; It is very large scale still but it's not save the world material , and it's a very personal one with lots of opportunity for meaningful role-play with Duncan about the main issue... And later on Raymond. It was a little annoying improvising some of the history bits at times but they seemed to have been written with for easy consistency at least. If I re-play I'll read all about what the PC possibly did before arriving in Hong Kong. Getting the bad out of the way first: I still think they completely ruined the Matrix. I don't know what they were thinking. This is easily the worst part of the game and the only part that was worse between this game and Dragonfall, with the possible exception of the history bits sneaking in. Your history could remain more mysterious and vague in Dragonfall which is both a positive and a negative. The UI is still bad and documentation still uninformative. There are lots of end-game bugs... I couldn't finish Duncan's story because of them. On the plus side there is lots of writing in this iteration of Shadowrun -- more than Dragonfall even -- and this time no character was spared from good writing. All of the companions are great, from Racter and his innocent psychopathy and his ageless cybernetic dream, to is0bel and her wrestling with her memories of the Walled City throughout her life. Gobbet, Duncan, Ambrose, Maximum Law, Spider Shen, Reliable Matthew, the Kai Fas, Auntie Cheng, Crafty Xu, the accountant-turned-vampire, Gaichou though I unfortunately killed him, the plastic-faced man, and etc... Nobody was spared this time. And much of the game your interactions were tracked with them and would later be acknowledged or influence their behavior which is nice. It was hilarious when I had to explain to Law what he was doing made him a liability and he finally understood Heoi wasn't just a wild west flick. The only really lost opportunity is that I wish there were still more times that Duncan was really on edge. There should have been more leash-work, imo. What was there was too easy. Oh, and the music, environment, art... all fantastic in this one. Easily my favorite of the 3 in these aspects, though there were oddly some performance issues in Heoi. But hey I can sit there and listen to the Heoi theme all day with its beautiful lights and fancy traditional Chinese characters. I assume they are traditional characters and not simplified ones, anyways. But yeah, the best Shadowrun. I think I still need to play the bonus campaign so I guess I'll do that next.

Haven't played the game but the "killing monsters" trailer for The Witcher 3 is one of the best game trailers ever. Also love the KickStarter pitch video for Wasteland 2. Not really a trailer but that is easily my favorite pitch.

Technically, any machine using an Intel CPU that is not an Itanium is affected. Most of the time this is insubstantial for single-player games and web browsing. Multi-player games can be severely affected on the server side though. I read that some disk heavy activities on flash disks can be significantly slowed down, but I don't know about mechanical disks. If you don't run virtual machines, you don't run a server, and you don't do disk heavy activities, you are probably looking at a minimal performance drop for anything where performance is actually meaningful nowadays.

Looks like a great way to get punched in the face.

Unfortunately there weren't that many places to actually go. You could spend a lot of time in one place going through a lot of text though. I'm playing through it right now and that is one of the aspects I'm finding curious about it - it's like they've gotten completely rid of all the smaller locations and made them all a part of each open area (bars, inns, and so on). The game seems of a decent size but its economy of locations does in some superficial way make its scope feel more akin to Tyranny's than Pillars', for me at least... That is basically what they did. The setting itself is underutilized in that aspect. I think the meres were actually supposed to fill in there but they were reduced in scope for the release. It could have appealed a lot more to adventure fans imo.

Unfortunately there weren't that many places to actually go. You could spend a lot of time in one place going through a lot of text though.

Too many nightmares of falling off the edge of the map. Except those nightmares were real.

Repetitive but relaxing. Used to listen to this to sleep many years ago and have recently started using it again. Need to not live next to a highway...

Not sure I can pick any one specific game but I like a little bit of abstraction. Ultima 4 or 5, Wasteland, and Baldur's Gate all have superb maps. I'm not sure why anyone would think Shadows of Amn's and Skyrim's maps are similar. I doubt they've even played Shadows of Amn... That or they have a very limited perspective. Morrowind came out what, a year or two after Shadows of Amn? Ultima 7 came our 8 or 9 years before Shadows of Amn and had a map much more similar to Skyrim's.

HK is my favorite in the series, so I do recommend to play it and the bonus campaign ("Shadows of Hong Kong", aka Epilogue). Some characters from DF appear there. Is there any way to force the matrix portions to be turn-based all the time? With the mini-game the lock can be forced but I'm really hating the stealth portions and I don't see anyway to slow them down.

So Shadowrun Returns was a quick diversion and I'm done with it. I really liked Dragonfall though and am itching to replay it, but now I'm itching to play Hong Kong too. Suggestions?

He did say Medieval fantasy, so I don't think games like Wasteland or Shadowrun will appeal to him. Otherwise, they're good options. I couldn't finish Tides of Numero Uno, so I can't recommend it. Dungeon Siege III is actually pretty good, as long as the OP isn't expecting similar to DS I and II. Tides of Numa Numa isn't medieval fantasy either though and they said they were considering playing it, so I figured anything was open to recommendation regardless. If one doesn't mind the fact that it's not medieval fantasy, Dragonfall is a safe bet. Nothing about the game stands out as being bad except for the UI. It has no filler, good writing, good characters, good plot, not bad combat, good pacing, and not excessive stretches of reading or combat only. I wouldn't worry about starting with Shadowrun Returns either... They may be set in the same universe, but you won't miss anything.

Finished Shadowrun: Dragonfall a few days ago and am currently processing what I think of the ending sequence. I will say writers were very brave and that's a refresher. I'll surely play it again after I finish Shadowrun Returns which I started a few days ago. After playing Dragonfall it's amazing how unremarkable Shadowrun Returns actually is. Nothing is really bad, but nothing is really good. It's so intensely mediocre that the only games I can think of comparing it to are NWN 1 and 2, sans expansions which are really their own games like Dragonfall. Oh well. I'll probably finish it up just to explore the setting some more which is growing on me still. The games are short so I still feel like I don't have a good grasp on the universe yet. Maybe I need to pick up some additional reading material or something. Regardless after this I'll replay the superior Dragonfall campaign, then I'll probably try Hong Kong.

That's what I remember too. It's a very twitchy game too and there's not much in the way of customization. It has a nice aesthetic though and the characters are quite good. I wish something like it would be made again, but RTwP, TB, or something similar...

Wasteland and Wasteland 2 are about as party-based as it gets. You play with a party in Shadowrun: Dragonfall and I can recommend Torment: Tides of Numenera too if you are a reader. You may also consider Darklands, but I never got far with that one myself.

I haven't played it yet myself. I admit that I've always been dissuaded from playing it because of how big of a red flag the "vampire underworld" setting is for me. I hope - and partly expect - to be wrong about all my preconceptions, and at the very least this poll has definitely made me consider that I should perhaps check it out... But I'm not entirely certain when I'll get around to it. I think you have to be into the universe and possibly be into the underdog tale of Troika to really appreciate the game. The writing is great, the characters are great, and there is a lot of customization and choice. Many different ways to play the game just by choosing your race or species or whatever. Unfortunately the game is very buggy and unfinished in some aspects -- even with unofficial patches -- or at least it was 6 or 7 years ago. Personally I don't care for the setting and was let down by the bugged and unfinished state of the game so I only played the game once.

It needs to be pointed out that this isn't a "kernel" flaw: the kernel is software e.g. Linux. Intel only makes the CPU and its microcode. The flaw is in the CPU but its being mitigated -- at a substantial cost -- by Linux. Epic Games' Fortnite's servers experienced much more than a 30 or even 50 percent slowdown btw, so these slowdowns aren't just theoretical. https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/news/announcements/132642-epic-services-stability-update

Okay, I guess we all knew what the top 4 or 5 would be.

Steam is good for the occasional gift card that can't be used outside of the country. Other than that I prefer GOG. Thankfully some Steam games can be added to GOG too.

I don't know how I managed to play all of Quest 64 only to completely forget its plot, its mechanics, that dozens of hours were consumed by it or that it even existed. I'm sure glad I put so many points into it though.

Been playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall despite better judgement to start with the OC, but it's been smooth and satisfying. I'm almost 20 hours in now and haven't felt like I'm behind much for not having played Shadowrun before. I have to admit that this game seems overly simplistic at times after playing Wasteland 2 and T:ToN recently but there are aspects that I really appreciate: more polish, less -- actually no -- filler, okay to great characters, and enough options to keep me from whining about how it's not really an RPG. The main plot so far is good but not great, but at least if the ending is bad one can't feel overly disappointed. Also Glory as a character has basically everything going for her. You could drop her into Planescape: Torment and she would seamlessly fit in. But to counter that the GUI, controls, and documentation are just bad.

Take-Two is a huge publisher that's been around since the 90s. Only the label is new.