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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2084 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

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What is the most addicting game you’ve played recently, what mechanic made it most addicting, and how do you feel in the midst of that mechanic?

Faster Than Light. Yes, I'm late to the party.

You're a lone spaceship trying to outrun a massive, constantly advancing enemy space fleet while you must fight random enemies and avoid running out of fuel and ammo. It's a roguelike so sometimes you just get screwed by RNG.

The best part of the game is the tension during difficult moments. You are low on fuel and only have a few missiles left, and the enemy fleet is only two jumps behind you. Suddenly, as you try to jump past a star, a well-armed mercenary ship uncloaks and demands you give up your ship and your crew as slaves. As you begin to engage, a warning blares across the screen -- the nearby star is unstable! Moments later your ship is hit with a massive solar flare, causing random fires to break on your ship. Your crew scrambles to put these out, sustaining burns in the process. Luckily, you've kept your best pilot and gunner away from the fires, but BANG! the merc ship has fired a hull-piercing missile into your ship's bridge which is now rapidly decompressing. Your pilot attempts to repair the hull breach, but you're not sure he'll be able to fix it before asphyxiating. You may need to sacrifice a different crew member to perform this repair to have any hope of escape. You pause the game to consider your options...

I had a heated 3 month fling with FTL back when it came out before I went somewhere for vacation and quit cold turkey. It was first roguelike (and one of my last - definitely not a good genre for me), and adjusting to the expectations of extreme punishment plus cruel RNG took a while. I remember it took me dozens of tries to win the game for the first time, and then I beat it immediately on the next run. And from then on, it was like a 50/50, which really surprised me, because of how utterly wrecked I used to get, and it's not as if the challenge had changed by leveling up or something.

In the middle of it, it felt to me like roleplaying in a very pure way, creating a narrative of a desperate ship captain in this scifi setting who needs to pull on all resources and luck to barely edge out survival for one more node. I don't think I've gotten quite the same experience from other games. And, unfortunately, I think I'd prefer to keep it that way, given how much time I'm likely to waste if I found something similar.

I got back into Elden Ring a few months ago, fairly hardcore (lvl 1 challenge runs, etc.). The addiction didn't last too long, but it was pretty strong for a solid two months.

People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."

Mechanically, the game is challenging for casuals, but it's fulfilling to play well. The defining design principle is that actions should be deliberate and if you get hit, it is your fault, and there is something you as a mortal human (ie., not Serral) could reasonably have been expected to do to prevent it.

The challenge that baited me into learning the game seriously was "Can you beat the Tree Sentinel as a lvl 1 wretch?" It's available right from the start of the game, and at first it seems impossibly hard, but it actually isn't once you learn the fight. At first, you'll die over and over again in the first ten seconds, and the challenge seems like something only a demigod could do; but with a bit of practice, you start to notice that all the attacks have predictable behavior, and eventually, not only does it seem doable, it feels downright easy.

The story is not told in a traditional fashion, and if you wait for the game to tell you the story, you'll miss it entirely, because the game never does. Rather, you're expected to pay attention to the detail of the world by piecing together snippets of information you retrieve from item descriptions. This sounds annoying, and it is until you get used to it. But once you get used to it, you'll be like "huh, I wonder what that Shaded Castle is all about. I never paid any attention to the items or people there, I wonder if there's anything interesting?" And there is! (If you want to know, the guy who's supposed to be ruling the castle is a weak simp who's been booted out of his own palace, which is now ruled by a foreigner who threw all the beautiful artwork in the trash, and the entire place is now flooded in poison and overrun by screeching subhumans. Gee, what could the game have been trying to tell us? Everything in Elden Ring is like this, and you can absolutely waltz through the game without noticing any of it if you don't pay attention.)

Finally, Elden Ring is one of the only games I've ever played where I genuinely believe the team's visual designers are more cognitively gifted than its programmers. I don't mean the game is has Realistic Graphics, which I don't care about (I usually prefer stylized graphics to realism, e.g., the Persona series). I mean the visual design itself is absolutely stunning. For example, the Church of Vows is aligned such that when you look through the front, you see Rya Lucaria Academy, and when you look through the rear, you see the Erdtree, because at this church were married the leaders of these two factions to resolve a great war. Once again, you can play the game and be totally oblivious to this sort of thing; but the game is saturated with this sort of high-IQ, intentional design. It is beautiful, and I have the highest respect for it.

My biggest criticism is that the game is bad at explaining how to play. This was my first souls game, and at the start I found the mechanics frustrating and counterintuitive, and the game's hints are worthless ("Did you know you cannot ride your horse indoors?" Yes, thank you for that profound insight, now how do I use the skill in my right-hand weapon?). And even aside from that, there are a zillion small design issues and bugs. But these problems fade into irrelevance in the light of the glory the game achieves. Its heights are so high. It is the only game I've ever played that feels like it successfully transcends the middle class nature of video games and ascends to the same tier of artistic achievement as good literature.

People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."

The reason people say this is pretty simple, it's that Elden Ring's setting, to the DS veteran, mostly is just more of the same as has been done the last three times. It's just hard to really see Martin's stamp. You can of course claim that he has done it better, but this is quite subjective. There are a lot of arguments about that already, and everyone has their own opinion. ER is undoubtly a good game, but most of your post could be written equivalently for any DS game, including even the aesthetic design (well, maybe not DS2, as much as I think it is somewhat underrated) and, funnily enough, even Martin's quote. Partially for this reason I got bored with ER halfway through the game, though I'll certainly pick it up eventually again. As a DS veteran you just can't shake the feeling that you have already played this game 3+ times, with near-identical story beats, setting and mechanics.

I mean I tried Dark Souls after Elden Ring. I just don’t see it, man.

The collapse of a great society sentiment is there, yes, but the difference in depth and subtlety is the difference between a post on /r/collapse and Meditations on Moloch.

See, for example, this reddit explanation of the unique vertical level design of DS1. Imo none of the other entries, including ER, have done it quite as masterfully, even if they clearly were inspired by it. Which is fine; They have done other things better.

Edit: Btw, DS3, since you mentioned it, is probably my least favorite of the bunch. DS2 at least tried a bit more to do its own thing. DS3 returned to the roots, yes, but in the process feels the most like a rehash of DS1, but invariably worse since a copy never reaches up to the original. That's imo one of the reasons why ER was deliberately given a different name, marketed as something different and has at least some clear deviations in the design, such as the open world.

There is also the element in which, since the DS entries are explicitly intended to be different iterations of the same loops, makes them work together better than alone. See this post which in my view - despite me agreeing that DS3 is a weaker entry! - entirely misses the point of the DS3 design: By the time of this iteration, the cycle has been going on too long, the fire has been lit too often, so that the sacrifice has to be ever greater for but a sliver of the greatness achieved earlier. The message is clear: This time around, just lighting it yet again will not be sufficient. You have to find another way. It's deliberate.

Edit2: I also think, since, as you mentioned, a lot of the design choices are easy to miss & somewhat subject to interpretation, DS games are especially susceptible to the tendency to always like the first game of the bunch you played. You'll always be more willing to look into all the details, all the theories, etc. the first time around. The more you play, the more you tire of it, so you'll miss more and more on average.

I got into Anno 1800 (pro tip: you can get the base game cheap and cream API the DLC for free) about a year ago and Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I haven't had a game touch my dopamine receptors like that since I was a teenager first getting into gaming.

It was un-ironically as close as I've ever gotten to wire-heading. The temptation to play at the expense of food, sleep, work performance, sex, socialization was intense.

What made it so addicting:

The production chains being complex enough to be challenging while not so complex as to shut down from overwhelm.

Ship logistics was a ton of fun, getting better at that and seeing it pay off was sweet.

The Victorian aesthetic I find really compelling, and the tense action against the other AI (who you later realize are absolutely useless at the game) makes for a really fun juggling balance and tension.

The different areas provide variety and a steady march of new challenges to wrap your brain around.

Each phase of the game has a distinct feel, and is fun on its own merits. Desperate economic balancing when you're on an island or two. Balancing wide/tall expansion with conflict in mid game. And finally hyper-optimizing and paper-clipping in end game once you've wiped out everything else.

I finally stopped playing incredibly suddenly once I was at about 150,000 investors and had just started the final production chains for the higher level skyscraper goods. The level of optimization required at that point (my goal was 1,000,000 investors) meant I was largely following templates I found on the German (lol) template sites, including their researched specialist stacks. At that point I wasn't really playing anymore, I was just following digital Lego instructions. I was also getting mildly tired of having to raze and re-design suboptimal islands repeatedly as I got better/learned how the game worked. I guess I could have continued to play blind and try to get to 1mil myself, but that would have taken so long, and required even more "raze and re-design" moments, so I got bored and stopped. Sucked a good couple hundred hours of me before I did though.

How do you feel in the midst of that mechanic:

Fucking incredible, it was the perfect level of challenge and the challenge level contributed to increase at a pace that allowed you to skill up perfectly in sync with it.

It was seriously so compelling and so fucking fun.

It was basically an instant drop into flow state on command, it was magical.

The sudden end was kind of surprising to me. I went from being so compelled to play it to basically 0 interest over night. Other games I adore (civilization, paradox games, battlefield) I have played for decades and will continue to play for decades. Anno was a whirlwind romance in comparison.

Highly recommend.

Looking at my game files, I don't seem to have any(??). It doesn't even have a Steam workshop.

I can't remember why I bought the game, as you seem to be able to pirate the whole thing.

Maybe I wanted mods but never got around to it because I was enjoying vanilla.

Extended power plant range was on the list of mods I wanted though, kind of cheaty, but it gets tedious.

Hardspace Shipbreaker. Attempting to dissemble a ship as neatly and efficiently as possible with a minimum of waste was enormously absorbing, appealing to the same part of my brain that can't relax until everything in my apartment is in its right place.

Looks at his current play-count for saved worlds

Well, as of late, I'd have to say Vintage Story. As for why? It's hard to place down on one single element. There's just something weirdly appealing about making wine and baking pies in a post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror setting were your overall goal is to make it to producing steel. Oh, and possibly figuring out the entire reason for all that post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror.

Mechanics-wise, it also has a wide plethora of emergent gameplay. Not requiring containers to store things and just being able to put your tools down on the ground or leaning up against a nearby wall has a charm all of it's own.

I am very much not a survival game person, but I do appreciate the idea of a Minecraft for adults. I've seen a bit of gameplay, and it's clear to me that the game conveys 1% of the difficulty of bootstrapping even medieval civilization from scratch (which is a hundred times more than most offer). People seem ready to weep when they finally get copper tooling.

Vintage Story has alot of difficulty gates for survival that give you plenty to do in-game, above and beyond acquiring metals - it can also cause some emergent hilarity. Just last night while playing, what turned into a scouting mission for more pine resin flipped into an effort to capture and bring back a female goat for my domestication efforts before quickly devolving down to fighting for my life against a horde of wolves in order to capture said damn goat.

All because if you make sure your diet has enough variety, it increases your health, and I need to work on dairy production.

Fun times.

The epic quest for the rarest commodity in the game: a bee hive.

ffffff-

I haven't had time to play the newer release, but I'll second this from the 1.18 update.

The part I found most addictive is how there's always one next small task to run, usually 'just' a five or ten minute task, and they're almost all pretty engaging. Absolutely will eat several in-game days of 'and I just need to finish this - oh and -'.

WoW Classic is still the most addicting game I have ever played. Sometimes I will randomly think of Stranglehold Vale and get an insane itch to create a new character.

Yeah I just played recently on a private server. Was fun, accelerated xp so you don’t waste your entire life leveling hah.

A new one is coming out for cataclysm soon and I want to try that.

World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.

Still a great game though.

Same, except the game came out when I was in college and your post made me feel old. But like you, I tried playing WoW classic and it just wasn't the same. The game was (mostly) the same of course, but my frame of reference was different and it had a much different feel as a result. I ultimately didn't stick with it, though I did have fun for a while (and my wife said I was "bellowing with joy" when I got my first green drop in Elwynn Forest, lol).

Arma Reforger.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have over 3700 hours in its predecessor, Arma 3. That is almost half a year of my life, and it wasn't all just leaving the game on idle. About 500 in Reforger.

For the unfamiliar, the Arma franchise is what happens when you take Battlefield and force adherence to a semblance of realism. Combined arms on the company scale, presented in either first or third person. Guns are lethal, you're not a super soldier, finding yourself facing a main battle tank in an open field, without effective AT only really ends one way. The maps can be enormous, and they must be, to accommodate the full spectrum of modern firepower.

Your role, in the grand scheme, is usually one of profound insignificance. You are a grunt. You might be a grunt with the keys to a fifty ton armored fighting vehicle, a helicopter, or a supersonic jet, but your fundamental state is that of a small, fragile component in a much larger machine.

To actually achieve anything, you must look to teamwork. You must find people willing to be the other cogs in the larger machine. You will find yourself reading the USMC's small unit tactics manual and applying it to great effect in a video game. In the limit, you could run a West Point course (and this happens, since a variant of Arma is marketed as a genuine military simulation for actual soldiers).

There's no one way to play Arma. You can play it single-player, either in its curated campaign, a wider sandbox, custom missions that push the bar for what the engine allows. You might play multiplayer, where experiences range from hardcore one-life ops with a hundred other human players vs AI, or even other humans, to people RPing a semi-functional society. Remember, DayZ and PUBG both began as Arma mods.

The reason why I have an ungodly number of hours in Arma 3 is a feature/game mode called Zeus.

This mode elevates one player to the status of a god, or more accurately, a Dungeon Master. From a top down, real time strategy perspective, the Zeus controls every facet of the unfolding scenario. They spawn enemies, call in air strikes, change the weather, and narrate the conflict, all in service of providing a compelling experience for the dozens of human players who have entrusted them with their Saturday evening. As a child, I arranged green plastic army men in my backyard. As an adult, I marshaled platoons of real people from across the globe. Among them, a cohort of astonishingly racist yet disarmingly hilarious British alcoholics, who, in a display of baffling camaraderie, adopted a young doctor from India into their virtual unit. I am scheduled to have a drink with some of these individuals in the physical world later this week. The kinds of bonds you can make in the game are sometimes ridiculous.

But Arma 3 is an artifact of a bygone era. It was never a paragon of technical elegance, and time has only magnified its flaws. The player controller is famously obtuse, the performance is inconsistent, and it lacks a constellation of quality of life features we now consider standard. It is, in a word, clunky.

Arma Reforger? It's very much a transitional product. Bohemia Interactive wanted to overhaul the entire game engine, and decided to launch a glorified paid demo to keep players busy till Arma 4 came out. Then, to the surprise of both the devs and cynical older fans like me, said demo blew up, and is now a genuinely good game which approaches greatness when modded.

The critical distinction is this: Arma Reforger is a superior shooter. The fundamental act of moving, aiming, and firing is vastly improved. You are no longer wrestling with an awkward digital puppet that seems determined to glitch through the terrain at the most inopportune moments. Clipping your car into a small rock will no longer reliably send you to space. The graphics, while not at the absolute cutting edge, are entirely serviceable and a significant leap forward. The friction between player intent and in game action has been dramatically reduced.

Alas, this reduction in friction has come at the cost of systemic depth. The simulation is not as comprehensive. The new equivalent of the Zeus mode is a pale, half baked imitation of its predecessor. The artificial intelligence of non player characters is unimpressive, and this is a damning statement when one recalls that the old AI was hardly a legion of tactical geniuses. Yet the core of the Arma experience persists, and a new dimension has been unlocked: the player versus player combat is orders of magnitude better. I now find myself genuinely enjoying large scale PvP, an activity I had long dismissed as a chaotic and laggy sideshow in Arma 3. The smoother, more responsive core mechanics make all the difference. Add to this monumental, DLC quality modifications like RHS, which transports the default Cold War setting to the present day, and you have a robust platform for tactical conflict. Getting a few friends together to engage in a firefight with other human beings is now a clean, enjoyable, and rewarding loop.

In a nutshell, Call of Duty and Battlefield use pretty pictures and the illusion of real world weaponry to sell the fantasy of being a supersoldier. Arma will have you feeling like a real and all-too-vulnerable soldier in the fire of modern conflict.

I have very high hopes for Arma 4 now. While I genuinely enjoy PvP at times, I yearn for the experience of herding human cats through my own campaigns. If done right, everyone has a great time you can't really replicate anywhere else, and you end up with drinking buddies for life.

Did you ever play DayZ, either the Arma 2 mod or the standalone game? What did you think of that?

I didn't really play much of Arma 2, and DayZ never really appealed to me. The gameplay seems like an exercise in misery, even watching highlight reels never sold me on the concept.

I must give you props on accomplishing something I wouldn't have thought possible: you almost make me want to try Arma sometime, through the sheer enthusiasm and love you clearly have for the game. I strongly suspect I would hate it, as I tend to be not too fussed about realism in games (indeed, Battlefield is already the more realistic shooter compared to others I have played a lot of, such as Quake 3 or UT2k4) and so I expect I would find Arma somewhat frustrating. But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to. Perhaps if I ever clear out my prodigious backlog, I should give it a shot.

You're welcome! Given how much I've played the franchise, since I was a wee bairn mucking around with the original Operation Flashpoint on my first pc, it would be weird if I didn't heartily endorse it. It's no Tarkov, the kinda game you have a love-hate relationship with but can't stop playing.

For many, it's an acquired taste. There are all kinds of official and fan-made game modes, from the comparatively frantic King of the Hill, which, if not Battlefield levels of intense, is still up there. Then there are full milsim servers, where you might spend half an hour of downtime before being cleared for a sortie, or a medevac crew waiting for a mass-cas event. People usually find their niche quickly, as a Zeus, I did a little bit of everything, even if the majority of the work was commanding the AI around and keeping players engaged.

The main frustration of players accustomed to more casual shooters (let alone Quake) is the downtime. Yet that downtime serves a very important purpose! It offers time for movement and maneuver, allows for wide flanks or ambushes. It makes death mean something, even if most servers won't have a one-life system. You are fighting the world's most dangerous game in PvP, and the pleasure of merking some poor fool arises includes the knowledge that he isn't going to immediately respawn in the building next door and be upon you in a few seconds.

But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to.

I don't mean to oversell it, since the level of teamwork can vary considerably.

In organized operations, one can witness communication and coordination that rival professional military practice. Squads have defined roles, leadership structures are respected, and air assets are integrated with ground forces according to established procedure. It is a simulationist's dream. A lot of players are active duty or ex-military, and they love their day job so much they do it again when they're off.

On more casual servers, the dynamic is closer to a Battlefield match, but with a crucial difference. Players may initially operate as individuals, but the game's mechanics consistently pressure them towards cooperation. Almost everyone uses a microphone. A direct request for assistance or coordination is, in my experience, almost always met with a good-faith effort. An emergent cooperative equilibrium tends to form out of shared necessity.

Even when not playing with a clan, I always try to brighten days/induce PTSD by really getting it on in VC:

"I can't feel my legs" + realistic sobbing is a good one.

"Tell my mom I love her" I say, neglecting the fact I almost never actually call.

"Tell my wife that... I have another wife" always goes down well. Never fails to get a chuckle.

"I can see the light, are you an angel?" followed by kissing sounds when someone works on my dying corpse. Or "buddy, that's the sun" if someone pulls that line on me.

(My neighbors love me)

Anyway. Just a few years ago, I would have recommended another FPS that was, itself, well-placed between Battlefield and Arma. Squad, as the name suggests, is a team based milsim-lite, the spiritual successor to a Battlefield 2 mod. It is more rigid than Arma, but also more fast-paced. You play your class with a well-defined role, on a medium sized map. It has a higher skill floor and lower skill ceiling. You must work as a team to get anything done, but often because an individual is unable to do very much except shoot and move. You can't even drive a car without getting approval from your Squad Leader!

I can no longer recommend it very strongly. The developers, in an attempt to further incentivize teamwork by "slowing down" the gameplay, implemented changes to weapon handling that I found debilitating. The player's avatar now moves with the sluggishness of someone suffering from both advanced Parkinson's disease and severe asthma. The stated goal was to make gunfights more deliberate, but the result was a pervasive and frustrating clumsiness that felt less like tactical realism and more like a systemic handicap.

I no longer play it, but many still do. It might be worth checking out, you'll fit right in coming from Battlefield. I would still recommend Arma instead, but watch some gameplay videos to figure out what appeals to you.

RubixRaptor: Absolute chaos and tomfoolery.

Operator Drewski: More considered, tactical gameplay. My ideal.

Karmakut: My man, have you considered joining the Army?

Minecraft. Mining. Relaxed.

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