Mine is vehicle building games like Stormworks or Scrap Mechanic. It’s so much fun to shoot at your friends with your latest nuclear drone while hiding in your bunker with a better defence system than Area 51 !
I’m very curious about your fav niche game genre !
(I’m sorry for my bad English ^^')
First person tile based dungeon crawlers! Like SMT I and II, or the Labyrinth of Refrain games! The less map and info, the better, so I can get full immersion in exploring and getting lost in a dungeon for days!
Sandbox RPG games with deep simulation and emergent gameplay elements cranked up to 11. Stuff like Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi and to some extent RimWorld.
I don’t know if there is a name for this genre and if anyone has similar games to recommend, please do!
I never understood what Dwarf Fortress was. Could you explain it to me please ?
Sure. Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator and fantasy story generator
It has 3 game modes: fortress, adventure and legends.
You begin all 3 by creating a world. The game will simulate the geology, tectonic plaques, erosion that eventually lead to a world that is habitable
Then the game puts elves, dwarves and humans on it and simulates a couple hundred years of history.
Civilizations rise and fall, go to war. People marry, have children and die.
Then you start your game. In fortress mode, you lead a group of dwarves to establish a new settlement. It plays like a city builder, colony sim and a little like the Sims
Every npc is simulated very in depth with thoughts, memories, relatives, moods, needs. This means there is stuff like trauma and npcs deal with it in different ways and eventually process into into a change in their personality and stats. The personality affects their social relationships.
You guide the dwarves to dig and build rooms, workshops, taverns. You organize the military and trade.
Eventually you might get attacked by globins or something. Each goblin will come from a specific village, they will have a family, thoughts and moods and memories.
You can see how the game is unique. No other game will go to this extent in simulating the world and its people.
Adventure mode is how you play with just one character and explore the world. It’s not good to play yet because most of the development at the moment is for fortress mode.
Legends is like Wikipedia for a world you generated, you can browse all events, people, places.
What makes the game amazing is the stories. One time, a beast from the caves arrived. It was a monster in the shape of a slug, made of lava, with wings.
It flew up my well and was about to kill everyone. But some beekeeper dwarf was lowering a bucket. The bucker hit the Beast so hard it fell into the water reservoir and died (it was made of lava).
Some water evaporated and the hot steam hit a few dwarves sending them to the hospital.
Another story is a mayor I had that was so good at consoling people he became legendary at it. He suffered trauma because a drunk angry citizen punched him. Also he lost his cat. He reflected on this and “found peace”, it’s kinda funny but that’s how the game rolls. After that his stats changed or something and he was never bothered by anything. Managing stress in the game is important so this guy being so zen kept me on the edge of my seat when he was in danger due to how valuable he was as an unstoppable beast in consoling everyone all day every day and preventing fist fights or worse as we were dealing with a war with elves.
Bottom line is, the game is extremely deep to a fault even, but I love it so much. I love how the stories are so unique and how things can go in such weird ways, I love seeing characters develop so organically with no scripted events at all.
Wow. Your explanation was amazing (like the game). I’m gonna check it out !
I would recommend starting with Rimworld. It’s a lot like Drawf fortress but it replaces the insane depth of Dwarf fortress with more accessibility for the average gamer. Think of it as a more streamlined Dwarf fortress. If you feel like you need more depth then there’s always Dwarf fortress.
Ok, i will check it out too
Cool! Let me know if you have questions. On reddit we had r/dwarffortress, we should maybe ask one of the gaming communities if there is interest. Earlier I found https://lemmy.zip which is a lemmy instance geared towards gaming.
Ok, I will ! You seem to know a lot about the game, why not make a lemmy community yourself ?
Haha! I don’t think I can moderate and run such a community. Also my instance here for Lemmy is something I spun up for personal use given I like to self host stuff as a hobby, and I don’t think it would work well as a home for a community.
However I saw someone made a new tool to explore the “lemmyverse” at https://lemmyverse.net and using it I found there is an existing community for dwarf fortress that seems a lot more seriously set up than mine would be: https://lemmy.ml/c/dwarffortress
I subscribed! Last time I searched there wasn’t one but maybe I just had to use a tool like this lemmyverse site that collects data about all communities across instances.
That’s a very useful tool !
I have tought about self hosting a website/ my own lemmy instance but isn’t it dangerous to host things avaliable on the internet from your home ?
I really like Kerbal Space Program.
And I also really like Factorio for all my logistics/factory builder needs.
I love the Mystery Dungeon games. Most people know about the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon ones, but there are also Etrian Mystery Dungeon I & II, Shiren the Wanderer titles, Taloon’s Great Adventure, Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, and more!
I like them because they are pretty casual games you can pick up and put down easily, but if you want to get deeper into the strategy, you can. We didn’t get these games in the West until the Nintendo DS era, but they started with the SNES in Japan.
Isometric Theme Park simulators. I’m in love with Parkitect and have fond memories playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 as a kid.
OpenRCT is the GOAT of this genre IMHO
I will check it out! Known about it for a long time but I’ve never really taken a look.
I really like exploration era sailing games. Trade and explore. Upgrade ships etc. I’ve tried them all and none are that great. But the idea is something I really like. If something like Uncharted Waters combined with Black Flag ever came out I’d be in gaming heaven.
