Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.
And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.
So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.
I’d love to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a diverse group of real people and share an adventure together, but have no friends who enjoy games that aren’t mindless slop.
Same with other slow-burn games like Project Zomboid and other survival/crafting games.
I learned to do slop to hang out with others, I even got good at slop like Rivals just to keep social contact alive. But I can’t drag anyone into a game that doesn’t have 2-minute matches filled with flashing lights and colors and gambling mini-games.
Sorry you’ve been through that.
I’ve about given up on chasing multiplayer, even including friends. It never fails. Because, there would be times some friends I know are playing a multiplayer game that is big and they’re all involved and I want to be involved. Then by the time I get it, they’ve moved on to something else and it would be a chore to have tried and get them to come back to the game I just got so we can have some of our memories poured into it.
It would never happen, they’ve grounded their footing into that next game and I would be a little begrudged and eventually I’d get that game, only for the cycle to repeat.
So, I’ve stopped doing that. Now I have a bunch of all of these games that were fun to have played with people on, just sitting and collecting dust because I tried playing with people I know and cared about. Now most of them play FFXIV, Escape from Tarkov or some other MMO-like game and they know I won’t go there to them because I’m not a MMO player, but I was always open to play something else that was multiplayer, but they never bit.
I’m in this boat with you. A few months ago I restarted my Valheim server for friends… And only one person joined me, for all of about 30 minutes. I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a Zomboid server, too, but I know it will be the same. We’ll play as a group maybe twice, and that will be it.
I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.
I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a server where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order high level gear from discord bots in chat.