benni

Hello, in the recent years I find myself willing to spend much less time and energy on games, but I do still enjoy them. Oftentimes I end up quitting a new game I tried out relatively early on, because I'm encountering some block, grind, non-optional boring side quest, empty open world, uninteresting clutter or details that I have to manage, or similar. Like, I just wanna play the actual game play, see how the story continues, and visit those areas that were designed with care. Not worry where on the map I can sell the glimbrunses I collected so I can buy a 37% stronger glarpidifice that I'll need to beat the next glutrey after which I'm allowed to continue the main story.

Sorry if this turned into some kind of a rant, but I hope it's understandable what I'm looking for and what I meant by fluff. Some games that have fulfilled this for me during the last years:

• Stray
• Skyrim (there's a lot of fluff you can worry about in Skyrim, but the thing is you don't have to worry about it, you can also just walk in any direction and see what situation you wind up in, at least for the first 10-20h of a playthrough, which IMO is enough time for a game anyway)
• Life is Strange
• Some Pokémon ROM hacks where the difficulty spikes were not too harsh

Looking forward to hear your suggestions :) Games where there is some fluff but you're allowed to just ignore it are also fine, but not having any fluff is preferred. Bonus points for anything on the Xbox game pass.

Hello, I am currently playing a high elf spellsword around level 18 on Xbox (so no mods). I maxed out the intelligence and destruction skill a few levels ago and unfortunately the strength of destruction spells is completely broken. I one-shot or two-shot pretty much any enemy I meet with a custom touch fire spell. It's not even min-maxed, I could increase the damage per magicka by making the damage hit more slowly and adding frost and shock damage. My blade damage is negligible in comparison and at this point I just swing the sword for aesthetics. It takes a lot of fun out of the game.

This is on adept difficulty. If I move to expert, the difficulty goes from way too easy to way too hard. Especially since higher difficulty reduces both the damage I make and increases the damage I receive. Maybe there are some Oblivion experts here that can recommend a playstyle with a non-broken difficulty? So far my ideas are:

• Increase the difficulty to expert, drop melee combat, play as pure mage with optimized spells, and lean into how broken magic seems to be in this game

• just continue and hope the difficulty balances out later in the game (I don't know if this will happen though?)

• start a new game in a different class without destruction magic (sucks cause I'd lose my progress)

I'd appreciate it if some Oblivion experts could give their thoughts. I had a ton of fun with this game before the difficulty broke and would love to continue.

Ok, I guess this will be a niche meme and require some explanation. Recently there was this post where a guy rescued a kitten from the neighbor's dog: https://lemmy.today/post/29489052 Today I was listening to the album Blood Mountain by Mastodon about a hero encountering all kinds of dangerous creatures while lost in the mountains. And the lyrics reminded me of the kitten's dangerous journey into the neighbor's garden.

See: https://lemmy.world/post/29462828