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Notes -
I sunk a bit of time into Wasteland 3, but bounced off well before finishing it. The writing seemed good at first, but it got too goofy for me to take it seriously at one point. That, and the combat got increasingly bad as I got later into the game. I think I was on the hardest difficulty, and every fight either felt like a cakewalk or impossibly brutal.
Witcher 3 is also amazing - forgot that one! I downloaded a mod for Gwent and did a full Gwent playthrough, it was excellent. I should go back and play the DLCs.
PoE, Mass Effect, and Persona are definitely on my list now. What did you like about them specifically?
Wasteland 3 does get a bit too goofy, you're right. Not sure why I listed it so quickly on my list, it's only somewhere in my top 20 probably. Also forgot to mention that Morrowind was one of my favorite experiences.
Pillars of Eternity games: I think one of the biggest strengths is the world-building, which, as orthoxerox says, is quite different in PoE 2 due to going to a Pacific islands setting. Some people favor PoE 1 though. 1 has a stronger main storyline, and a much longer one. 2 has a lot of great content aside from the main quest. Anyway, it's a cool universe with a bunch of gods interfering in mortals' affairs. It just makes sense as a world. The language use is pretty cool too. It's semi-inspired by real world history and cultures. You have one culture that's Romance language inspired, so you can kinda guess at many of the words' meanings, and it all just works. The voice acting is fantastic too IMO. And the soundtrack is great, sets the atmosphere kinda like the one in Morrowind did.
There's great reactivity and roleplaying in these games. You develop dispositions and reputations which a lot of NPCs react to.
Another strength of the Pillars games is that any build can work, due to how the attributes and skills etc are set up. You can have a wizard with high "might" because might affects damage for all attacks, and low mental skills and you can make him/her work.
Graphically it's almost exactly like the old isometric Infinity engine games, with beautiful backgrounds with 3d characters on top. PoE2 looks a lot better than 1 in terms of the 3d.
Mass Effect: the first truly cinematic space opera experience. Here too the world-building is great. High production values. I'd say the story, main character and side characters is the main strength in the whole trilogy, but it didn't stick the landing. Definitely worth a playthrough though. The first game is dated in some ways so be prepared for that.
Persona games: Could talk for an hour about these. P5 is perhaps the most slick and responsive game I've seen. The UX is top notch. But what I love about all the P games is the combination of a pretty intriguing life sim rpg and dungeon crawling. You spend about 50/50 in each. Half as a Japanese high school student who needs to forge social bonds and answer exam questions, take part time jobs etc, and half as a persona user fighting 'shadows'. It's all pretty Jung inspired. Some of the social relationships actually feel meaningful. There are many bonds you can rank up, one for each 'arcana', and you get to help the person develop and overcome challenges, by picking the right responses and hanging out with them. Top notch music that sets the tone, good voice acting and writing.
If you're going to play the Persona games you have a bit of a dilemma because while there's recently been a PC port of P3, it's not a good one, and they're releasing a much better looking remake of it next year. Though, there's no reason you have to start with 3. They're separate stories with different characters. Persona 4 Golden (each game has a significant 'expanded edition' that improves the game) is on PC, and if you don't mind PS2 era graphics, you might start with that one. If you want a modern game, you might start with Persona 5 Royal, but if so it might be tough to play P3 and P4 later because of the many QoL improvements in P5R.
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I would skip PoE and go straight to PoE 2. It fixes a lot of issues with the first installment, like replacing the most vanilla setting (it's not, but you have to care to notice that it's not Forgotten Realms) with Pirates of the Hawai'ian, being set in the most exciting time period for the location, making wizards actually useful and having optional turn-based combat that is supposedly less floaty than RTwP.
It keeps the brilliant disposition mechanics that are much better than just rolling for speech.
Some drawbacks of PoE2 are the lackluster main quest and the companion relationship mechanic that either works too well when your party has the right NPCs or causes them to hate each other if it doesn't. Both totally fixable in PoE3, but alas, we're not getting it any time soon.
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