I see your first point, but honestly I don’t understand the “meta” sentence.
Everyone gravitates towards the conventional wisdom best options so devs work to make sure there isn’t a single conventional wisdom best option. Which tends to mean there’s few “hard choices” because making the wrong one can lock out a character. You go with Life Magic or Light Swords or Elf Faction and then the meta becomes all about Fire Magic or Polearms or Goblin Faction and you feel hosed and underpowered.
The “meta” is essentially the groupthink for what is the best or “right” way to play at the moment. So everyone starts moving to that spec or playstyle, and people playing other types may get shunned because they’re not playing in the most effective way possible (someone may well enjoy the challenge of playing a droid-focused guy who sucks against beasts, but if I’m doing a dungeon/raid that’s all beasts and no droids, I don’t want that gut in my group).
I cant believe that no one has mentioned Old School Runescape. Its still going strong and more popular than regular Runescape.
Meta = Most Effective Tactic Available
Think of it like the developers introduce a new race or class, and that new race or class is vastly more powerful than any previously existing choices. That new thing becomes the meta, as everyone rolls one up and plays with the new shiny.
Well, I tried LOTRO. Meh, it’s okay, but it looks like WOW, too. I’ll give it a fair shake again tonight.
Wait until you get to Bree and speak to Barliman Butterbur in the Prancing Pony. 
Also you will soon get offered a crafting choice.
I recommend an Explorer, who can gather wood + ore, process them and sell the result. Explorers can also make light + medium leather armour from hides.
What race and class did you go for?
Let me know if you want any advice…
Elder Scrolls Online is on sale in Steam right now, if anyone’s interested in trying it out. I’ve never played, but at $8 for the base game I think I’ll give it a chance.
My FFXIV account vanished. The password no longer works. If I try to recover it, it says there is no account assigned to the email address - even though I have previous emails in that address congratulating me on my new Squarew Enix account and verifying it and stuff.
So, there goes FFXIV. LOTRO is the only holdout. Maybe I’ll try Guild Wars 2. More sword and sorcery.
Is Fallout 76 any good?
I love the Fallout world, so I’m the perfect customer for Fallout 76. I enjoy it. There is a huge update coming out April 14.
I’ll see about F76 but it’s REALLY expensive to buy. Yikes.
So I downloaded The Old Republic again. Back in 2012 or whenever it came out I maxed out several toons, then got bored. In 2018 I fired it up again but the game was ludicrously easy; I got a toon to level 25 without ever once being anywhere near dying. I figured I’d give it another go and started up an imperial agent last night (after a long download of course.)
The game’s dialogue and story remain the state of the art; it’s odd to me that no one else has ever done as good a job. Actually maybe it isn’t that odd; SWTOR was insanely expensive to make. But there it is. I haven’t yet played long enough to see if it’s still too easy, but I will say that global chat is so horribly spammed by gold vendors that it’s quite irritating.
I played SWTOR pretty heavily from 2014 through 2018, and you’re right – in the time that I played, they made a number of incremental changes to the game which had the net effect of making it easier for players, including a lot of simplification of the gearing system, and, IIRC, setting your companion to the Healer role was a great way to ensure that you never died, as companion healing was pretty powerful.
I haven’t been on the game much at all in the last year or so (though I’ve still maintained my subscription), but one of the first things I’d always do when I created an alt was to immediately turn off General (world) chat, as it was just trash.
In the 6.0 release last October they did nerf companions a bit. It’s still easier than it was back at launch, particularly if you generally know what you’re doing, but better than it was when they changed the system a couple years ago.
Supposedly, if you link your Steam & Bethesda accounts, it’s currently free.
How does one do that?
:smack:
My bad - I didn’t read the details closely enough.It appears that it is actually for only people who already own the base game. So, they’d be able to drop the Bethesda launcher. The accounts can be linked at the Bethesda account management page.
Rift sent me an email today reminding me that it still exists, apparently. I stopped playing a long time ago (about the time SWTOR came out), so I have no idea what it looks like now, but it was pretty fun at the time, and I liked the open-world events.
That is very good news. I liked 76 when it came out, but drifted away because I loath Bethesda’s launcher.
As I feared, SWTOR is still so easy it’s almost pointless.
Well, that’s it, I guess.
As was suggested earlier, play City of Heroes.
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It’s not dumbed down at all; it’s a fairly old school game with lots of abilities and flexibility, and it can be unforgiving at times. And you can set your own challenge level if it feels too easy at any point.
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If Secret World Legends taxed your system, this won’t. It looks pretty good for an older game, but it’s an older game and it isn’t very demanding in terms of hardware.
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It’s free. Completely. I don’t even think they’re accepting donations right now.
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Plenty of us on this board play and you can join CECIL, our super group.
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It’s really fun. I know this is subjective but the game has a long-term, very devoted cult following for a reason.