Ahh, Morrowind. A conworld so good that the community effort put into modernizing it may have eclipsed the amount of work put into creating it in the first place. The OpenMW project is extremely impressive.
I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.
Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.
Three years makes a big difference if he was, say, 12 when Morrowind was released. And while I wouldn't call it convoluted, Planescape: Torment is much more cerebral and much less experiential than an open world first person RPG.
The problem is that the "game" parts are not very good; even outright shit, especially if you compare it to Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.
It more than makes up for that in atmosphere and writing, but many players are expecting to, well, play a game, not read a novel, which is entirely fair.
> I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
What do you mean? Planescapes gameplay is pretty much the same as all party based RPGs, many modern ones are pretty similar as well, Pathfinder, Divinity, pillars of eternity...
The problem is how well does Planescape Torment work as an introduction for someone who never played any of the games you listed? A few weeks ago I was talking with some younger coworkers about new games and they came up blank when I mentioned Baldurs Gate III, any game related to it and even several out of your list. Planescape Torment is part of a genre of games many never played.
Good point, it's easy to forget that nowadays there is much more variety of games in the different subgrenes. So even if you like RPGs, you might have only be exposed to first-person like RPGs like the Elder Scrolls games, while back in the days every RPG fan would have heard of Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate, Planescape ... Which all have very similar gameplay.
I decided once to walk up the east coast of Vvardenfell, then started cutting inland.
Then the ash storms started. I needed shelter quickly, so dived into some nearby Dwemer ruins.
But it was infested with vampires. They hadn't detected me, but were close enough that I couldn't rest, and I wasn't strong enough to defeat them.
So I sat there in the ruins, listening to the ash storm howl outside, for an hour, until it died down.
After I finished my journey, days alone in the ash wastes, with only ash storms and danger for company had gotten to me, so I had to take a break from Morrowind. That damn howl, that sound was perfectly oppressive.
TL;DR - I'd never had a game affect me like that before, and the capacity to wander into stuff you totally can't handle made the world and its danger feel more real.
That's why anytime I played Oblivion or Skyrim, I installed mods to disable creature leveling (creatures got tougher or weaker, contingent on your level).
I like a game where eventually goblins become a non-threat I vapourise with one swing of Goldbrand, but powerful vampire mages can still turn me into paste with a few gestures.
Oh man. That game went way over my head at the time. I don't think I got anywhere in the missions. I would end up alone somewhere in a forest with no idea what to do and potentially enemies anywhere.
I think I mostly ended up watching the half-scripted and excellent sequence in the background of the menu if I recall correctly.
Torment is probably the easiest of the bunch to get into, it is far less combat heavy and you are literally invincible. "Game" part is just there to deliver the story. My suggestion is to just start playing and not worrying about min maxing
painful to read about planescape torment, that game was damn formative (though as a working adult now... I really want to put that time and focus into disco elysium and havnt been able to yet...)
You can make a nice 3D renderer, learn shaders, bring in a physics library, make a bunch of models and textures, write a lighting system, add a system of animation, make an actor/AI system, create 2D UI helpers for menus/HUDs, work out a file format for storing and loading state...
...And then realize that it's very difficult to create a detailed world when you can't see it and manipulate it in realtime. D'oh.
Streaming is a huge weakness of the Pi platform. It seems like the big sites change their DRM every few months, and everything stops working.
A couple of years ago, I could happily use a Pi400 as a streaming box for my TV. Today, it's only good for playing videos off of an external drive with stock Raspbian. This was one big reason why I cancelled my Netflix subscription.
In fairness though, I seriously doubt that other SBCs have better streaming support. Is there a project like OpenWRT for HDMI sticks like Roku, Fire TV, etc?
I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.
Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.