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Please sell my wife on Co-op, RPG [Diablo 3 Achieved]
ArbitraryDescriptor
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
[Update 9/3/12]
Success! D3 grinding now counts as quality time. This is doubly good because with the baby coming "going out" will be a far less viable avenue of entertainment.
[Original Post]
I have been slowly grinding down my wife's resistance to nerddom for years, and I think it's time. I have determined that she'd enjoy the mechanics she would find in RPGs, it's just a question of finding the right one to introduce her to them.
I've got Neverwinter (all of them), but I think that might be too involved. I've got Dungeon Siege, but it's pretty boring. I was thinking Diablo II (then there will be no argument when D3 comes out...), but that might be too much, too soon. Corpse runs, inventory management, building up the wrong skill sets only to realize that they are complete shit and you're stuck with them; these are not fun things.
She really likes the Lego Harry Potter/Star Wars stuff. She likes the loot drops, unlocking those red brick powers, smashing up a bunch of bad guys, etc. So I think I'm looking for a bridge between those games and Diablo. Some co-op action/adventure game that introduces light RPG elements like skill progression (as opposed to unlocking red bricks) could be ideal, but I've been out of the loop on this stuff for years and I just don't know what's out there and I'll welcome any* suggestions you guys might have.
We've got the following platforms: 360, Wii, 2 PCs (LAN preferable, our ISP is flaky).
*No MMOs, please. I'd like to keep her.
[Edit]
Suggestions so far, ordered from Diablo to not Diablo
Diablo 3
Diablo 2
Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
//Sacred 2 (Wiki required?)
Orcs Must Die 2
Borderlands (First Person Loot-fest)
Dungeon Siege 3 ?
Crimson Alliance :
:
? = I'm not familiar with it, need to investigate.
= She likes it!
= Not for her.
Nothing = Not tried.
For science, I will maintain this list as we progress toward Diablo 3. Or Neverwinter 3.
And for double science, I'll update it one last time post-D3 to note that TL2 is awesome.
Alternate H/A request: Someone make Neverwinter 3
Success! D3 grinding now counts as quality time. This is doubly good because with the baby coming "going out" will be a far less viable avenue of entertainment.
[Original Post]
I have been slowly grinding down my wife's resistance to nerddom for years, and I think it's time. I have determined that she'd enjoy the mechanics she would find in RPGs, it's just a question of finding the right one to introduce her to them.
I've got Neverwinter (all of them), but I think that might be too involved. I've got Dungeon Siege, but it's pretty boring. I was thinking Diablo II (then there will be no argument when D3 comes out...), but that might be too much, too soon. Corpse runs, inventory management, building up the wrong skill sets only to realize that they are complete shit and you're stuck with them; these are not fun things.
She really likes the Lego Harry Potter/Star Wars stuff. She likes the loot drops, unlocking those red brick powers, smashing up a bunch of bad guys, etc. So I think I'm looking for a bridge between those games and Diablo. Some co-op action/adventure game that introduces light RPG elements like skill progression (as opposed to unlocking red bricks) could be ideal, but I've been out of the loop on this stuff for years and I just don't know what's out there and I'll welcome any* suggestions you guys might have.
We've got the following platforms: 360, Wii, 2 PCs (LAN preferable, our ISP is flaky).
*No MMOs, please. I'd like to keep her.
[Edit]
Suggestions so far, ordered from Diablo to not Diablo
Diablo 3
Wife on being introduced to Diablo's replayability mechanics: "I'm not playing through a game a second time on a higher difficulty level just to get more loot. It's the same thing but harder, who cares?"
Wife after beating Diablo: "How do we start a Nightmare game?"
Ha!
Wife after beating Diablo: "How do we start a Nightmare game?"
Ha!
Diablo 2
Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
She liked it, picked up the skill tree no sweat. She even played it with a friend of hers when I wasn't around; something she hadn't considered doing before. D3 came out before we finished, so in my excitement I tabled TQ.
Torchlight II //Sacred 2 (Wiki required?)
Orcs Must Die 2
This was a great introduction to first-person controls. You don't have to aim that well, or at all depending on your load-out, and you can stand in one spot most of the time while you do it. She actually recommended this to her friends. Really likes it.
Magicka Picked this one up during the steam sale. Not for her, not really for me either. It's interesting, the dynamic magic system is conceptually intriguing, but the game itself didn't really hold my interest.
Fable IIIBorderlands (First Person Loot-fest)
Dungeon Siege 3 ?
Crimson Alliance
:
Diablo Lite. No skill tree, no leveling, but introduces the more intense combat situations and 3/4 perspective that Castle Crashers lacked. She loved it, tore that thing up in a week or so. Next up: Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, got it cheap on a steam sale a few weeks ago. It's basically Diablo with fancier graphics and respeccing; if she digs it I think we're gonna be cleared for launch on D3.
Castle Crashers :
This has been great. Colorful graphics, simple gameplay but there are some good skills to be learned. Combos, when best to cast which spells, Boss fight mechanics, crowd control. She's been picking them up like a pro as the difficulty gradually ramps up. There are some sections where you fight each other, not including Arena modes which are optional, but it breaks down like this:
98% Co-op.
2% Hitting your spouse in the face with an axe to win a kiss from a virtual princess
OR
2% Getting hit in the face with an axe to win a kiss from your princess: +1 to Spousing!
Lego Star Wars III 98% Co-op.
2% Hitting your spouse in the face with an axe to win a kiss from a virtual princess
OR
2% Getting hit in the face with an axe to win a kiss from your princess: +1 to Spousing!
? = I'm not familiar with it, need to investigate.
= She likes it! = Not for her.Nothing = Not tried.
For science, I will maintain this list as we progress toward Diablo 3. Or Neverwinter 3.
And for double science, I'll update it one last time post-D3 to note that TL2 is awesome.
Alternate H/A request: Someone make Neverwinter 3
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I don't know which one you have, but the third one is basically just killing mans, and getting loots, and death in coop isn't bad at all; and a player can play the whole game by just mashing the attack button.
Yep, he's got DS III. You just illustrated his point.
The first two DS games are much better, but if you buy them now, the multiplayer has been stripped out. So, no dice.
Also, you can respec in Diablo 2 now, they added that in a patch at some point.
Wow, thanks. She'll be all over that.
re: D2: I think she might take to it eventually, I just don't want to scare her off. We don't have that much time to play together, so I can see it going like this:
We get in a couple hours one Saturday, she dies a lot learning the mechanics, gets frustrated/embarrassed. She then stews on her defeat for a week before we can play again, and then wants to go back to Lego Whatever because she's good at that.
Re: DS3: I've got DS1 or 2, I'll investigate 3; but isn't that the one where the only the host gets to keep their stuff?
It's worse? Jesus. The boring comment was my friend-I -used-to-play-it-with's, who already felt like you just walked around and auto-attacked shit. (Magic was fun, I liked it
Spiral Knights (I haven't yet played) could fit the bill, too, and is free-to-play on Steam. It's more mico-transaction-centered, though.
I can relate that my ex used to always want to play games with me, but would get frustrated/annoyed when I ended up doing better at the game I had already put 30 hours into. In the end it was Castle Crashers that probably provided the best experience and longest life. And it's pretty cheap. And is, honestly, a really well done little beat 'em up with a good sense of humor and beautifully unique art.
It's much more action-oriented. I'm sure you can find videos of it, but I've had tons of fun with it, and I'm still playing it and having fun with it.
Also, Crimson Alliance just came out on XBLA. I haven't given the demo a try yet myself, but I hear some good things about it and it seems to fit the bill.
Torchlight II when it comes out soon, torchlight 1 lacks multiplayer, so chalk that.
magicka - revive spell is super simple, and you can both play on the same computer at the same time. Its always funny when you kill each other, very lighthearted game. Its kinda like castle crashers in several ways, except its much easier to kill yourself/allies.
Lego Star Wars?
Not sure if you're looking for PC though... I should probably... yeah, you are.
Never mind!
(no really, gladius is a shitton of fun and you should buy it and play it and rule the world.)
I'm not too good at the rpg things, and not very good at PC games. like at all. Although Alice was fun
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Results of your labors so far:
My day took a turn for the creepy when I got home, turned on the 360, and was subjected to a giant Castle Crashers ad in the Spotlight. Kismet, or grand conspiracy? I don't know, but I grabbed the demo.
She liked it! So begins the Nerdening
Put all suggestions so far in the OP, if only so I can keep track of the titles in the long term as we progress up the list. Always open to more, and many thanks to everyone thus far!
BORDERLANDS
play borderlands
No. You just get the cursor close to them, and it'll shoot them. There's no headshots or arm shots or anything like that. I think it does some other calculations so that even if you have the cursor on them, it doesn't always hit. I don't remember, and I'm sure someone else can fill you in on that, but it's not like that at all.
That's not to say it's a very hard game, though. If you're doing most sidequests, you'll stay out-leveled over the enemies for pretty much the entire first playthrough and not have much of a problem except with specific fights. Playthrough 2 and some of the DLC are more difficult.
You can play safe by keeping it on the bots and gradually ramping up the difficulty as she starts figuring out the mechanics. I'd really recommend Demigod, but that's the only one I've played
I'll fifth or whatever Borderlands tho. It's mega-fun.
How much of an RTS is Demigod in terms of: Base building / Unit management / Resource gathering ?
I have played the Spellforce series, if that makes a helpful RTS/RPG reference point.
Tales Of Symphonia on Gamecube at least has that.
I'm not a fan of JRPGs in general, but that's a good question. Using FF7 as an example: if you only had MP in combat, then that's way too much solo. Solo play should be the exception, like a level section where one person has to set off on their own, or if there's an NPC conversation system and only one person can control it.
Theres Final Fantasy XIV, you can get it for about $10 and it has no monthly fees either and is not PVP oriented, but group oriented. Though its still kind of "under construction" and may not tickle your fancy (I play it super casually/barely at all, while i wait for it to build up.) but it's cheap and you can put it down and go back to it any time.
It's to the point now where she's even played a few rounds of testing with me on Portal 2!
Castle Crashers I think has already been mentioned as well. There aren't really any RPG elements to it but my wife will also laugh and mess around with Dazzler on that Arcade version of the old X-Men game.
I tried playing Tales of Vesperia (360) like this with my ex who sounds a lot like the OP's wife. She actually bought it close to release because she thought it would be a good game for us to play together. The combat can be configured for two players, but my takeaway was that it was both 1) way too long and involved a game, and 2) the 2nd player, while in on the action, gets pretty bored for the often long non-combat sequences.
We continually had issues with the game changing the 2nd player's character and other such glitches. On a number of occasions we'd do something unrelated to character order which caused her character to drop out of the party or revert back to CPU control. I can see playing Tales of Vesperia (and I think the other Tales games are the sameish) with a friend who is a pretty hardcore RPG gamer for some fun, but for a casual player it's just too much RPG and too little co-op.
We ended up giving up on it after about 10-15 hours. It's a really, really long game and reminds me in spirit of the earlier, pre-VII Final Fantasy. That's to say that it's really Japanese and isn't very intuitive or enjoyable for a casual player who ends up not doing much when you actually play.
Yeah, I remember the multi-player being not fun at all. The game itself was great though.
The beginner controls are dead easy but the content difficulty ramps up fast enough that serious gamers will feel challenged.
Borderlands is a shooter with RPG bits attached, most of the time you're staring down the business end of a gun shooting waves of baddies.
Spiral Knights is Zelda with MMORPG mechanics on top (gear, levels, co-op and pvp). It is F2P so trying it out is easy. My problem with the game were the steep costs for playing a level and the reliance on cash shop items to get enough currency to play the game without worrying of being stuck at the end of a level without any options to continue.
Is co-op a prerequisite? Because there's a lot of great single-player RPGs that work far better as an intro to RPGs than the regular coop fair: Bastion The Witcher or the complete Bioware backlog (excluding Dragonage 2).
Torchlight is pleasant enough, but quite maddening wrt content past the final boss.
Someone said Diablo 2 would not be a good idea because it is too hardcore. I disagree: it can be hardcore if you play it like that, but it is perfectly possible to start a run on Normal, keeping in mind the best advice ever: "a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none" and build a character without a single trip to GameFAQs. Now whether your ladybird can stomach the aged graphics is another question entirely.
*but it's made by Microsoft! You wonder; surely Microsoft should be able to make their games run on all their operating systems? Nope, they don't bother with old games, on account of being idiots.
The first thing that helped me (and her) was having her play through a classic RPG. It shouldn't be anything too difficult or requiring a ton of min/maxing to beat, and it should also have a gripping story. A lot of the classic final fantasies are good examples of this.
However, after trying a lot of the suggestions I see in this thread (Borderlands, etc) without any luck, what finally got us playing together was Diablo 2. While it may seem complex to you or me, that's only because we've played it and we know all the systems underlying the game and how crazy it can get at high level play. However, for an introduction to multi-player games it's actually quite forgiving, and all of normal mode can be completed in a duo of any class + any class just fiddling around with skillpoints and not bothering to optimize anything. The only sore spot might be Duriel in Act II, but there are ways to get past that.
I don't know in what ways your wife differs from my girlfriend, but unless she's had experience with FPSs, I wouldn't recommend Borderlands as a starting point. Figuring out the Diablo 2 framework is enough work for someone new to the genre, but combining that with teaching someone how to aim with a mouse/controller and navigate a 3d world in first person mode is a recipe for headaches.
If you start with Diablo 2, by the time you're done with it, she'll understand the basic style and elements of the game, which means you could easily move on to a game like Borderlands, and she would then have a frame of reference to draw upon.
Either way, I urge you to, no matter what, have fun and be patient. Nothing will sour it faster than either one of you getting frustrated with the whole experience.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
Ocarina of Time - got me into consoles
On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - got me over my inexplicable aversion to PC games
Professor Layton - I just love me some puzzles, sounds like she does, too.
Also, I started dating into the gamer crowd shortly into my discovery of gaming. This placed me in the category of "gamer girlfriend" wherein I felt I was talked down to or ignored. It's a tough position to be in, trying to feel your way through things while everyone is thinking you're only in this for the relationship. My experience and the timing of all this led to me getting really defensive about not knowing things, so sometimes that made it difficult for my friends to explain a new game to me, or I would just close up and not ask questions for fear of sounding dumb. I guess what I'm trying to say is, when she starts playing whatever it is, you've got to be really sensitive to her reactions, and try not to condescend but also not to assume she knows everything either, and just be nice to her no matter what.
Pretty much zero. You control a single character, who walks around and kills things. S/he can shop for upgrades for your 'base' or magic items for himself. Resources is either via kills or holding territory. Not sure about the other DoTA alikes but I think they're all pretty similar.