Preferably in the high fantasy or sci fi genre.
I enjoy playing games like Chronotrigger, Tales of Symphonia, Witcher 3 (easiest difficulty), Mass Effect (in Story mode), Outer Worlds (in Story mode), etc.
Basically, story first, mechanics second. What’s your fav?
Disco Elysium
As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.
The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.
Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.
The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.
Isn’t combat just so boring? While none of the games you mentioned are familiar to me, story focused games are my main interest. My personal favorite is definitely The Wink and Kiss Part 2 for Neverwinter Nights. Its an adult romance damsel in distress bard’s tale in which there’s almost always a social solution. Whenever combat is apparently unavoidable even the nicest and most harmless character can prevail with the help of her friends! Still though, it is all based on the 3rd edition of DND, so don’t expect things to be easy!
If an old DND game doesn’t interest you, then perhaps consider The Sims 1. Its one of the best selling role-playing games of all time. The Sims is just so awesome it doesn’t even need combat to be creepy, scary, and hard! Right now that’s the game capturing all of my spare time.
There is also a really good visual-novel with enough different paths to cross over into similar territory: Cinders! Its a contemplative retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale which focuses on the player character’s own agency and freedom in an oppressive world. Perhaps its best described as being a game about the true meaning of freedom and independence.
Since you’ve already received many excellent suggestions in this thread by now you hopefully won’t mind these more unusual options. Have fun with which ever game you choose and good luck!
I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!
The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)
Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.
Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU
The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs
Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE
Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M
There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo
You sound a lot like me, and probably get annoyed with a lot of grindy mechanics. Especially when you have limited time to play games.
Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes will really scratch that Chronotrigger itch.
Outer Wilds is also incredible (don’t read spoilers, just go in blind). It’s mini space exploration with cartoon-arcadey newtonian physics.
Sword & Sworcery is also great, and a good point-and-click adventure with an amazing soundtrack. I’d almost argue it’s better on a tablet or largeish phone through. It’s very touch input focused, which is OK with a mouse, but I think is better with a finger (as intended)
Others I enjoy :
- Kentucky Route Zero (point and click with a wild vibe)
- Firewatch (walking Sim with pretty low poly art)
- Dishonored 1 & 2 (gritty fps with stealth and magic)
- Inside (short puzzle platformer)
- Abzu (undersea exploration, relatively chill, but I never completed it)
- The Invincible (more recent than the rest, a very pretty walking sim in a retro-future sci-fi setting (Stanislaw Lem) that kept me pretty engrossed and occasionally worried)
- Horizon: Zero Dawn. (Absolutely adored this world and story. Story mode combat was good, but I just used cheats for a lot of the basic pickup/crafting stuff. Yes, I can take 30 minutes to run around and gather basic materials, but I don’t have that kind of time irl.)
visual novels: Digimon survive, Danganronpa
On the topic of Visual Novels: I’d like to recommend basically everything from Winter Wolves Games that is tagged as RPG. The classic is of course Loren the Amazon Princess, but, to be honest, their writing has improved since then, so you might want to check out their newer Tales of Aravorn games, like Seasons of the Wolf. Also, Loren is really long, so if you don’t have a ton of time, the newer, shorter games might be a better choice.
A word of warning though, by Winter Wolves themselves: https://mastodon.social/@winterwolves/111588943770965424
Cloudpunk is nice, although it’s more of a “walking simulator” than a fully-fledged RPG. It’s a cyberpunk-ish indie game in which you’re a delivery driver, although with a flying car and a sentient dog.
