I'm replaying Fallout 3 for the first time since launch and it is blowing my mind how much I underappreciated this game the first time I played it. Things that felt unforgivably janky on my first playthrough now feel charming, which is pretty surprising to me.
I was definitely a lib when I first played and didn't fully appreciate a lot of the story elements. Not to say that the politics of Fallout are uniformly "good" but they're so much better than most games. It definitely has a lib streak (the way it handles the "sneaky" Chinese etc.) but it also has some incredible moments where it manages to break out of lib brain.
There are so many little things about Fallout 3 I didn't appreciate the first time that now are making me say "holy shit this game is special". Both gameplay and story wise.
I think it was actually playing through Disco Elysium that set the stage for me to finally appreciate how good Fallout 3 really is. I had never really connected with a PC style RPG before that. I was always a JRPG guy where dialog trees and whatnot are not a thing. I guess what I'm saying is that Disco Elysium was so good it made me appreciate an entire genre of games like I never have before.
I could ramble about this Fallout shit forever - I have had so many "WTF THIS IS AWESOME" moments on this playthrough.
Any of y'all have similar experiences where you had to beat your head against a game for a while before it made sense?
Most high-end builds involve wiping out entire screens with a single skill. There's not much room for nuance or complexity. Much of the satisfaction comes from taking some bizarre build concept and making it work.
This is true for mapping, but for killing bosses some skills definitely play very differently and have mechanical complexity. Damage over time skills only require you to inflict the DoT once, then keep debuffing the boss occasionally to optimize damage. Other types of builds require different amounts of balancing your DPS versus staying in safe areas to avoid attacks. Ideally in PoE melee skills have very high damage with low uptime, so a melee character should be playing very dynamically, getting close to the boss when it does weak attacks or attacks that are easy to dodge, then quickly avoiding telegraphed moves. In practice though melee tends to be about the same damage (or worse) than ranged playstyles, with extra risk. Then there are spells that take time to cast or ramp up (especially channeled ones), so it offers a risk vs reward scenario where you may want to keep ramping up your damage from Blade Vortex or similar skills by casting them more, or you may just want to run. I think those things make the game much more fun, even if the main appeal is designing character builds and trying to work out how to get them geared up and working.
I agree with all that and I didn't mean to sound like I was ragging on the game. Also, in spite of countless hours invested, I've never quite hit the big time, mostly because I'd rather play what I enjoy than the most mechanically effective FotM builds.
And while bosses are the exclusive source for many items, it can be argued that it's about as profitable in the long term to run a mindless map farming build. That's not the same as fully engaging with the game, but it's a POV which makes up a large part of the discourse on any given build's "effectiveness."