Postby rmsgrey » Wed Mar 28, 2018 12:59 am UTC
I'll throw in Terraria (I'm currently at 354 hours played on Steam, with 84/88 achievements) - it's kinda a 2D side-on Minecraft with a bit more action-adventure. You start out with some very basic equipment - sword, pickaxe, axe - and a nearby NPC (the "Guide") - and have until nightfall to arrange shelter - during the day, near the spawn point, things are safe enough - the only enemies you're going to encounter without exploring are Slimes - and they ignore you until you attack them (they still deal damage if they hit you) - but at night hostile enemies spawn and unless you're very good at combat, you'll want to have somewhere to hide from them. Once you start exploring, you'll start coming across regions that aren't safe even by daylight - on the surface, there are jungles, deserts, snowfields, a dungeon with a cursed guardian, and the corruption (or, in 25% of generated worlds, the crimson) - an actively evil biome with lethal pits and aggressive hostile flying enemies that can make short work of the unskilled, unwary, or unprepared. Go far enough to either side, and you'll reach the ocean that bounds the world in both directions - complete with sharks. Heading up, the upper skies are home to flying predators that make the sharks look like a picnic, but there are also floating sky islands with exotic treasures - and eventually you approach the edge of space and gravity starts fading (giving you a significantly increased jump height and safe fall distance). You can also explore below the surface, either through natural caves and crevasses, or by wielding your trusty pickaxe. Below the surface is all sorts of interesting loot - including unique gear. Delve too deep, and, again, things get significantly more dangerous, with granite and marble caves, dangerous spider caves, more lethal flora and fauna in the jungle caverns, vast subterranean bee hives, and other unfamiliar biomes. Keep heading down, and you reach a layer where pockets and pools of lava block your progress, and ultimately reach the underworld - a world-spanning cavern, with vast lakes of lava, the most lethal regular foes, ancient structures with exceptionally valuable treasures, and the prized hellstone, which can enable you to craft the strongest gear for this stage of the game - though even if you could find your way down there, you couldn't mine it with your starting pickaxe.
Meanwhile, you can use the many blocks and other items you can gather, including 4 tiers of metal ores and various kinds of wood from cutting down the local trees in various surface biomes to craft and build - some things you can craft with your bare hands, but most things require appropriate furniture items - a workbench for basic items, a furnace to turn metal ore into metal bars, an anvil to turn metal bars into tools, weapons and armour, a loom to turn cobwebs into silk, and much more. You'll also want to build a village - to get any more NPCs than the original Guide (or to get a replacement Guide if the original dies somehow), you'll need to provide places for them to live before they'll join your world - as you progress through the game, more NPCs will unlock either through you finding them out in the world, or through meeting certain conditions like having a certain amount of gold, or increasing your maximum life, or finding/crafting a certain class of item...
There's also a significant amount of world progression in the game. To start, you can't mine anything harder than gold; a gold pickaxe can mine the evil ore, and the resulting pickaxe can mine hellstone, but needs additional items only available from bosses in order to craft it. As you pass various milestones, events will start to unlock, like the Blood Moon - where more and nastier enemies spawn during the night, including some that can batter open doors. There are several bosses that trigger from various things too - defeating one of them unlocks access to the dungeon; another drops the items needed to craft the evil pickaxe (and evil armour) you'll need in order to mine hellstone. Then there's the underworld boss - the Wall of Flesh - once you trigger and defeat that, the world enters "hardmode" - a group of new biomes known as "hallowed" appear, a chunk of the world gets converted to the evil biome(s), and both types of biome will spread through most types of block, meaning, if you do nothing, eventually the world will be an uneasy mix of the two, with only the underworld and sky untouched. New ore types also spawn, which are tiered, with multiple new pickaxes needed in order to be able to mine them all. All biomes except the underworld get new, tougher enemies, and new bosses become available. Defeating mechanical versions of three pre-hardmode bosses unlocks a boss in the depths of the jungle, defeating that unlocks a dungeon buried within the jungle, containing a boss chamber. Defeating that boss, in turn, finally unlocks the endgame, where defeating yet another boss summons 4 stationary bosses across the surface, each of which creates its own temporary biome. Defeating all of them summons the ultimate boss, a tough fight but which drops some unique goodies (making defeating him a second time significantly easier). Any boss that has been fought can be resummoned, either by repeating the default summoning method, or by crafting and using a consumable boss-summoning item.
And there's variation built in too - not only are worlds randomly generated, but the evil biome has two variations (each with its corresponding boss), each tier of metal ore has an alternate variant, with all of them chosen at random (pre-hardmode ores and flavour of evil during worldgen; hardmode ores when first spawned), there are some rare/unique features which only have a chance of being generated in a given world, and some items only available in chests won't necessarily spawn in every world.
And initial customisation - worlds can be 3 preset sizes, and can be regular or "expert" (enemies and bosses are harder, but drop better loot, and death penalties are harsher), while characters can be created with 3 different tiers of death penalty - from dropping a percentage of your carried money on death, through dropping all carried items, to permadeath. Once generated, a given character can be used in any world, keeping their current inventory and any permanent upgrades (there's one expert-mode upgrade that only functions in expert-mode worlds, and various boss-summoning items only work in worlds where the boss's prerequisites have been met) allowing for a kind of new game plus, or for the creation of "farm worlds" - throwaway worlds created solely for the purpose of looting them of rare items.
And, while I haven't played with it much, there's also a fairly robust wiring system, letting you create various large-scale contraptions once you unlock the relevant NPC (if you don't make use of it yourself, you will also encounter some very basic examples in the form of traps deep underground - a pressure switch connected to either a dart trap, or a boulder trap - the switches are visible if you're paying attention, and have enough light, or if you wield any mechanism, you can see wiring, which is a dead giveaway). It's no Factorio, but people have built very basic working computers.
