What are some alternative to soulless videogame franchises?
What I mean is... sometimes people are very loyal to a videogame franchise or a company because they loved a game they released years ago (Silent Hill/Konami with Silent Hill 2, Blizzard/Bethesda with their respective golden eras, some could argue this happens too with Pokémon and Final Fantasy, etc). Ethical/consumer reasons aside to stop supporting certain companies, sometimes some franchises/companies aren't necessarily creating the best examples of games of those specific genres anymore, yet many fans are loyal to them (and a chunk of them also seem to suffer/complain with every new release).
Meanwhile some people that explore less known titles and different niches occasionally pop-up and say stuff like "the last Pokémon games are formulaic and uninspired, there's actually this and that incredible examples of somewhat recent monster collecting games" or "the last FF wasn't actually bad but if you want turn-based RPGs that'll remind you of your old favorite FFs then check Chained Echoes or whatever" or "don't look for something like Silent Hill 2 with Konami, instead I recommend these survival horror games".
So the idea of this thread is for people to recommend alternatives to franchises. Especially if they're standalone instead of other alternative franchises and especially if they're indie (since most of my enjoyment these last few years has been from indies like Roadwarden, Citizen Sleeper, Darkest Dungeon, Celeste, Slay the Spire, Tacoma, Hellblade).
For ARPGs if you feel burnt by Diablo IV, I can recommend Path of Exile. Arguably the king of the genre today.
Others mentioned Grim Dawn, which has a bit slower gameplay, but a good choice nonetheless.
If you're looking for indie ARPG, then there's Chronicon. Nice little game that I really want to go back to again.
Path of exile is great because it doesn't shy away from complexity at all, instead it does the exact opposite, it just goes balls deep. It really make for a very refreshing change to typical AAA games where your intelligence as a player doesn't feel insulted.
I second Grim Dawn as it's clearly labor of love from the developers and still getting updates. I also like the fact that its not live service like Path of exile meaning that it does not require online connection and can be even be modded.
It remains to be seen with GGG will do with Path of Exile 1 when they release Path of Exile 2, it would be cool if they would release something like POE Unlimited a premium version of the game that would allow people to play the first game as single player experience, mod it and host their of servers.
But in this day and age it's much more likely that they'll just force people to move on to their next big thing.
They already said that PoE 1 will stay playable.
Sure but for how long and in what state?
There's a lot of enshittification going around with games and services with more greedy business practices and it would be naive to think GGG is immune to it. When it comes to live service games certain level of skepticism is healthy to have. Now I do hope we'll be able to play POE1 even 10 or 20 years from now with it being just as good.
An arpg that doesn't require online is actually a negative for me. I'm not going to farm content offline
To Each Their Own I guess. Single player games tend to respect players time a lot more and thus usually require a lot less grinding or farming to complete. That being said Grim Dawn does have online multiplayer and community hosted seasons.