Steam Summer Sale: what should I get

[endoperez]

Dragon Age: Origins has a PEGI rating of 18 ( Extreme violence - Multiple, motiveless killing - Violence towards defenceless people - Sexual violence ) and ESRB rating of M ( Blood, Intense Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content ).
XCOM: Enemy Unknown also has ratings of 18 and M. XCOM 2 only has ratings of 16 and T, it looks like they downscaled from "extreme violence" (PEGI) / "blood and gore" (ESRB) to "realistic looking violence" and "blood" respectively. I think one of the biggest changes was that when you see your researchers cut open alien bodies, the first one shows the buzzsaw, the second one hides it just outside your view. However, XCOM 2 still has close-up killshots, shows war as a brutal thing from the loser's side, etc. Definitely not something I'd recommend to someone who wants to enjoy a game in the summer, at least not without knowing their tastes.

So that's a no.

If you like the setting, I'd actually recommend you go further back and get Daggerfall; I think it's a much better game than Oblivion (I haven't played Skyrim yet), though it definitely is much worse graphically, plus it has some bugs (save often, especially before getting a quest!). The game environment is huge, the game is essentially open-ended, and the main quest line can be resolved in several different ways (definitely an advantage over Oblivion, which has only 1 successful way to resolve the main plot, and that way is unfortunately lame).

EDIT: Oh, and Daggerfall is available for free IIRC.

Sorry, but no. Daggerfall is extremely difficult to get into, too much of its content is random-generated by early 90s algorithms that suck, the random generation causes all sorts of headaches such as not having enough time to actually complete quests, it's ugly by today's standards, by Oblivion's standards, by year 2000s standards, and arguably even by 1996's standards because the early 3D / pseudo-3D is less aesthetically pleasing than the sprite-based graphics that had already been largely perfected at the time. Baldur's Gate has aged much more gracefully, for example and so have Chrono Trigger, sprite based Final Fantasy games, etc.

I'm not saying that Daggerfall is a bad game for 1996, or a bad game today. However, even putting graphics aside, it's a MS-Dos era game with all the baggage than entails, including problems with installation, getting it to run, getting it to run at modern resolutions, clunky interface, UI wasting way too much of the screen space, etc.

Daggerfall may be an interesting game to try, but for a person looking for an experience similar to Skyrim, Oblivion is hands down the better choice. Even if Daggerfall were objectively a better game than Oblivion (and I personally didn't like Daggerfall), I'd still recommend Oblivion, because it's a better experience for anyone who isn't already familiar with 90s games.



Sorry for being a party pooper, but I just can't agree with these recommendations for someone underage who wants something like Skyrim.