What is a good multiplayer game that is both (almost) endlessly replayable AND with less grinding as possible?
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My interpretation of your request boils down to “what’s a good co-op roguelike” where the grinding is the replaying.
So, depending on how many players you need it to support and preferred genres, you might check out games like
- Risk of Rain 2
- Enter the Gungeon
- Children of Morta
- Vampire Survivors
- Streets of Rogue
- Gunfire Reborn
- Barony
There’s also a game called Jumpship that i’m keeping an eye on the development of that’s supposed to be hitting early access in the coming months.
Unreal Tournament 99.
I’ve spent countless hours in the 2004 version
When you ask for something without ‘grind’ I have to ask if you know what you are asking. Grind is entirely subjective. It’s not a mechanism of a game but rather what happens when you personally don’t find a game mechanism fun/rewarding.
Take classic examples, like mining in… most games, really. It’s smacking a rock. It doesn’t have much variety. For some people, they love their own little game of ‘hit the rocks in the most efficient way,’ or they like to relax with music and bust rocks, or they feel like every rock is a loot box. Other people hate it for being too complex to automate and too simple to feel engaged.The difference between ‘grind’ and an ‘endlessly replayable part of the game’ is how the player looks at it. You are asking for ‘the drug to which you will never build a tolerance.’
Fighting games:
- Endlessly replayable because there’s always more to learn.
- No grinding because there’s nothing to grind.
I play FF XIV online. There’s as much or as little grinding as you want there to be. I’m in a really chill social FC.
Can you advance in the game without any grinding?
Yes, they give you the gear you need to make it each step of the way through the story.
Crafting and gathering are optional. Relic weapons are optional.
There are some players who like to role play. There are casuals, hardcore, and everything in between.
Deep Rock Galactic!
- Works just fine with anywhere from 1-4 players
- You can have a mix of friends and random players if you want a full team but don’t have a group of four to play with
- The game is strictly cooperative so there’s no incentive to screw each other over, fostering a generally good multiplayer culture
- There’s lots of stuff to unlock but none of it is necessary for a fun and functional build
- Teamwork is encouraged and effective
- Missions are randomly generated but you’ve got years of additions to the random pools for lots of variety
- Absolutely no pay to win stuff
- There’s cosmetic DLC, but there are still absolutely loads of great cosmetic options in the base game
Edit: also, rock and stone
Works just fine with anywhere from 1-4 players
Madding can get it up to 8 without issue and 24 with extreme lag and instability.
I’ve played it, but it has become a bit of a grind. The only reason for doing mission has become unlocking stuff
I had issues with grind as well since the unlocks system required every single person to start at the same time and not play alone, as everyone had the same missions.
Personally I’ve always just played the game to play it. I only ever cared about a few of the cosmetics and have long since unlocked everything just as a sort of byproduct. …The vanilla gameloop can definitely get repetitive and stale, so I play a lot of modded games these days.
Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.
I guess it counts because you are not grinding, the factories are grinding for you. The problem is that it’s a niche game and not many of my friends would play it
Its a wildly popular niche game for good reason.
It’s the defacto automation game, and can get pretty wildly funny with multiplayer co-op. Players slot into niches and ted to focus on building out X or Y and when these things meet can be hilarious.
It also has a versus mode where you race to build bases on a shared map and kill your opponents first.
What do you want? Lots of games fit that description.
In some shooters, you basically only grind for cosmetics, like Overwatch, Marvel Rivals or Counter-Strike. Dota 2 is a Moba and also only has cosmetic unlocks, I think.
Maybe Minecraft or Terraria? I don’t think you really grind in these games, but you do very similar stuff all the time.
These are the features that I want to avoid: grinding for resources, cosmetics, and anything that require repetitive and/or mindless action. Any genre is good, the question is more like a test to see if a game like this can exist
No cosmetics pretty much disqualifies almost every game, because all of them have it, even old games.
In my comment before, I probably wouldn’t describe cosmetics as a grind. You just unlock stuff on the side, as a bonus, since most of it is random. It’s not like you’re going to play a thousand games of Ursa in Dota to unlock some rare skin.
