Suggest me games

Black Desert Online

Only in the capacity that you want it to be. No monthly cost.

Borderlands 2 is what I thought of immediately after you said being able to solo stuff that was previously only MP. Game has raid mobs that can be soloed if you get good enough gear.

As far as I know though there isn't any PvP.

Ratchet and Clank

Warframe is an older free to play game, but it kinda fits some of your requirements. I've only recently started playing this so I don't know everything about the game. It's a third person shooter where you collect warframes and weapons. You can think of warframes as classes because each frame has different abilities, statistics and purposes. The grind is in farming components for each warframe and weapon. There are also companions but I'm not that far into the game. The game is free to play so you can buy almost anything off the store or you can farm materials for them in game. I'm pretty sure the only thing you can't farm in game are slots for warframes and weapons. So if you want to farm many warframes you'll just have to pay for the slots. They give you some starter currency that you can use to unlock several at the beginning.

Game play is a 3rd person shooter with parkour, double jump, a powered high jump and some other moves I'm forgetting. It's definitely Mass Effect 3 multiplayer inspired but where ME3 was restrictive in movement Warframe is fluid. You can play coop or single player.

The story is you're a lost race of space ninjas doing space ninja things like saving the solar system.

In summary:
Persistent character growth & collection: Farm weapons and warframes.
Challenge: Unknown for me. I don't know how difficult the end game can get.
Bonus. Has coop and maybe PvP but I haven't tried it.

Available on PC and consoles but no cross play.

Ill give another +1 to Warframe. Reading the things you want out of a game Im not sure you could have described pretty much everything that Warframe is any better. It's a fantastic game from a smallish studio that wont cost you a dime to play and will provide dozens or even hundreds (if you're a super min-maxer) of hours of playtime. Sukik covered the main points and you should definitely give it a try. It's a prettier experience on the PC, plus patches and content come a whole lot quicker than they do on the consoles but regardless of where you play it's a pretty damn fine game. Ive put a couple hundred hours onto it on the PS4 and still go back to it regularly to see the newer content.

you could try final fantasy 14 too if you love that anime kinda look, it has a lot of grinding but you do need to be online to play so dunno how realistic that is for your travel schedule. would play really well on a surface pro, I imagine

Path of Exile

you might be into that pokemon shit too, apparently you collect hundreds per game

There is not a lot of action combat games of quality in general. And there is virtually no titles that I can think of equivalent to monster hunter. If you like challenging games, and you like action combat. There are multiple Devil May Cry games on steam. SSS ranking them is of a sufficiently decent video game challenge. They do not have animation locked action combat like MH/DS. There is a lot of opportunity for high skill cap fun, and the games have increasingly harder difficulties. Both Bayonetta games are combat system incredible. I lament the fact there is no monster hunter game on PC of its quality in the west. I'm quite sure all my friends would get into it if it wasn't only on a hand held or Nintendo systems. No idea if the old Ninja Gaiden games are able to be emulated, they are also extremely hard relative to the standard fair and quite enjoyable action games.

Hateyou_sl said:

You may like dragons dogma. You WILL like the witcher 3.

Click to expand...

Fixed that for you.