After around 16,000 hours, I’ve found WoW to be a lot more fun playing with others than just restricting myself to open world and full-PUG content. The last expansion was decent (story was a bit meh, but gameplay was great) and the current expansion has been okay so far. I just hope they can get balancing right on events going forward, since it’s getting tiring seeing them create a massive artificial grind then walk back on it a week or two later.

After playing for 2000 hours, this one is an easy recommendation from me, too. The game was quite light on endgame content at release, but due to the design of the game, now the vast majority of the game occurs at ‘endgame’ and can be very fun. I love how I can come back after a couple of years, buy access to any content I missed in the meantime and have a character that doesn’t need to grind levels or gear, just jump straight into story mode and get caught up on the story. Even better when you don’t have to worry about making your playtime feel like it needs to be ‘worth it’, since you don’t need to pay monthly to play.

It comes from the publishers in the 90s. They needed an easy way to tell stores/distributors how popular they thought each of their games would be, to help them decide how many of a certain title the distributor should order. The games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”. That then lead to more and more games being marked as AAA due to budgets getting increased, and the whole system became a bit redundant.

Looks like Palia with hobbits. Personally I’m not too impressed, but maybe it’ll find its niche.

As someone who’s played a lot of GW2 over the past couple of years, I can confirm that it’s still fantastic. It doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of content that WoW gets, but it’s on a good cadance these days and outside of buying expansions, is absolutely playable without spending a penny.

Helium Rain launched a few years ago as a commercial game with an open source launcher (BSD-3), and as of a few weeks ago the game became free on Steam. The developer is no longer maintaining it, but there’s still a small community that are interested in it.