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I am not saying microsoft hasn’t dipped their toes in to pc gaming but for a company of that size that is really the most you can say of their efforts compared to the immense solidity, staying power and loyalty pc gaming embued in windows for younger people growing up with computers (not saying this category of people liked windows just that they valued it).
This is ALL gone and microsoft is about to figure out that while business tools are their main industry the supposedly impenetrable moat they thought that gave them was far more a byproduct of a generation of nerds growing up pooring time into windows before they ever even entered the workforce than it was a dynamic of their dominance in corporate business software.
Whoopsie!
What I miss about Morrowind was how unconcerned it was with being weird as fuck, it isn’t that Oblivion or Skyrim are bad it is just they feel like they got a crew cut and a Linkedin and I am like no!?! why did you sterilize all the most interesting parts of yourself!? … even though I know why, it was a career decision.
next get drunk and play oblivion while listening to young scrolls
https://youngscrolls.bandcamp.com/
how about starting with Star by Adoring Fan?
I think for me this weirdness is most obvious with books, the best novels that change you, stick in your memory and make you see the world differently are never 10/10s because that would mean they simply fulfilled the expectations you had before picking the book up.
A 10/10 novel is still awesome but it is more of a comfort food experience which while wonderful isn’t the same kind of experience.
Beyond All Reason is the kind of rts that makes you realize chasing after Starcraft style gameplay (when Total Annihilation presented a totally different and arguably more approachable experience with shift clicking and less obsessive micro) was a fatal error for the broad popularity of the rts genre.
A competitive rts hyper focused on apm and units that move in artificial and uninteresting ways (especially airplanes) was never going to inspire a new generation of rts fans with diverse interests and brain types to dip their toes in instead of leading to a narrower and more constrained vision of what rts games are and what kind of brain types can suceed at them.
BAR is both a living breathing cryptid (descended from the ancient TA itself) that somehow survived the great RTS extinction event and also paradoxically a vision of the future of RTS games.
Not the answers you are looking for but I feel like the vibes you want are best met by games like…
webfishing
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3146520/WEBFISHING/
no man’s sky
the nerd.nu pve minecraft server (for shared public spaces made by players that feel real and actually social). Very long running with no lame autoteleport so player made rail, roads and nether roads create emergent highways and gathering spots in a meaningful way that is exceedingly rare for open world multiplayer
or doing logi jobs in Foxhole
Let AAA die.
I don’t give a shit generally about AAA games but the value of having large stable game development studios goes beyond the direct games they create, this is a crucial stepping stone for would be indie game development studio founders detonated and destroyed and mark my words the collapse of stable, consistent employment in the game development industry will play right into a brutal deleveraging of worker’s negotiating power and lead to further consolidation in the industry around AAA studios that have to try less and less hard (and pay their developers less and less) because very few indie studios will be able to weather these manufactured and designed shocks to the system.
This is the same old strategy cut throat robber barons/capitalist oligarchs always use to steal from workers.
Hey, make sure you get a balanced diet of board sports though.
You got your downhill longboarding racing with Driftwood
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2223700/Driftwood/
and your realistic, park/trick focused realistic snowboarding with Shredders
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1874170/Shredders/
All part of a healthy breakfast
For me it is loading up Xonotic to strafe jump around and blast bots. The movement in Xonotic is hypnotic, and while I usually play in short bursts I don’t think I will ever get bored of returning over and over again to learn the nuances and creative opportunities of combat and movement in Xonotic. All it takes is the first strafe jump to put a stupid smile on my face.
Also I love open world driving games and Motortown is my jam. I do urgent taxi jobs and just let my mind relax as I drive like a complete madman. The tire grip and burnout mechanics along with the vehicle handling in general is the best I have tried in any game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/
The pathetic thing is games of the ilk of balatro and luck be a landlord (also OG peggle) are actually the kind of game that plays with your gambling impulses but in a healthy and fun way, these games should be celebrated for subverting the language of gambling to make something beautiful, how pathetic to have so little actual understanding of video games and yet have this kind of power to impact the industry.
Beyond All Reason is one of my favorite games ever, here is a good beginner tutorial
Here is an example of what high level play looks like.
They won’t, indie gaming will pick up some of the slack but we are witnessing the end of a golden era in game development.
Also I could care less about the AAA studios themselves. What is tragic is that without AAA studios the stepstones for advancing in a career of game development has become an order of magnitude farther apart and less realistic (especially if you have a family or something and need some amount of consistency).
They aren’t exclusive entities when you consider the careers of game developers who may have otherwise been able to leverage the stability and opportunities that came from working for a large company to advance their career and eventually create successful indie game studios themselves. This is ultimately bad for indie game development though I understand the schadenfreude.
Xonotic is from a different reality were competitive movement shooters never died! It is the active fork of what used to be called Nexuiz.
Xonotic runs on the darkplaces engine, it isn’t just stylistically of the arena shooter era it is directly descended from quake and the lot.
Playerbase is small but consistent, Xonotic is very easy to download game (it is on several linux repos for one) so there are always new people wandering in and a solid community of veterans.
High level competitive gameplay is absolutely wild!
Xonotic “defrag” is a community of people who just strafe jump race, Xonotic is very popular for that given the buttery dream-like highspeed movement.
(beginner tip the blaster is your best friend, you always spawn with it and it massively elevates movement in Xonotic)
One of the cheat codes for xbox ghost recon did that, the genius came from how terrifying the chicken sounds were post explosion audio slow-mo fx. The xm24 grenade launcher hybrid gun became a portal straight to foul hell.
The cheat is listed here, it is the best kind of cheat though in that it isn’t really a cheat at all, just an invitation to laugh about a gag that is waaaay more funny than it has any right to be.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/516717-tom-clancys-ghost-recon/cheats
I am not trying to argue this isn’t also true too, my argument is that the fediverse doesn’t have a marketing department so the framework of discussion around the fediverse in mass media will always be fit to whatever the most convenient narrative is for the corporate tech world which will always be the fediverse is an obscure nerdy diy thing like ham radio or something.
That isn’t to say the fediverse doesn’t also have existential accessibility issues on multiple dimensions.
In the near term of course bluesky will, it has hype, it has rich tech people on it, it has 10s of millions of investment it can throw at stuff.
This is not how Mastodon or the Fediverse grows, our growth is real, not based on hyped and marketing. People come and stay here because it is a nice place, not because it is a popular or exciting new hangout spot that all the rich cool people are going to.
Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
I think the bigger problem is that the tech press starts from the perspective that Mastodon and the Fediverse is just for techie nerds and then fills out the narrative with supporting details and so unless those narratives are challenged Mastodon and the Fediverse will never be for normal people because the Tech press and the money behind it won’t let that narrative stick in the general public’s minds.
“Chasing live-service and open-world elements diluted BioWare’s focus”
Lol gotta love the narrative framing here that carefully tries to avoid coming out and saying why Bioware might have been so focused on monetization and blindly following trends and buzzwords. You would think if the experienced artists and developers had any actual agency, power or true belonging with respect to the corpse of the game studio Bioware, the studio would never have pivoted this way in a million years.
Life does not return to a body that has had its spine extracted and heart ripped out. Of course there is always a little bit of cash to be made on selling people on the possibility that it might happen, especially if you push that story in interviews with gaming press, but the point of buying Bioware was to enshittify it. Extracting the spine and ripping the heart out was always the plan.
Yeah lots of recommendations here but let me give you some that I think answer your request more specifically.
Wizard Of Legend is a top down roguelite where you play a wizard that can equip different spells and upgrades. The combat and strategy is very focused on spells and how good you are at slinging them between dodging enemy attacks.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/445980/?snr=1_5_9__412
Margoq’s Lair is a top down roguelike where spells are cast by composing them from elements, for example fire + shield casts the spell fireshield. It makes for a much more satisfying experience than pressing a button to cast a spell.
Yeah I think a lot of “gamers”/programming type people actually would look down on most of what farming really is and it is the reason there are so few genuine farming games.
Stardew valley is actually a farming game in both mechanics and spirit. If you think the puzzle of growing your factorio farming machine bigger and bigger is the only interesting or desirable experience of running a farm you categorically don’t understand.
Personally I haven’t managed to get into stardew valley myself but I respect the hell out of it.
The slightly less boring answer is an Xbox series x/s controller with an armor x pro or just the armor x strikepack.
The “strikepack” slots into the battery door slot and has a usb-c rechargeable 1300mah battery, four programmable rear buttons, and the ability to function as an xbox, playstation or switch controller.
The pro version also has a gyroscope input for playstation and switch controller modes or can be set to convert onboard gyro to joystick input (with lots of manual settings you can tweak if needed) so you can use gyro to aim or steer in games that don’t support it/xbox.
My only gripe is the usb dongle needs decent line of sight with the controller.
https://shop.bigbigwon.com/products/bigbigwon-armorx-pro-wireless-back-button-for-xbox-series-x-s-controller