Prepping, still, for a DnD campaign. Pulling all the stops, with music (ripped from Cyberpunk 2077 and looped), art (done by me), branching narratives when my players do something unexpected, custom homebrew mechanics (it’s cyberpunk red ported into 5e, so as best as it can be ported), etc. I really want to start it soon but I have to migrate all the stuff I had made on a foundry server to my computer, and that’ll take time since I’m cleaning it up as I go.

Apart from that, killing bugs and heretics on Space Marine 2, killing bugs and heretics on Rimworld, and killing imperialists and fascists on Squad.

Lady butterfly. Died 47 times against her. I’d always dodged instead of parry in soulslikes, and she kicked my ass over it.

Squad, Rimworld, WH40K: Rogue Trader, Another Crab’s Treasure, and Valheim and Baldur’s Gate 3 with friends.

"> capitalists need their heights shortened

FTFY

Yeah, lot of em moved on to make Weird West, as Wolf-Eye Studios.

It’s a good game if an out-there im-sim is what you want.

Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.

I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.

I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.

Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.

You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.

Gives me the ick.

EpicLoot might also be good, if OP’s kids are keen to grind components.

Not FPS, but Valheim is plenty fun. Also, zomboid, but that ones a bit more violent

Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in prep for the new game. I had forgotten how much grind the game requires, honestly. I’ve been Mage 1-11, MArcher 6, Ranger 6, Sorc 30-40 or so, and my magic score is still low as hell. I’m purposefully delaying meeting the duke because I really want to give MArcher a try in the post-game, and it feels like I’ve already played for a long time but sheesh, levelling up is slow. I had never focused on building for stats, honestly. I know now though that most of your damage comes from your gear, so I might quit levelling Sorc when I reach 450 magic instead of the 600.

Hope it’s a little faster in the second entry.

Apart from that, trying the Nordic Souls modpack for Skyrim, and Helldivers 2.

IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They’ve realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there’s no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.

Unless leadership resigns I won’t expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.

Right, forgot about that one. Never played it.

Fr. The only other game that comes close is Terraria. Both have only improved as the years have gone by.

Wish SV was my cup of tea.

I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).

True, but that was before mtx became the name of the game. Nowadays when a game has a multiplayer component with no bells and whistles and just works, it’s an outlier.

Honestly, I prefer this, as long as the single player option is unaffected by the multiplayer component’s performance, and the resources allotted to the SP game don’t suffer because of the MP.

Oh, I had no idea it was open source. I’ll take a look, at the very least. Thanks for the rec!

BG3 and Halo: Infinite with friends, Doom: Eternal, Crusader Kings III and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous solo.

I’ve seen it mentioned, but havent tried it.

Ditto on what others have said. Hours/price is a lousy metric because nowadays lots of games have some pretty toxic mechanics that incentivize sticking with a boring experience (New World, Assassin’s Creed, etc.), inflating how much time you’d spend in a game that should be much shorter.

Games I’ve paid full price and I don’t regret: Rimworld, Baldur’s Gate III, Wasteland 2, Doom 2016, Celeste, Project Zomboid.