I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Almost every MMORPG. They start off fun and then the fun becomes grind - tedious quests, upkeep, travel time, hp recovery, crafting, rare spawns, penalties & debuffs for death.
My first experience of all this was Everquest. I quit because Verant screwed up a series of expansion launches leading to crashes and downtime and I questioned why I was playing this thing and realised it hadn't been fun for a long time. But pretty much every MMO is the same.
Not strictly an mmo but the original Guildwars might be fun for you, it's a lot more story focused and if you can find people playing it is fun to find groups in
I've tried so many times to get into MMORPGs. But there's just something about them I can't really explain... now that I'm in my 40s, I'm a little sad I don't enjoy playing them with my brother and friends I barely see.
They're either designed to make you spend real-world money for upgrades, or to take a long time to do anything make you pay for a monthly subscription.
In both cases it's the same problem - mechanics designed to extract additional money from players rather than to serve the game.
not all of them - Guild Wars 2 operates on a buy-to-play basis for its yearly expansions - you buy it once and have access to that content as long as the game is alive
it does have a premium currency store, but it's all stuff you can do without - mostly cosmetics and a few QoL tools, but the game also lets you convert ingame currency to the premium one (over 11 years of casual play I apparently bought almost 2k GBP worth of stuff without ever spending an actual penny on the store)