Consider valve's lasting legacy and primary method of monetizing their games. (It was always about the hats)

Shroud (and folks like me) with 200+ hours found the fun. The quest design in starfield has extreme lows, but it has some extreme highs that are probably helped if you watched the shows and films the quests are referencing. The faction questlines are stellar the first time through.

If you just hate all quests and only care about gameplay outside of that, you should probably admit that to yourself instead of flinging buzzwords and design guesses around. Bethesda open worlds have always felt surprisingly dead, closest they've got is morrowind and oblivion with almost every npc having a domicile and a daily routine. Their open worlds have been panned as being empty, too quest-locked, too small (or artificially large), poorly balanced, and any number of other complaints that they're trash/slop/unplayable.

We've heard this take (new game bad, old game good) for the entirety of video games existing across basically every genre. If you don't like it, cool. It's a game where you assign your own goals after a point (or even from the get-go) so ultimately it's on you to find a satisfying gameplay loop. It's okay if you can't, but it says something about you and not the title, especially when you turn into a goblin who can't stand the fun or joy of others on public spaces

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. "we'd be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that's what they were going for." They are MAKING THEM it's VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven't played Last Epoch and don't know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you're making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn't got much stuff to "distract" you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you're slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you're looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you're thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

In high school, I took some time to read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". The title is as edgy as I was as a teen, but the advice is wholesome and sound, the core being one of the first few rules the book prescribes: Take a genuine interest in people. It's a solid set of rules that help beyond masking behaviors and can even act as masking itself, even if it could do with some more up to date examples.

I saw your reply and regret to inform you the other folks are right, I'm no gamergater and the context isn't even right. Woke is a descriptor that causes me to buy a game. "Core" referred to gamers that were willing to grind, basically; it was a useful demographic for describing players and I don't really know what has replaced it.

Not that odd. Seems like a decade and change ago it became common knowledge that market-tested, sanitized content wasn't really resonating with "core gamers", but we don't even call the demographic that anymore. Not really sure how we got here

Unfortunately not how nicotine works

E:D doesn't really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I'm doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don't have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I'll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

MRI machines do explode and send shrapnel everywhere. Emergency stopping them causes the helium that's trapped in the part that rotates the magnets to become a gas, then expand as the magnets superheat. In some cases, this causes an understandable explosion.

Seriously happened once already this year https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-resonance-imaging-mri/mri-explosion-leaves-3-injured-including-2-hospital-staffers , the cop is lucky.

For bedrock, yes, absolutely. Bedrock used to be lauded for its performance across multiple machines and it now runs like trash on every one with the most egregious storefront in gaming. You can spend 20 extra USD on bedrock to get a single mod-equivalent data pack. You can spend that much or more on minecraft skins that won't work outside of bedrock. Minecoins as a premium currency targeted toward children are one of the worst examples of robbing a low information userbase in gaming all around, it has reached unbelievable levels.

As for as storefronts go, which is what's being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn't prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.

The browser war has been long and bloody, but here's a current battle.

https://fosspost.org/google-slowdown-firefox-users-when-watching-youtube