I feel like FromSoft's games have a nice solution to this in that generally speaking, the world has basically already ended and you're fighting through the wreckage to try to pick it up again. Not a viable option for every story, though, of course
I would quite like to see a game in which the events play out both without a completely fixed schedule and without being within the player's control. If we take Skyrim as an example, since everyone already knows how that one works, imagine if:
Civil war battles happen whether you are there or not. You get some notice about them or can maybe even ride in at the last moment to turn the tide, but they're happening with or without you.
Your sidequests to win over jarls and find powerful artifacts stack the odds in your chosen side's favour. Intercepting the messenger on that one mission allows you to avert an otherwise guaranteed loss for your side.
Alduin is also doing stuff on his own schedule. If you leave him unchecked, one of your allied jarls might have their army decimated trying to hold off a dragon attack without you.
If you leave Alduin unchallenged long enough, jarls start defecting to the Dragon Cult and directing dragons with armies as backup towards your side, knowing that you are fighting for them and are the biggest threat on the board.
Leaving your civil war side unsupported means that Balgruuf won't agree to help trap Odahving. You then have to track down info about the portal to Sovngarde in an ancient scroll and take the long and arduous journey up the mountainside yourself on foot, leaving your civil war side without you for days on end
You'd need to make sure that the player has control over when these events start, but it already does gate dragons behind that first quest to defend Whiterun. You want to just mess about in caves for the first twenty hours, sure, go ahead.
Obviously Skyrim was never going to do this because it isn't trying to be that kind of game. It wanted to be a do anything go anywhere power fantasy, and that's fine. But I would like more games to do this sort of thing. I think some of Paradox's strategy games actually do quite a good job of creating this feeling, but the gameplay is completely different (and it only works until you get good enough to just break the mechanics in half for most of them)
If you want pausable combat and a logistics focus, the Hearts of Iron games might be interesting to you. They're pseudo-real-time in that things happen on an counter that ticks forward once per in-game hour of the day (so the results of two units fighting, a diplomatic message being sent, construction on a building), but you can speed up, slow down, or pause however you wish. If you want to zip along at a few seconds of real time per day in game, cool. Want to slow things down to a few seconds per in game hour instead? Also fine. Need to pause while you read a description? Also fine.
Paradox's games don't really do storytelling in a traditional sense. They're strategy and managememt games. Some of them are pretty damn good at creating stories dynamically through gameplay, or providing a frame upon which you can create your own stories, but they were never intended to be narrative experiences
Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it'd be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together
Each to their own! I really enjoyed V and have hundreds of hours in it, but I appreciated the changes in VI and felt like it vbecame a stronger game than V overall. I do have more hours in VI. I get that the art style was a little controversial, but I was never playing V for the visuals anyway
For Civ 6, I'd say winning each victory once. Try to do it with different civs each time too. You can set your goal as winning a game on the highest difficulty if you want, but personally I don't find that to be as interesting as the shift in gameplay necessary to win the different victories without just militarily crushing everyone else.
I really wanted to love ESO, and I'm delighted that they'e actually using the weirder lore sometimes, but it never felt like it rewarded my exploration. Like I never learned aything new about a place by finding stuff in it.
I was actually slightly put off by how tightly it looked like it was imitating the first couple of Wipeout games, like the UI being almost identical and a bunch of the teams being the Wipeout ones with the serial numbers filed off. Like they're unwilling to try their own ideas, you know? If it's so similar, well I can still play the old games. I assume you feel differently?
Wipeout. They can continue from Omega, it was great fun. Formula Fusion is a really cool spiritual successor by many of the original minds, but it's a little lacking in content.
Edit: lol, took me four hours to realise that continuing on after Omega rather ruins the title of that one