Sierra adventure games, like King’s Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn’t know, so you don’t get it and then several hours later when you’re at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can’t. Because you didn’t get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.
If you ever used the server browser in Steam itself and not from the game, that’s basically what they were. An external app that you could get a list of servers for pretty much anything you added to it.
My ideal Star Trek game would be a first-person immersive sim where I can just be a random citizen in the galaxy and just… Live there. Maybe I join Star Fleet. Maybe I join the Marquis. Or I could be a Klingon or a Borg, or one of the Dominion’s warrior slave dudes addicted to drugs.
Starfield. Kinda. It’s not sucking me in like literally every other Bethesda RPG has. I find myself playing for only like 1-2 hours at a time, and having fun while doing so but also just kinda not sure what I really want to do, because everything I know I want to try is locked behind some high tier skills, so I’m just trying to level up to do that shit and often just wander aimlessly looking for a quest that is more than just under a minute of my time to complete. I’ve done 3 semi-major quest lines so far (UC Vanguard, Freestar Rangers, and Ryujin) and they were pretty short for faction quests.
There have been digital tabletop tools that allow you to play any game for so long, that are free, I don’t see how they would ever really get anyone on board with a subscription service to do the same thing.
I use a couple myself with my group. They have some premium features like access to tilesets; but they also allow importing an image to use so it’s not like I feel compelled to subscribe.
Dwarf Fortress mostly doesn’t have unique gameplay mechanics or anything; but the Legends viewer certainly is a unique feature, due to how all the systems work together to weave randomly generated stories and history of the world through the entire world generation process. So even though you didn’t play the game through all those years, the game still kept track of everything going on while simulating the world creation and you can go through it and see all the battles, conflicts, migrations, rise and fall of civilizations, deaths of monsters, etc.
I mean I still play it on a modern system mostly unmodded (I do minor QOL mods like adding/moving fast travel points to limit loading screens but nothing super fancy or specifically for performance). Still on windows 10, though. I get no performance issues, though crashing is still a worry. It’s not like every 30 minutes tho, like when it was new 🤣