M$ monopolizes swathes of the game industry (and several other computer related areas) while Sony monopolizes nearly everything else media related. This is NOT how market competition is supposed to happen.
BTW, Gotcha Gotcha Games is the owner of RPG Maker and Pixel Game Maker, make of that what you will.
If you like space games, X3 and X4 can probably eat up lots and lots of your time. Space Engineers if you’re less interested in flying, space economics and creating a supply chain (which X lets you) and more in gathering materials and creating all sorts of weird, funny or actually amazing stuff. SE is probably better played with at least 1 other person, possibly more, while X is exclusively single player.
Grand Strategy games can also obliterate your free time. Civilization 5, any Total War game. Hell, Age of Empires 2 can have very long matches if you play on huge maps and people have loved that game for over 20 years.
You can also go for Fallout 4 or Skyrim with extra content mods, like dungeons, quests or areas.
Personally, I’m just past 400h on Palworld, so I’d recommend it as well. I’ve played from start to “finish” some 4 times by now. Official servers will be wiped sometime in December, possibly with a new patch arriving, but you can always play single player and even invite a friend to play on your local save and never lose progress (unless the save gets corrupted, which can happen).
And considering Bethesda’s track record, we will get a buggy mess 2 years from now. I mean, just compare the list of shit the Unofficial Skyrim Patch fixes that Bethesda hasn’t addressed in 13 fucking years
Their “open arms” has felt like a vampiric embrace for almost a decade now, because they would really, really, really prefer if modders released stuff via their club, where modders can get money and they also get a slice for free.
The bigger PC names of the 90s and early 2000s were all welcoming to modding, with some games shipping with the “official editor tools” for anyone to mess around with (UT99 and Warcraft 3 come to mind)
Oblivion’s leveling didn’t change from Morrowind, it also had that flaw that could really fuck you up if you didn’t optimize getting extra points in the minor skills before the major skills.
I enjoy that Skyrim made leveling up simply a matter of gaining X points across skills, but how they ditched the attributes and went for +10 on one of Health, Stamina or Magicka made it feel kinda dumb.
It’s all this bland uniform container of “content” with nothing making any of it stand out.
The big irony here is that they could damn well make weights for the procgen to create spots with dense “habitation” and others with zero points of interest. But nope, just generate a map, plop down 5-8 POI, call it a day. The “big cities” like New Atlantis stand out in the worst way possible, a small square of buildings surrounded by absolutely fucking nothing. They effectively copied the worst aspects of No Man’s Sky
Pirated ones, probably, though I doubt anyone other than the dear leader is allowed to play, because “western propaganda”. Not like you’d have many people in there with a good PC anyway. Or even electricity.
Speaking of satanic panic, the biggest irony are those that denounce stuff like the Diablo or Doom series. You know, games were the player’s job is to literally destroy the forces of actual hell. Maybe killing demons with swords and shotguns is sinful?