I've seen Thronefall recently and it looked really cool, but it also apparently has just a few hours of content. You might enjoy it as a chill experience tho
Have you played any of the modern incarnations of those games perhaps, and if so did you like them? I've been looking at Nebuchadnezzar for a while now but could never pull the trigger, seemed always kinda meh
I usually have similar stress playing management games but honestly, of all of them factorio really lets you do it at your own pace, especially if you torn off biter expansion. I'd often just say something like "ok this afternoon I'm redesigning the oil refineries because they are a mess" while everything else is just standing by waiting for me. Ticking these things off one by one is kind of the main attraction of games like these tbh
Some people here are blaming paradox but honestly, I don't envy any game releasing in this period. We've had so many great (and expensive games) in the past few months but even if that weren't the case, personally I'm not willing to pay 50€ for something that looks like a blander XCOM game (or 65€ if you want the special additional character, bleugh).
Then again maybe I'm just not the diehard fan and their target audience, the only game of theirs I played was shadorun many years ago and I wasn't interested in battletech either. If I were in a mood for a turn based game I know I'd sooner pick up BG3 since their price is relatively close...
I disagree, with or without taking bugs into consideration. It was a great experience and if you liked the base game you'll probably like the expansion too, if you didn't like the base game then you won't.
Dotage just released, it's a relaxing boardgame / city builder made by a single guy over the span of 9 years. It's very addicting in that "one more turn" way, if you're into these types of resource management games.
I think something like what modern Deus Ex games had is a perfect balance of 1st and 3rd person camera. Most of the exploration, sneaking and shooting is first person but whenever you enter cover or shimmy along the walls, you get a 3rd person camera so you can see and aim better. It's both practical and immersive IMHO. Takedowns were kinda bad since it took you into a basically cutscene every time but if done differently, more seamlessly, i'd be a good fit for cp2077.
Also I wouldn't mind 1st person camera in vehicles at all if it was actually good, but it feels like I'm driving from the back seat, FOV was just terrible. And that's coming from someone who enjoyed doing GTAV heists in first person mode...
When I say opening / beginning I don't mean the 20 minutes of prologue, I mean the first ~5 hours of game showing new mechanics and worlds to you, making the illusion that there's lot of unique fun content to do. Eventually it all started to look like same formulaic shallow crap to me and the game didn't live up to that initial impression of freedom, exploration and progression, it's half baked in everything.
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you're interested in. I've really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I'm not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you're just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain't me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead
Distribution is getting easier and cheaper, the available talented workforce is larger than ever, tools are getting better and faster with every day and despite "no large increase in costs", the gaming industry has grown to be one of the largest and most profitable industries in the entire world and everyone wants a piece of that cake.
$60 is fine and anything above that is pure greed.
Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I'm afraid you are wrong in this regard and we're going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it's going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I'm pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there's no way I'm paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
That's why I was excited about the online partffew years ago - imagine gtav but in night city, backed by CDPR? If done well it's be printing money for them and guarantee constant updates and improvements for us. Unfortunately it just wasn't meant to be it seems :/