I think you're looking for Wasteland. They shared a lot of DNA already, and they've got different senses of humor, but Wasteland still has a black comedy angle.
It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)
Nah. I remain hopeful that this is a market correction against live service investment. Devs will be hurt in the interim, but think about how something like Redfall happened. The suits said they had to make a live service game at Arkane. Arkane devs had no passion for that. 70% of the studio left, leaving Redfall's development to inexperienced new hires that replaced them, and they essentially set those development funds on fire making that game that no one wanted to spend money on. Sega made Hyenas for $70M, their most expensive project to date, and decided it was better to just not release it than to continue to run infrastructure to enable it. A similar story to Hyenas over at Sony, where they cut their live service portfolio down from 12 games to 6, seeing that the well had run dry. There have been a lot of these bets made, and they've been big bets, with the assumption that they'd see all the success that their predecessors in live service games had, without realizing that there aren't enough customers out there for you to be lucky enough to capture that success from when they're busy playing other games.
So what do all of these devs make instead? Video games that people actually want to play and spend money on, that can be made with budgets they can afford.
Even without any cynicism, I think the government was more interested in there being tighter competition among cell carriers than they were with the people who will lose their jobs in a merger. With all due respect to those who fall on tough times as a result of that kind of merger, it's a more short term and small scale problem than there being fewer viable competitors in an important sector of the market.
You're right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn't complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn't comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.
I'm a fairweather Pokemon fan at best, but I'm with you on Temtem for the same reason; many people don't have the same reservations as you and I, so I thought I'd mention it. I think Cassette Beasts is that game and reviewed well, and to ignore it might be to ignore exactly the game you're asking for, but I'd also point you toward the "creature collector" tag on Steam. I've never heard of Coromon before doing that search to leave this reply, but mousing over it for a second shows a video that proves they know what they're making (87% positive Steam reviews). Same goes for Nexomon: Extinction (92% positive). No one will know what you're looking for better than you, but people have been making games inspired by Pokemon for a long time now.
Off the top of my head, there's Temtem and Cassette Beasts that try to mimic the formula more closely, and then there are a bunch of "Pokemon but _____" takes on the formula that you can find with a quick Google. This is "Pokemon but <survival game>". Last I heard, Ark didn't let you assign dinosaurs to a factory or have some of the more RPG systems like boss fights, but quite frankly, I found Ark so obtuse that I didn't play for long.
A character action game is something like God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Hi-Fi Rush. Combo-based, juggle-based, score chasers, but different than the rhythm-based combat in Batman: Arkham or Spider-Man.
I had the same reaction to God of War, with reverence for the combat in those other games you listed as well. Do you typically enjoy character action games? They all kind of felt the same to me, and I couldn't really get into the combat in them even though I ought to be into it on paper. Then Hi-Fi Rush came along and made that genre make sense to me. Now I've gone back through most of the Devil May Cry series and plan on giving God of War another shot when I find the time.
I've been playing a ton of Pillars of Eternity still. I think I can wrap up Kana's quest before I head into Act 3. I've got a lot of irons in the fire of my quest log that look like I need to advance the plot or level up more to finish them, so Act 3 is maybe when they intended for me to finish those.
Heh, maybe I'm splitting hairs, but if you want a game "like Pokemon", they've been making exactly that game for 30 years, but there's only a handful of games in the ballpark of Bloodborne. If you want the fantasy of roaming a world, catching creatures, and battling with them, there are lots of ways to skin that cat that GameFreak and Nintendo haven't been doing that aren't at odds with preserving those core pieces. Likewise, I don't enjoy Monster Hunter, but some of its core pieces are present in the likes of Horizon and Mercenary Kings, and I love those games for taking the high level parts of Monster Hunter that do work for me.