The thing that would speak against ARM are the recent sightings of new AMD based APUs from Valve on benchmark sites. Unless that is the next thing over and they are actually now ready with Deckard/Frame.
To combat the ramble-y-ness of your posts you should try to add more paragraphs. That makes it easier for your readers to take a short pause while reading.
For the topic at hand, I basically don’t play any multiplayer games precisely because it is too much work to keep up with the current meta. It seems to me that often enough what the game teaches you in the tutorial is not what you have to do in the real thing to succeed.
Add to that that many people don’t even pay attention to the good things of tutorials and you get a horde of brainless people just doing the bare minimum to pass by.
As to why they play ranked, at least to me ranked play comes with the promise of match making. That you get paired up with players of a similar skill. In theory that should give you a 50% win rate. I’d play ranked exactly so that I get lumped in with players who are as bad as me.
I’d make it depend on the length. Expedition 33 is shorter. So if you want an experience that you can finish quickly you should choose that. If you want to spend weeks to months on a game choose BG3.
Both are great. Maybe play E33 first and go to BG3 after that.
I’m playing Lost Records: Bloom & Rage and am desperately waiting for the story to get interesting. It is an extremely slow burn. And with some fake outs I kind of lose hope of it ever getting interesting.
And I kinda hate the dialogue system. You can basically move around while talking and look at stuff and sometimes have a limited amount of time to chime in. Which is fine from a realism standpoint but somehow it doesn’t make the dialogue feel more realistic. Pair that up with some dialogue choices requiring you to be standing on certain spots and looking at certain things makes it much too stressful for a game that should be more like a relaxing point and click adventure.
Also, the security manager sold his shares right before making the public statement about banning Schlepp. Isn’t insider trading even more illegal than child slavery?
A bit late to the thread, but I wanted to add the Gothic games to the mix. They don’t hold your hand and are relatively grounded in reality (within their fantasy world). Controls are a bit janky and the English voices as well. If you can, you should play in the original German or Polish. The Witcher series was heavily influenced by Gothic, especially Gothic 2.
If they are too old for you, the Remake is slated for early 2026. A demo is available on Steam and GOG and should give you a pretty good overview of the atmosphere and the way the games work.
Just stay away from Gothic 4: Arcania. Totally different studio with none of the charme.