They have mentioned before that they gave up on episodic development, which tacitly ditches Episode 3. The episodes ended up not being that much easier or faster to make and in a time when PC games in retail was still kind of relevant, it was a pain to make, distribute, and get shelf space for.
You will need games that have crossplay between PC and Xbox One so you can play together across different platforms. Multiple people have suggested Left 4 Dead 2, but that doesn’t have crossplay. Most of the shooters I personally play don’t have it, but there definitely are shooters with crossplay.
Here are my recommendations that have crossplay:
Borderlands 3 — Collect wacky guns, travel the universe, and shoot bad guys together. The previous games in the series don’t have crossplay.
…Yeah, that’s it for crossplay shooters I recommend. For crossplay games that aren’t shooters:
Overcooked! All You Can Eat — Chaotic co-op cooking. Work together to prepare, cook, and serve food in increasingly absurd scenarios: in the middle of the highway, on an iceberg, in a hot air balloon that crashes into a different restaurant.
Ultimate Chicken Horse — Platformer where you build the levels together and then race to the finish. You only score if someone died, so you need to make the level extra dangerous.
Moving Out 2 — Goofy co-op game where your group plays as a ridiculously reckless moving company. Carry furniture from the house and shove or throw it into the truck. No one will notice if you break all the windows.
If everyone is on PC, things will open up a good bunch. Old-school networked games generally still work. You can go FFA deathmatch in your old favourites or in newer arena shooters, like Warsow or Disco Dodgeball.
I’ve been out of the RSS metagame for a long while, so I don’t have any particular recommendation. I’ve just been using Inoreader on mobile as well for the past several years since it works for my purposes. There very well could be better choices out there but there’s no urgency for me to switch.
If patch notes are announced in an official blog, it’s likely that it has an RSS or Atom feed. You can subscribe to the blog from an RSS reader and it’ll appear in the feed.
And if you haven’t heard of RSS readers before, welcome to the world of being able to subscribe to almost any website you want! The news and webcomics come to you, not the other way around.
Update: an example.
I open my reader (Inoreader), select “Add feed”, and enter https://www.teamfortress.com/. It detects the TF2 official blog and I select “Follow” to add it to my feeds. Now, when TF2 updates and patch notes are posted, I can refresh my reader to see the latest patch notes.
Honestly, my issue with it is that it gets mired in real MMO tedium when it didn’t need to simulate that. Stuff like running between NPC traders to trade your supplies up for good equipment and other stuff like having a gigantic pile of consumables.
And of course, I finish the final boss with all the best consumables still in my inventory. The game never pressed me to use them, so I always saved them for something more important. “Oh, that was the final boss. Guess I should have been eating more sandwiches.”
The plot and worldbuilding are still really cool. Just don’t get into MMOmaxxing.
I guess you’re looking to spend time with interesting characters.
Endearing party of playable characters:
Bug Fables — A big tiny adventure of three cute insects, with Paper Mario-inspired turn-based combat
Cassette Beasts — Creature-collecting with heart. You bring one of several interesting companions with you.
Moonlight Pulse — A metroidvania set on a planet-sized creature. You play as a team of planet-creature denizens fighting off a parasite infestation.
Encountering interesting NPCs:
A Short Hike — A very small but dense open world game. You encounter characters on your way to find a cell signal in a remote mountain park. With no quest tracker or minimap, you just wander and do what you want.
Inscryption — Card game with an immersive, spooky atmosphere. The game is hiding secrets from you, though, and you’ll meet plenty of shady characters before you can get the truth.
CrossCode — Action RPG set in a fictional VR MMO of the distant future. You wake up as a player character with no memories of real life, unable to log out. You quickly make friends, go do MMO stuff together and get to the bottom of why you’re stuck in-game.
Parasocial weirdness:
Hypnospace Outlaw — You are a janitor on a Geocities-like service in a simulated 1999 internet. You learn about all the users through their personal websites. This game expresses a large emotional range with just website updates (or the lack of them).
My guess is that expanding to a new country has some distribution challenges. Framework stated that was why they only shipped their laptops to a handful of countries at first.
I found this game during Next Fest and wishlisted it, but later removed it. It’s a concept that appeals to me, but my list is already long enough and I can’t realistically afford and play everything on it. The art style also doesn’t really land for me. I think cute + gore is a really fun contrast, but the way cute stuff looks in this game is too ugly for me. I guess I’m wishing too much for Happy Tree Friends as a game, which historically has had a poor record in games.