Took me about 5 hours to get through the winter intro story that is linear before it gets to being the open world. Not sure if that was slow or not, but it was a bit longer than I would have preferred.
Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.
Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won’t be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.
Some games are challenges that many people feel as completed when they finish it. For me, that would be Portal. The storytelling through the setting was great, but the main focus was the puzzles which aren’t as fun the second time through. Portal 2 has a great story that makes it fun to replay, but that doesn’t mean Portal was a bad game because it didn’t have a story line worth replaying. Plus Portal 2 had the additional custom puzzles that made it worth playing outside of the story itself.
Being an unfun challenge is definitely the sign of a bad game., or at least a bad match for the player. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think Dark Souls/Elden Rings are bad games because of the frustration factor, some only play it once to get the satisfaction of beating it, and there are people who play through it over and over again.
Tekken 8 didn’t have an early access that I am aware of, and I have given a Not Recommended review on steam because of the shop being added post release. The Tekken situation is not an early access problem, just a greed problem so I might have caused some confusion as an example of games having sketchy behavior even without early access.
Multiversus is free to play with predatory monitization. The beta was free, but you actually got stuff by playing a somewhat reasonable amount of time. During the beta they increased the amount of time and people complained, so it was kind of surprising that they did the opposite of the early access feedback on release.
WoW did set out to be massively popular with a gameplay style that encouraged daily play.
PUBG lucked into the popularity by getting the scale and pacing correct for a large audience.
Both also seemed to benefit from server issues causing an ‘exclusive’ thing that means people lined up to get in during peak hours. Popularity can breed popularity, especially when the games are fun.