Quetzalcutlass

"Humans are the greatest polluters, so those death squads we hired in Colombia to kill union leaders were just us contributing to the environment!"

Accounts. They've been at this for months.

Now I want to go back and play through Mass Effect again. There are so few games where you can set your friends up with each other. It's usually "the player shacks up with one and the others remain all alone".

Yeah, I can't remember any either. I just assumed they were characters I never talked to since the game has so damn many good ones.

If you pick it up, know that it has a huge modding scene that makes an already great game even better. I can recommend a few basic QoL mods if you want, though the 9.0 update is coming soon and will probably break most of them for a while.

Also, the base game has some arbitrary mechanics meant purely to punish the player so veterans can't steamroll the NPC factions too quickly, at the expense of making the new player experience harder. There's a list of these mechanics (and links to mods that reduce/remove them) here.

Admittedly I'm in the middle of a playthrough and currently deeply enamored with the game, but I've enjoyed Enshrouded much more than Valheim (which I also loved, to be clear). I'll probably start noticing all the flaws I've been ignoring soon, but right now it feels like Valheim, but more. More recipes, more enemies, more options for farming and better animal tames, much better combat, a building system that doesn't drive me crazy, and a hand-built world that is vastly superior to the samey procgen of Valheim.

The comparison to the Elder Scrolls is much less flattering, admittedly. It's only in the world design and exploration that I'd put Enshrouded ahead, and even then I bet many players would be annoyed by just how much Enshrouded uses verticality in its map (which I love, but I'll admit it makes overland travel a pain).

The entire world being one map so a hole in the internal walls of a dungeon could lead directly outside is a massive step up from Bethesda's engine where dungeons are basically their own separate universe. I just completed the Blackmire tower the other day, a dungeon that had the branches of a giant tree punching through its sides and forcing you to take alternate routes. I fell all the way to ground level several times but still had a blast exploring the place.

I'm not super far in. I have three characters* that are all around the same point, at or just after the boss fight at the end of Pike's Reach. It's possible the rest of the game lacks the same polish the early areas have.

* One created when the game first entered Early Access, one for co-op, one newly created to see all they changed in the opening hours.

That's fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.

Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It's actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They're the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.

One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They're funded entirely by expansion packs now.

Wow, most of them were even older than I'd thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.

~~(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)~~ Already fixed, never mind!

True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later revealed it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.

F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.

I'd honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.

Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it's carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you'd only spend a tiny bit more (with that 'bit more' often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with 'pity' systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it's obscenely profitable, I don't foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.