I don’t play a wide variety of games anymore, I find one I like & play the bejebus out of it. After something like 11 or 12 years of WoW, gave that up & a year or so later bought a new PC to catch up on the years of first-person or third-person shooters my 10-year-old PC could not run.
Ran through a few on-rails single player FPS mostly to see the pretty graphics (like CoD:WWII, Zombie Army 4, & Strange Brigade), then ended up spending ~18 months playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands. That game really struck a chord with me, and I eventually finished it in regular and perma-death mode. (I still play a couple hours a week to try and get the last 16 items of the 500+ available from the free crates, and I still love long-range sniping in it, 500m+. Tried Breakpoint and The Division since I bought them on sale at some point, but didn’t care for those (Breakpoint is such a dead world compared to Wildlands, and I don’t like the upgrade system Ubisoft put in The Division 1 - which they had to patch around in Breakpoint when Wildlands players recoiled in horror).
Finally Wildlands was left aside as I began playing Red Dead Online as a single-player game because of Tom. Usually literally single-player now, using the RDO Lobby Manager mod (if your friends have the mod installed, you can set up a password & play together, but nobody else can join). When Rockstar announced they were ending updates for the game, the use of cheat menus got completely out of control on PC, and the most expensive tiers of the cheat menus ($125 or more) can literally crash everyone in a lobby to the desktop. Interestingly, there are some persistent bugs in the game that Rockstar will never fix, but are fixed by forcing the game into a private lobby, so they are almost certainly linked to Rockstar’s horrible peer-to-peer multiplayer system.
Still playing RDO daily, but close to hitting my personal goal of buying every available item. The bastards at Rockstar never put the “Coats” or “Accessories” categories on sale though, and many of those require a substantial amount of Gold (the real cash currency, which you can earn in game very slowly). There are no unlockable items after level 100 but you keep earning XP, and I just hit level 648 today (you do get a Treasure Map every five levels, and the chests have an average of about 1 gold bar & $150 in them). I just enjoy playing the fattest, oldest gunslinger the game would let me make, cruising around the incredibly beautiful virtual 1898 world Rockstar created, at my whim causing or getting out of trouble, saving those in distress, skirting or supporting the law as needed, serving up frontier justice in the form of hot lead or a lasso, and hunting various game (I swear RDO is a better hunting sim than most hunting sims).
I work in a bit of few other shooter/sims (“Gunner, HEAT, PC!”, Ground Branch, and Ready or Not), but I’ve realized I’m doomed to always play alone. That knocks out a lot of games that would benefit from co-op. (I call it “The Pacific Time Gaming Curse.” Less than 20% of the US population lives west of about El Paso, TX, so finding guilds/teams/posses who start playing at 8pm-9pm in Pacific Time like me has proven virtually impossible in every game.)
So soon I will need another solo-play compatible open-world shooter, and I am turning to the Great Sages for advice. I learned to quit buying things during Steam sales, but I still am looking at a years-old backlog there. Plus, playing basically one game a year really builds up surplus cash in the ol’ gaming budget if I want to buy something new.
Games I’ve considered that are in my Steam library are Far Cry 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim (I have the Special Edition, but not the Anniversary Update), though I’d prefer something with gunpowder weapons. Should I pick up Far Cry: Giancarlo Edition, or maybe Rust? I thought about Sea of Thieves, but as a solo player it sounds like I’d be getting my ass kicked a lot, and some content is impossible alone.
All suggestions for the next 12-18 months of my gaming life are appreciated!