So up until very recently, the monster hunter games had a theme of living in balance with the environment and monsters were only hunted to help control manageable numbers or if some had gone out of control. Then they were apparently specifically told to tone down their environmental messaging to appeal to a wider audience.

It helps to understand some of the deeper lore, but AW2 does a good job of letting you know the important bits so it’s not necessary to have played the first one.

I believe the things you are calling out are an integral part of the ARPG genre so there isn’t going to be much change to the core without fundamentally changing the game you’re playing. Plenty of people enjoy the wanton clicky destruction and seeing numbers rise, just look how popular stuff like cookie clicker is.

Have you tried monster hunter? (Or god eater or wild hearts) Those games sound a lot like what you’re describing. At its heart the core gameplay is ‘Hunt monsters to gather parts to make better gear to hunt more powerful monsters’

Instead of mowing down tones of small things though, you take down a single large and dangerous foe. As you progress, new and more powerful foes appear, but despite the large roster of monsters, they all feel unique. And while better gear certainly helps, a good deal of skill is also required.

Wait, the three mile island thing wasn’t a joke?

Kerbal space program 2 was somehow both rushed and delayed :(

I don’t know if I’m opposed to store exclusives exactly, but epic was paying out the nose to drive people to their store that didn’t even have a shopping cart.

They launched a store without a feature every online store has had for decades

I tried bazzite and nobara which are both the big gaming distros. Bazzite worked the best but I had a ton of just weird little issues with stuff randomly not working unless I restarted it. I don’t have much to say about nobara because I couldn’t actually get steam to work for some reason.

I went back to mint and honestly it’s been the smoothest and easiest to use distro, plus it has a larger user base so it’s easier to find help.

Oh…so I dug further, and apparently the only in-house game to their name is a blade runner title that’s still in development.

Annapurna was both, this article is saying that the development side broke off from the publishing side.

I was so looking forward to this game because the aestetic was so cool…and then I played, and it was a buggy always online mess with a convoluted crafting system. So disappointing.

I’m probably in the minority here but the realistic style is the least of my issues with the movie. I’ve only played modded minecraft and shaders give it that weird realistic look too lol

Yeah…I was dual booting to test mint, then accidentally wiped my windows drive when I tried out bazzite and went ‘welp, guess this is my life now’ and haven’t gone back to windows lol

I guess way back when microsoft said than win10 would be the last version of windows, what the meant was it would be the last anyone wants to use.

My computers at work are on win 11 and good god, almost every time I log in I have to reset all my Taskbar setting (left instead of goddam CENTER, minimize the search bar, unpin the bullshit, only combine when full) and the most egregious issue of all is win11 doesn’t let you reposition the task bar anymore!

An emoji burger

Interesting, it hasn’t been big enough an issue for me to get around to investigating yet but that might be the reason my my wifi speeds are lower than expected, stability hasn’t been an issue though.

So far I’ve really only played the Alters. It seems like an interesting blend of base/resource/personnel managment with some exploration and base building, plus the story seems pretty neat so I’m probably gonna pick it up when it releases.

I think, also if I recall both games were genre defining

Typically valve only puts out games that showcase something new, so might be interesting