Funny you say that, Daggerfall is fondly remembered but only in spite of it's procedurally generated overworld. Daggerfall's openworld is extraordinarily barren, remarkably so. You literally will get lost if you walk more than 5 minutes from a town, and not in a fun way but because every direction you look is literally the exact same three tree and rock sprites and you lose sense of direction. Daggerfall's overworld is so bare and empty and large it actively encourages you to engage in the fast travel system with fleshed out gameplay mechanics like camping supplies and vehicles.

Same here,

Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don't write or produce proper "reviews" anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot... I don't know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5

Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because... of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer's tilt.

The Pillars and Pathfinder games are both relatively daunting in terms of world size and, at least for Pathfinder, the rules are much more gritty... remember Pathfinder is a spin-off of DnD 3.5e and sticks relatively closely to that. While BG3 is based on the much more "friendly" DnD 5e rules. Pathfinder is much closer to BG2 than BG3 is, gameplay wise.

The big differences between BG3 and the other modern CRPGs is that BG3 does an exceptional job at presenting unprecedented player choice in traversal and combat. Other games have dialogue skill checks and all that but traversing the world is flat, literally practically menu driven and combat is all measurements and numbers. BG3 has free-form qualities that, in the world of video games, have so far only been utilized in immersive sims like Deus Ex and, oddly enough, I'd say the modern 3D Zeldas.

There's not a game I prefer on the Switch over the Deck but I do think both systems have their merits. I've played through Zelda TotK on Switch recently and play my Deck more often (lately a lot of BG3)

The Deck is honking huge, while the switch is small. I much prefer the size of the Deck to the Switch but there's a an easy argument to be made there for portability.

The Switch is just more dock-friendly. Any serious Switch owner (who would care about docking) owns a Pro Controller. Docking to and undocking from a TV just works perfectly 100% of the time. You can buy a dock for the Steam Deck and you could Bluetooth a controller but it's definitely more finicky - specifically with some games especially.

Multi-person household. I have a wife and a kid. I'm very fortunate and my wife has her own Deck but we do share a Switch and a PS5. There were dozens of times I would have played Zelda or FF16 but my wife was using the console so I settled with my Deck. I could easily see the opposite happening if we didn't each own our own Steamdeck

I don't have an exact answer for you but I can 100% confirm it works through Heroic.

Switch to desktop, install heroic launcher, install BG3 with default options to internal SSD, launch with Proton Experimental, it will say you need .net so accept the dialogue and download the exe, use Heroic to install the .net exe to the game's prefix, go to the configuration again and add --skip-launcher (two hyphens at the beginning) to the launch commands.

That's it, I did that and ran the game from desktop and then used heroic to add it to Steam. Now I launch the game straight through Game Mode. I also added Heroic as a non-steam game so I can launch it occasionally for patches.

Skipping the launcher is important, as is installing the correct .net exe. I've read that some folks had the game claim to be installed but then realized it never actually completed successfully because they ran out of disk space during the final step. It's a very large install. I also read a one-off comment that power tools can break it, if you have that installed through decky loader.

They're called management sims, or in the case of Factorio a factory builder.

Rimworld is a colony management sim... check out Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included for similar games

Rollercoaster Tycoon is a theme park management sim, the obvious suggestions are Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo but also check out City Skylines.

Factorio is a factory builder, I would recommend Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, there's a few handfuls of those types of games. If you want to get a little wild look into Minecraft mods - most easily something like the FTB Infinity Evolved or one of the new Direwolf packs, it's where the craze started.

Maybe not my favorite game but one of the very few games I truly felt required pen and paper were some of the old Might & Magic games - most notably I think of the first 3 games.

Those were first person dungeon crawling RPGs. They didn't have, what later became termed "automaps", but what is now just a in-game map. So if you wanted to look at a map you had to either buy real life books they sold called Cluebooks which had maps printed in them or you had to pull out the graphing paper and get to drawing.

It wasn't just a limitation of the time, the games back then honestly treated it like a feature. I think it was in M&M3 that you could eventually cast the spell "Wizard Eye" and the entire point of the spell was to present to you a minimap of the surrounding area. NPCs and quests didn't put icons on your map (there was no map), you were given directions and had to figure out how to get there.

I tend to lean the same way, with a kid and busy job I just don't have enough time to finish long games. Hearing something like FF16 is not 80 hours makes me happy.

That being said, I also lean toward sandbox games as I get older with no definitive ending. Factory builders, city builders, colony management sims, etc... even though those games can last hundreds or even a thousand+ hours. The difference is sandbox style games typically always allow you to quick save or save anywhere, and I never have to worry about finishing some storyline to feel good about my playtime.

Deathloop is great, I got it right around release and played through it over the course of a few weeks.

It doesn't take brainpower to solve. There's a whole time loop puzzle but the most disappointing aspect of the game was that it's a solved solution. The game spells out exactly what objectives to complete at which places and at what times. While you play through the game the first time you're uncovering twists and clues as to how to solve the puzzle but instead of letting you deduce a solution the games builds out a step by step list of markers for you to follow.

It's essentially the complete opposite of how The Outer Wilds, which has a similar time loop aspect with a puzzle to solve, handles it.

That being said, give Deathloop a shot because it's still a fun shooter with neat mechanics that lean very close to immersive sim levels of freedom.

I liked Skyrim and will defend it but Fallout 4 had some inexcusable problems. I still played it and had a lot of fun once the mods rolled in but the base game is a mess in terms of story, dialogue, role-playing, balance, graphics, animations, etc...

The settlement building was pure silly sandbox, there was no reason to engage with it, no benefit it provided, in fact it only introduced extra nuisance if you engaged (in the form of annoying settlement raid alerts). The dialogue options may have as well been nonexistent and all the skill check mechanics were stripped out in favor of the most bog basic charisma checks. The leveling and SPECIAL mechanics ended up meaning every character was exactly the same, there was no build variety past 10 or 12 hours. If you wanted to argue there was it by was only stealth or no stealth, melee or ranged, but the balance between them was fubar.

The game was extraordinarily disappointing as someone who was a huge fan of Fallout since the original, liked 3, and loved New Vegas. FO4 was a step back in every way EXCEPT first-person shooter mechanics which wasn't even an true aspect of the franchise.

The one thing FO4 has going for it were mods. Like Skyrim before it, FO4 was completely reworked in multiple ways by different mods and that's what basically saved the game for me.

I wonder how long this will take to catch up to the current game though in terms of content. There's, what... 10 expansions for the original plus a dozen content packs and music packs? It's almost as extreme as The Sims.

Might be hard to dive deep into C:S2 if your used to playing C:S1 with a large amount of the expansions from the last 8 years

Same here, though I'm only able to play an hour or two a night (dad checking in) and am only around level 30. I played the beta and the server slam and have tried a few classes. I agree that the camera is too close but I'm constantly impressed by the build variety - Diablo 3 was lacking in that regard and while I lived D2... it obviously wasn't very friendly to experimentation last the early stages.