How does one 'finish a level' in Factorio? I thought it was pretty open ended (until you launch a rocket)?

But I do get what you mean - it's definitely harder to drop and return to a story based game.

It's not about the destination, it's about the optimisation tangent we spend 15 hours on, we met along the way.

Haven’t tried the Space Age expansion yet, so not sure what to expect there on time commitment.

Massive increase in time commitment there.

You still start the same way, but now launching a rocket isn't the end of the game ... it's just the end of the first act. Now you also build orbiting space stations and interplanetary spaceships (which require launching dozens of rockets to build), so you can go colonize 4 more planets, each with their own new challenges and new resources to gather and exploit. Each one of those can easily take just as much time to colonize as your original planet, if not more. You'll need to build autonomous spaceships to regularly ferry supplies and finished products around the solar system to where they're needed. Then finally build a big, badass spaceship capable of reaching the edge of the solar system, and that is the new win condition.

After playing Space Age, the original Factorio game seems like just a tutorial level.

Ah I know, I'm not waiting for a sale. Just need more spare time lol

I mean I say it kinda tongue-in-cheek! I'll play it eventually, it's not going anywhere :)

Modded skyrim is one of my favorite games, vanilla skyrim is just... meh.

I know the Wabbajack scene is pretty big for Skyrim, is there any big mod pack you would recommend? Skyrim is also an embarrassing blind spot for me (played enough of Morrowind and Oblivion back in the day so never got around to it) but after all the hundreds of hours I've spent modding Fallout: NV, Cyberpunk and STALKER Anomaly I am not sure I want to dive headfirst into another multi month mod project.

I completely agree, if you need to heavily mod Skyrim for it to be good, is it even Skyrim any more? Grossly overrated on release in my opinion

I’ve played some tabletop in the past (10+ years ago) as a noob, never quite got super deep - it was mostly an activity to enjoy with friends.

With the way my life is structured these days, I’d be a key contributor to “schedules & conflicts” and don’t want to burden a party with my inability to fully commit to a campaign.

CRPGs give me the advantage of being able to start and stop whenever, short or long sessions.

Is it better than Galaxy 1 and 2? I 100%ed these two and i feel like sunshine would give me less of the same, am I wrong?

Enjoy the art of it with mods that lessen the crotch kicks baked into it. 🖖🏼

The modding scene in general is really good. The only shame is that so many old classic mods got broken by the 2.0 update.

If you take away the grunts, you lose half of Barrett's dialogue! /s

I'll have to keep an eye out for this in FF7R-3. But I'll be honest, I barely noticed. Might be cause I'm a bit of a grunter myself, though...

hell divers 2, my friend group is pressing me hard to buy it

I do have Mass Effect pirated. Just need a hardware upgrade to run RPCS3 better.

Another alternative is to buy on console. I bought the PS4 version of Yakuza: Like a Dragon because the steam version has Denuvo. I'm kind of torn between generally preferring physical over digital media, versus the openness and flexibility of PC vs the closed-off proprietary-ness of consoles. Trade-offs either way.

I did. I played it a bit and it's fun. Not sure why it didn't really scratch that itch. I feel like the mechanics are too simple and the moment i try to push the physics it just doesn't really do interesting stuff i think. The best part was collapsing a huge structure by cutting each leg but it took a while and the fps fell to a crawl and i couldn't really move my head to see stuff breaking and falling unfortunately.

The dev is quite against the deep discount sales for Rimworld, it never drops below a few quid off. It is 100% worth it at full price however so take the plunge when you're ready, you won't regret it. I've got a good few hundred hours, it's one of my most played games. I come back and start a new colony at least once a year or so. All the explanations are great and add something cool to the base game. I haven't even looked at mods for it yet but there's a huge scene for those.

It's not been easy. There's also Mass Effect, which I got around to playing last year — but that's largely because I forgot about it after being patient about it for only a couple of years.