Gaming

Taking a stroll through my library:

• The Ascent: Cyberpunk Action RPG, nice action and story, single/coop.
• Star Valor: Top-Down Action space. not so much story wise, but great gameplay, costumisation, fleets, and the upcoming addon will add station building and (more) faction warfare.
• Weird West: from the Arkane Austin crew (Prey 2016, Dishonored). Good story, immersive gameplay, and a innovative world. It's 3rd person, but there is a mod which makes it 1st person!
• Mortal Sin: Roguelike Melee-FPS. lots of fun, and the dev just replaced the level generation completely, adding verticality and much more variety.
• Golden light: another Roguelike FPS, its on the weird side, but a lot to explore, had a lot of fun with that one!
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker: scrapping spaceships in zero-g has never been more fun! good storyline highlighting the plight of workers in an inhumane system, and what they can do about it.
• Styx: Master of Shadows: Thief-like gameplay, well polished.
• Red Faction: Guerilla: Older game, Open world is a bit bland, but the realtime destruction of large buildings with explosives will never get old
• and if you haven't played it yet: the System Shock Remake is an absolute joy to play.

My current FPS fix is Deadlink: another roguelike FPS, very tight gunplay and movement, good looking too.

if you can give a few examples what games you enjoyed, i can probably point you in the right direction... i think i have a slight game collecting problem with a few thousand titles, but at least i can help people like you out lol

Ys

I was actually kind of blown away by the scale and verticality of the open world in Elex. It has some jank (as most AA games do), But surprisingly in the end, it actually honestly soured my feelings towards Bethesda games somewhat because in Elex, your choices matter far more.

It always annoyed me in Bethesda games that if you do one factions quest line, you can still go and do the other factions quest lines and no one ever mentions it. It doesn't change the game whatsoever except the ultimate ending. In Starfield, for example, you can do the entire United Colonies Quest line, and then go join the freestar collective and literally nobody mentions it, or trys to stop you, or treats you literally any differently because you joined their erstwhile enemy. Each quest line is a separate game in itself. For example (spoilers for Starfield...) When you're trying to get the Freestar Collective's cooperation to get access to some data, if you've previously become a Freestar Ranger, that should have mattered to the story in some way. But nothing you do in a Bethesda game has any bearing on anything else that you do except in the most cursory of ways.

Elex doesn't play by those rules. Once you join a faction, that's it... And the other factions treat you very differently as a result, with different dialog and different options. None of this "essential character" garbage either. If you kill them, you'll get a notice on screen that says ("x"s death will change the story moving forward...) and stuff like that. Sometime that change is immediate, and sometime it comes back to haunt you hours and hours later in a completely different quest line.

It's also HARD because it doesn't lock off areas until you've reached a certain level. You can go anywhere and do anything right from the beginning, but if you stumble upon an enemy that is twenty levels above you, tough luck. Often, getting to a quest requires going through those areas, which means early on, you're not necessarily fighting all the time. You pick your battles and you pick when to sneak by at night and when to just run like hell.

It was honestly a very refreshing open world experience. And the world was extremely "vertical". And by that I mean you could jump off a mountain and fall into a valley that's about as deep down as some other game maps are wide, with absolutely no loading screen. Really impressive for a AA game. Can't speak highly enough about it.

A couple of other one's that I enjoy but not on the level of Elex is the Spider Software games, The Technomancer and Greedfall. Fun enough for what they are, but not nearly the same scope as Elex.

Mad Max get's not nearly enough love either.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Here are a few picks off the top of my head:

• Control: TPS, open-ish world, present day setting, solo only
• Deep Rock Galactic: FPS, mission-centric, sci-fi setting, solo & co-op
• Generation Zero: FPS, open world, sci-fi setting, solo & co-op
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits: Action-Adventure, open-ish world, fantasy setting, solo only
• Outward: RPG, open world, fantasy setting, solo & co-op
• Remnant: From the Ashes / Remnant 2: TPS, open-ish world, sci-fi & fantasy setting, solo & co-op

The banner saga. I never liked turn based games, but this one is a banger.

I'm not sure what your definition of AA is so this might not be helpful to you, but here's what I'd consider so:

Supergiant games, most Lego games, Telltale games, Klei games, most of the open world survival craft genre, Chorus, Alan Wake, Darkest Dungeon 1/2, Doom and other boomer shooters, most platformers (a hat in time, Celeste, ori, mirror's edge etc.), risk of rain 2, disco elysium, most metroidvanias (hallow knight, hyper light drifter), older titles in some AAA game series / older AAA games in general..

Operation Harsh Doorstop is an FPS is similar to Squad or Project Reality, a more realistic mod for Battlefield 2 back in the day, and I think it's shaping up to be a great game. Plus it's free to play so you lose nothing.

Sanctum 2 is a bit older, but it holds up as a solid FPS tower defense hybrid. It's often on sale for around $4. The dlc is also well worth it, doubling the base game content.

Battle Bit Remastered

Children of Morta

Risk of Rain 2

Crab Champions

Echo

Gunfire Reborn

Journey

Hypercharge Unboxed

Journey to the savage planet

Perish

Scanner Sombre

Severed Steel

Shatterline

Strange Brigade

Zedfest

No Man's Sky

The Outer Worlds

Weird West

I would recommend Greedfall. It's a solid AA open world rpg with combat that's a bit janky and repetive but the story and sidequests kept me engaged all the way through.

Hellblade is pretty cool. Not made by a huge studio but looks like it was. Combat is meh but presentation is excellent. Would buy on sale