Games

I don't disagree with your main point, but D&D 5e is a rather shallow rules system. It's needlessly complicated (15 strength gives you what bonus? How does readying an action work? Can you smite when unarmed?), but it's not really deep.

Basically Rimworld in minimal, not that hard. At least you don't get beaten and robbed as soon as you start, like in Kenshi.

Meanwhile I still think there's that group of folks out there who want to decompile the game looking for lore in the code comments.

There's a Rat Man den in Portal 2, it's in a later section of the game after you've climbed out of the depths, you can get behind the scenes and there's a niche with a big fan in it, and Rat Man has built kind of a shrine of coffee mugs. And if you listen, under the harsh electro music and the sound effect of the fan, you can hear a sort of insane jibbering, as if Rat Man is still there raving to himself.

Fans of the game hungry for any more lore or story hints, have put more thought into this sound clip than the folks who made it and put it in the game.

As soon as some technology becomes so accessible that anyone can use it, the platform becomes populated by morons and it's essence is diluted by all sorts of rules put in place so the morons can't damage each other.

I was deep into Strategy and lore – preferring games that ate hundreds of hours. Unfortunately these days my available gaming hours are reduced to a mere handful. It’s difficult to remember everything when I can only play sparingly.

Thus, I’ve resorted to smaller indie games that can be enjoyed in a smaller amount of time, with less of a learning curve. I’m a casual gamer now. What can you do?

RDR2 is the most boring good game I've ever played. It's like they were trying to make it as miserable as possible.

Dwarf fortress?

UI feels like such an art nowadays. With computers being powerful enough to handle more complex simulations, we can potentially have insane amounts of data in a game. And game devs need to figure out how to present that information to the player without overwhelming them.

For example I think Victoria 3 does a pretty poor job of it, while a game like CK2 does an excellent job of it. It can be hard to get right.

I bet it has to do with the average age of the gaming community getting older. I used to play Civ 5, EU4, CK2 all the time in college, when I have tons of free time and didnt care if I was up until 3 in the morning. Now that I have a life and a job, it takes like a week of 1-2 hour sessions to finish a game of civ 5, and the last time I played EU4, I played for several weeks and didnt even finish.

I always preferred Arena style fps games because the varied weapon set means having far greater variety in possible encounters with opponents. Military style shooters feel shallow to me. Skill just means placing shots to the head. There's no real movement techniques with them

Yeah several times I have tried to play Crusader Kings because conceptually its really cool but I just give up every time because I don't know wtf is going on.

Also this may seem like a weird suggestion but if you like FPS you may like Rainbow Six: Seige. Got over a thousand hours and I'm still cooking up strategies with my gaming buddy. And unlike a true strategy game you can just run and gun when you start out and still have fun and the game will always be balanced because it's pvp and it will adjust your rank accordingly.

The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.

My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.

The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.

Just recently I picked up a few more modern strategy games. Balatro and Against the Storm are both great fun and very deep strategically