HER0

Sometimes I chill after work by driving around the Nurburgring in a touring car in Automobilista 2.

Alternately, for more driving games:

1. Art of Rally has a free roam mode, which is pretty chill.
2. I've been playing Sledders, a snowmobile game. It is super early in early access, but it can be fun to just roam around (and learn how to drive a snowmobile).

Seems like it is just some cosmetics? Seems like many items you get by interacting with NPCs and others are somehow paid, but I haven't looked at how that works.

I see a bunch of mentions of Journey. Recently, I've been playing Sky: Children of the Light for the first time, which is made by the same devs. It is beautiful, and feels like a spiritual successor to Journey, to me. It is also free to play, so it is easy to recommend trying it out.

I feel like it is best, in racing games, if either:

1. Everyone agrees that racing dirty is okay, like in more combat racing type games.
2. The game has systems to discourage contact or intentionally ruining others' races. Some more serious games have safety rating and such.

Otherwise you get some who want to have a fair race and others who think that all racing must be dirty, and it isn't fun when these collide (literally).

I personally buy games almost exclusively on Steam after realizing how much Valve pumps money into open source/Linux gaming, and this is yet another thing on the list. Cool stuff!

I am not a fan of horror games all that much, and Half-Life Alyx is not one, but the horror elements are stronger than previous titles and I still haven't finished the game because of that. The game is incredible, but I just can't get past the scary parts.

This has improved further in recent years, so you probably weren't seeing how it is now.

It may be different in other regions, but I see significantly less toxicity in Dota 2 compared to Counter-Strike, the only other big competitive game I have enough time in to compare it to. Though my CS experience was longer ago, and they could have improved things there, too.

Well, we can also look at their other games for this. For example, in Dota 2, everyone has a behavior score, based on reports and such. This is used for matchmaking on top of skill, and lower behavior scores result in certain restrictions (like can't speak, can't ping as much, can't play ranked, can't pause).

The way they are handling Deadlock has many parallels to Dota 2. For example: popular invite-only playtest, probably a free-to-play model with cosmetics for sale, Dota 2/Icefrog style gameplay depth and balancing.

This game has consistently had more players than most games on Steam without even being released yet. I think it is far from going the way of Artifact, and is much more likely to take a place alongside Dota 2 and CS2 as a giant multiplayer game with indefinite longevity.

Well, sometimes they do flavour-of-the-month, but only when they want to, not because they exclusively chase trends.

ROG Ally is. ROG is just their "Republic of Gamers" gaming brand, with a bunch of products.

A big part of it, I think: the Steam Controller is different in ways that are unpleasant if you approach it like a standard controller. For example, it is not designed to be gripped around the handles like an Xbox controller, but to rest in your fingers. If you attempt to grip it like a traditional controller, it is uncomfortable and the trackpads are hard to use.

I have a friend who grew to like his Steam Controller after using the trackpads on his Steam Deck. For him, it was realizing the potential of the hardware combined with Steam Input.