loopgru

Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you’re still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you’re not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it’s very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

I would look at some of the tech demos for Unreal Engine 5 and its capabilities. We’re at the point now where the engine itself, with sufficient art assets, can look photorealistic more or less out of the box.

Where this is still hardest- and likely always will be- is in faces, because our brains are so thoroughly wired to spot micro-expressions and subtle facial and body language as social animals.

That said, for a game like Doom or Path of Exile, sure, I think we’re way past the point of diminishing returns. But for games where you’re actually experiencing a story and interested in the relationships and characters involved? Things like Death Stranding, RDR, Cyberpunk 2077, or more recently BG3? All of those same nuances of expression can definitely add to the experience- it’s the difference between a mediocre actor and a good or great one.

My absolute, #1 biggest recommendation is to male separate partitions for / and /home.

What does this mean? In short, you’re telling the system to treat different sections of the hard drive / ssd as entirely separate buckets. In this case, you’re putting all of the operating system and programs in one bucket ( / ) and keeping all of your files and settings in another (/home).

Why does this matter? As someone learning Linux, you should tinker with things, learn what they do and how they work. Sometimes, that means breaking things, occasionally in spectacular ways. Having your files and your OS separate means that you can completely wreck your OS while you learn without losing your data in the process- you can reinstall from scratch or even distro hop (try out a new version) without having to stress over losing anything. In short, you can learn and play and blunder and explore without risking anything more than a 20 minute reinstall if you can’t figure out how to fix it.

I appreciate the fact that the distro community is diverse enough to accommodate even people whose personal preferences are this objectively wrong. ;)

Lots of console titles in the comments here. Easy answer there is Zelda 2.

To answer the question as posed, though, Star Control 3 was a massive disappointment after its amazing predecessor.

The Legend of Zelda. So many amazing, visceral memories associated with that game- cracking open the package and gawping at the golden cartridge, leafing through the manual, looking at the paper map while running around in game, exploring, sweating through the labyrinthine later dungeons, hacking my way out of a like-a-like, braving the graveyard for the magic sword, the music… It was like 35 years ago and it’s still a helluva thing.