HER0

Arma is an interesting example. I'd say that it is only an open world game in some scenarios, and often times is a linear game that happens to have a big map and sandbox.

In any case, I'd agree that it having a large world with many possibilities is important for the gameplay and ability to mod/create content across the maps.

I personally use Matrix for text and Mumble for voice, but most probably won't go anywhere. Discord is convenient, and most users won't care enough about some extra ads to put in the effort to migrate.

Recent conversations with friends had me playing Star Fox 64 earlier last week, which has been very nostalgic.

Over the weekend, I was surprised to have a couple friends who I thought would never want to play an Arma title show interest in playing Arma Reforger with a group of friends I play with. I got to play a bunch with one of those newly-interested friends yesterday, and was super pleased that she enjoyed it.

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 also got Archon V. Checked my ranked matches after, and a lot of them had Ascendents in them.

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).