it's not just that though, AAA gameplay has largely evolved to waste time. pointless side quests, pointless collectibles, pointless giant maps, pointlessly going from one end of the map to the other back and forth just to complete some bullshit quest, pointless grinding...
well i say pointless, but there is actually a reason to make playing these games such a chore.
100% XP boost: would you like to pay us for the privilege to play our game half as much this week?
Lately, it's been Hades II, Jusant, trying to finish Cocoon, and I'm gonna retry starting Outer Worlds (couldn't get into it before for some reason).
But I can't really give you a comprehensive list since playing indie games usually means playing tons of different stuff all the time. These are just my very current games at this point.
I do play some AAA games. C2077 was pretty good; I finished the main game but still haven't gotten into the DLC though. I also still regularly play Overwatch, begrudgingly. I like the gameplay but still hate the monetization and the fact that there is no real competition that scratches the same itch.
Dunno sometimes it's gotta be something with their asset loading methodology. I put Battletech on my NVME and it still had crazy like 3-5-minute loads. A mod fixes it really well though and made the otherwise-great game much more playable.
Yeah I built my pc two years ago. Didn’t bother with an ssd, wound up getting 4tb of ssd last year because it needed it (well I thought that’s what it needed, it did need it, but my problem was in addition to dragging over my old hdds I also just kept the same 8gb ram stick, turns out games actually run when you have 32gb ram)
I personally just compensate for my HDD array's slowness with RAM. Cyberpunk 2077 runs at more than 30fps on an rx580 being loaded off a HDD with 20GB RAM on Linux.
Those 5-10‰ of the time are absolutely excruciating when you've gotten used to SSD gaming, though. Especially when you have moderate to severe ADHD so any kind of waiting sets the Gears of Distraction in motion lol.
And it's almost always an AAA game even though those are the ones with the LEAST excuse for not being optimized