There are still plenty of non-garbage games if you wade out further than AAA.

My friend group played Valheim a few months ago and it was spectacular (for the weekend anyways). It's a great game to lose your self in the environments and doesn't have any IAP rubbish.

Even some AAA games have amazing story, but few and far between and a good number of the ones i'd point someone at are exclusive to ps4/ps5

I really don’t understand what people see in this game. It’s not bad, sure, but it’s almost a walking simulator.

Getting resources feels pretty grindy, and the abilities and leveling system feel lackluster to me.

It's fun to hang out in with a few friends. Solo play is like watching paint dry, playing with friends has that almost emergent feeling as all of you go off doing god knows what and end up making a mess of each other's work.

I highly recommend you dive into the indie and small-medium sized publisher world. There are a lot of games out there made by passionate individuals who are succeeding at creating enjoyable experiences. There are great stories, beautiful art, and interesting gameplay. You just have to dive a little deeper to find it.

There's plenty of exceptional story-based games out there. Personally I loved The Last of Us Part II last year, which has none of the issues you mentioned above. I'm currently playing Disco Elysium, which I also highly recommend.

It's pretty easy to find free cheat engine tables for any single player game for free. Paid cheats are really multi-player things, where you really shouldn't be cheating anyway

I can strongly recommend mining old 90s titles. Homeworld remains the best RTS I've ever played by miles and that's from 1997 or so.

Oh yeah, I have food memories of it. Nexus the Jupiter Incident was also great.

> I haven't played a good game in nearly a decade. I used to play them for the story, then it all became too grindy

That's on you. There are tons of amazing new video games with a good plot and a great gameplay. I'm not a huge gamer myself but the last one I did that checks those boxes was Horizon Zero Dawn.

I haven't played recent games, but are they really more grindy than e.g. EverQuest or the NES Square/Enix games?

If you want to unlock everything without spending real money, then yes they are often by far more grindy. Companies realized that putting huge grinds which you can pay to skip is by far the best way to make money from games so today this is in most games. This is the modern slot machine equivalent.

The "problem" with EverQuest wasn't the game, it was the people.

It's just like real life. You aren't supposed to be the hero. You aren't supposed to have all the best everything and a million platinum.

You're just another cog moving through the world, easily replaceable. That's how it was designed. The problem is that, strangely, in a game, people can't accept that, so they'll spend 18 hours a day playing, but for some reason won't spend 18 hours a day working, even when spending 18 hours a day working at something clearly - undeniably - yields better results than playing a game.

Ultima Online had more of that feeling than EverQuest (I played both). EQ was quite clearly a game in which you could make steady progress in power with proper grinding (and every 5 levels sucked thanks to a coding error).