What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

The game Asura's Wrath was all QTEs and it was pretty awesome, generally I agree though.

The only QTEs I can stand are in Man of Medan and Little Hope. At least failing them there leads to further amusement.

It's only taken 8 hours with Crusader Kings III for me to realize that it's a better pure roleplaying experience than literally any RPG video game I've ever played.

Definitely! I think I told you in that thread elsewhere to never ever quit a character/lineage when something goes wrong, and avoid any attempt to min-max. The game has a quality where once *you* start to act and take risks, it starts off an entire snowball of events. If you never act, much less will happen, and you'll just sit around gaining some gold and upgrading territory which is intentionally not made especially interesting in CKIII.

Paradox's other games are more focused on development and such.

It definitely rewards the choices you make, and the open-ended self-driven quality makes it a far more personalized roleplaying experience than I thought possible. It all feels very organic.

Another thing I realized I appreciated was the abstracted nature of combat. It's so much less trouble than personally controlling every unit like you would in something like Civ. I don't mind going to war at all in CK3, because for all its complexity it's not really a game full of busy work.

Speaking of Civ and of busy work, I have been pretty burnt out on Civ VI for a long time, but I also felt like playing some kind of Civ. So I decided to reinstall Civilization V after a few years with its sequel, and it's been very nice to get back into it. I'm willing to concede that VI is the "better-designed" game, in the sense that its mechanics seem very well considered, but it takes a lot more steps to accomplish pretty much anything. So the relative simplicity of V has been refreshing for me. The biggest advantage that VI presents, better combat, is sort of negated by the fact that I tend to be a Civ pacifict in the first place.

So I think after all these years I would still land on Civ V being the best in the series. While VI has plenty to recommend it, I think it's at that "too many notes" stage for me right now.