The biggest competitor to Star Citizen right now is Elite: Dangerous. I've played it a lot and it's pretty good. You can play solo or online, too. It can feel a bit slow and it doesn't hold your hand when it comes to learning how to play. There's combat, trading, and exploration. Also pretty active communities online.

If you want to go back in time a bit, there's also the X series from Egosoft that's spanned back many years. There are a few installments and more is being developed. These games are definitely more colorful in several ways than Elite: Dangerous. More of a focus on the Rule of Cool than trying to be real sims.

Haven't played Star Wars: Squadrons, so I don't know the state of the multiplayer side of things. It does offer a solo story mode, apparently. May be worth looking into.

Every now and again I'll think about games like Freelancer, Freelancer 2, X-Wing, and the Wing Commander franchise for straight sit-in-cockpit combat action. Those are very old- early Mid 1990's to early 2000's. If you feel like something retro and can run them, those are options. I wish we had more games styled after those early space sims.

Mojang is a pretty big player that has jumped ship. I'm just wondering if this might be a catalyst for others that have been on the fence about leaving.

It honestly depends on my mood. But my very first thought was Divinity: Original Sin 2. Haven't played it in a hot minute.... might go reinstall.

This is, hands down, the best thing I've seen all week.

I really hope they come through. Don't own a PS5 yet but played the demo the other day. Reeeaaally considering spending money I don't have just to play FFXVI.

Online gaming would be so much more fun if this behavior was more common.

Oh, I'm very excited for this. A dark sci-fi investigative game would be absolutely amazinig. Blade Runner, in my opinion, is an uptapped well.

Reminds me of the time I ran Descent into Avernus and my party conversed with Jander Sunstar, a vampire, long and hard enough that I didn't have the heart to make him turn into dust as the module said. He was freed and pledged his loyalty to the party. I had him show up a couple times to do cool vampire things to the party's love and awe. It just reinforces my belief that Rule of Cool is above all. We're all 9 year olds at heart.

Great QoL stuff. I'm most excited that you can finally pack concave UV islands more efficiently. That in itself is going to speed up my work by a lot.

Regulations (or lack thereof) aside, I would never crawl inside that thing if my life depended on it. I couldn't imagine shelling out stacks of cash to sit inside that tin can. I was shocked when I first saw videos. How could a potential patron look at that and go, "I'm okay with this."

I don't think they're going to locate the wreckage for a long time to come. And I think it's safe to assume that, at this point, there are no survivors.

I don't know what it is about this render, but I find it very cute.

For me it was sheer stubbornness that got me through. Realistically, it's important to know that a model is made up of a series of very different kinds of tasks. When I was learning, I focused on only one of those tasks at a time. For instance, I would just sculpt for a while and became familiar with those tools. Then, when I felt I had a good handle on that, I asked "What's next?"

Sculpting, Hard surface modeling, retopology, UV unwrapping, texturing, shaders, rigging, renders... Pick one thing and forget the rest for the time being. It becomes a lot easier to handle and learn when you're looking at Blender with blinders on. You can't really get around using tutorials because learning this software is like climbing a vertical wall for someone that hasn't used modeling software before. But it can be a lot easier finding tutorials and answers you need when your scope is narrowed down to doing one specific thing at a time.

So, figure out the steps for whatever pipeline you're interested in. Then break those steps down and work to understand them one at a time.

I play Stay every day with my cat. I wouldn't play a simulator of things I can do in real life.... right? (Yes, I would)

Snagged Neverwinter. Thanks for the info.

I'm just imagining river fishing in bikinis. There's a minigame where you swat mosquitos before they bite you.

I am so super happy this turned out to be good. The franchise's games have been like flipping coins when it comes to quality. I can't wait to play it.

Reading through that TVtropes page was one wild ride.

Same!!! I probably used it about 20 years ago and, until this post, had completely forgotten it existed. Holy crap how time flies. I can't believe it's still a thing and going strong.