Viking

All good. But due to the combination of artistry, world persistence, strategic building physics, and strategic terrain sculpting, Valheim tops them all in sense of agency and immersion.

I share your sentiment, except that I'm not so sure it is that popular.

I don't want to follow a prescripted character through a predetermined world, with optional side quests thrown in to claim "open world" status. What I want, is an interesting world for my character to be dropped into--a character not so special, except that through easy suspension of disbelief, it is *me* and malleable. I want agency in a world unpolluted by unbelievable distractions like magic, superpowers, and suspension of physics. I want Kenshi or Valheim.

But, a virtual life, like a real life, requires an extensive virtual grind to feel real. That is where artistry comes in.

I can with great pleasure wander for hours through the meadows of Valheim picking up sticks and hunting game, because the music that I live in is sublime, and the visuals are not faux-realistic, but like a painting I don't want to stop staring at. I can spend all day cautiously elevating my character through the swamps and caves of Qud, because the background music is hauntingly alluring, and the randomly cobbled-together but detailed textual descriptions are perpetually made coherent by *my* imagination. I want a virtual life that only ends when my virtual life ends, or when my real life puts it on terminal pause.

But most people, I'm afraid, just want a movie with a vestigeal gamepad. And so we get inundated with technically open worlds that have no in-game purpose, aside from tourists who decide to stop playing just so they can look around at what the game designers have sculpted--optional walking simulators as background to nonagentic cinema speckled with mindless trial and error arcady action.

In short, I am an adult. A week-long sequence of 10 minute runs of high res Space Invaders is a suitable distraction for my young kids. But with gaming, I'm looking for for something MORE than the alteady enormous library of masterfully-crafted books and video provides. I'm looking for fiction with sense of agency.

Realism is a mistake. It always falls short of its obvious target, and so is constantly reminding you that there is something wrong with it--that it is just a game. That you are living in an age of very limited technology.

Artistry is better, but perhaps more difficult. It certainly is more likely to pass the test of time. I'll take the imagery of Sable, Valheim, and Don't Starve over failed attempts to imitate film any day.

Valheim has the most interesting and immersive building, since it requires strategic engineering with materials and structures that conforms to world physics.

Games like Minecraft and Enshrouded, where you can leave walls permanently floating in midair, and different materials only impart different esthetics are like pointless external CAD diversions that remove you from the game. It was the most disappointing "improvement" in Nightingale when the devs removed building physics and suddenly everybody's Victorian bases became absurdly tall.