I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Not really sure if it’s been posted yet, but for me that’s GTA Online. I can’t pretend it was ever masterpiece material, but it was compelling enough for me to sink over 4000 hours into (over 12 years). It’s remarkable how much GTA has become a parody of itself. GTA 5 had materialism and insane money spending as some of its themes, something it parodied hard throughout the story. Hell, shark cards in GTA Online seemed to follow this a bit.
And where does GTA Online sit nowadays? Normal boring vehicles costing millions, a subscription service to get quality of life content, mediocre mission design wasting a lot of your time, every update feels more disconnected from the last, and most insulting of all. The shark cards from 2013 cost the same, but have only had a 25% increase in ingame cash. A 2014 update released a LaFerrari inspired supercar costing 500k, a 2026 update released a BMW 5 Series inspired sedan costing 1.4 million. Police cars were added, but can easily cost over 4 million each, and then they still have the audacity to remove all resale value from them. Final nail for me, the last big update nerfed payouts on a lot of big heists.
I haven’t touched it in 7 months, and from what I’m seeing online, I’m not missing much.