Oh man Astroneer is so good — but I don’t think it’s up OP’s alley. There’s no quests to speak of, or even goals really, besides the 1. tutorial stuff, and 2. overall “reach the end” — besides that, it’s up to you to be self-directed.

Context: my breath-of-the-wild loving partners didn’t much get into Astroneer, unless I specifically set them goals and they didn’t have to figure anything out for themselves. :P (Well, one of them, at least …)

I think the “map marker check mark” dopamine game is a whole different thing from ‘true’ open-world … well, that’d unnecessarily exclusionary. Neither one is truer than the other. But they’re definitely extremely different.

Anyway, OP, my suggestion in that vibe would definitely be the Fallout or Assassin’s Creed serieses. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn! Great sidequest-driven, exploration-heavy, gigaaaaaantic games, all of them!

This is terrible news to me, as an OCaml’eer.

There goes all my potential cool project domains … 😭

What on earth size of monorepo is that!? iirc, we’ve got ~1Mloc of OCaml, probably another two or three times that in assorted generated code, specs, config, infra, and other languages; and my VScode-Remote definitely boots up as fast as the network connection can stand up.

Definitely faster than I can think of the first thing I want to do … ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That said, I should own up to having had an absurdly overcomplicated vim config, tons of plugins, a decade n change of customizations and patches and shit. Maybe I’ve just always had a high tolerance for a slow boot. hahaha

Whewf I’m boutta out myself or something, but …

after 15 years of vim, writing (and contributing to) a host of plugins, even running custom builds with my own patches …

I basically never boot up Actual Vim anymore?? I’ve basically entirely switched to VScode + VSCodeVim. embarrassing as fuck, in some ways, but jesus christ it’s just too goddamn good.

The neovim integration, even, was fantastic. (Although I don’t use it right now, for “VSCode Remote reasons,” lol.)

I haven’t actually played it yet, but HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed has been in my Steam library for ages. That looks like it may scratch your itch …

I really miss some “toy soliders” 3D shoot-em-up that I can just baaaaaaarely remember from the 1990s … does anybody remember the game I’m thinking about? (There was definitely a series, I distinctly recall the name ending in “2” …)

I absolutely adored Invisible, Inc (by Klei — yes, of Don’t Starve & Oxygen Not Included fame — what a diverse bunch!)

It seems a little different from your usual vibe (it’s not an first/third-person shooter-y thingie; iirc it’s isometric and pixel-art?); but it’s easily the best stealth game I’ve ever played. :D