Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.
The main reason I don't like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don't have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.
Best strategy game I've ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don't have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your "villagers" standing around idle because they can't figure out there's a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.
Plus you're there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.
You're not alone. I'm in the same spot. I love the humor of Fallout and I really liked the TV series; I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, more Skyrim playthroughs than I can remember but I bounced off FO3 pretty hard. For me it was the dreary environment and overall decay of the world.
People in FO3 just didn't seem to care much about their living conditions and this doesn't seem like what would happen in actual post-collapse society. People in general love surrounding themselves with art and beauty, rusty scrap metal shacks wouldn't be around two centuries after the bombs drop. Earthship, stucco and clay bricks are low tech but can be made very pretty and livable. Murals and paintings made using various pigments, colorful textiles, basreliefs, carvings and sculptures of ceramic, wood and stone would be everywhere, sprinkled with surviving pre-war artifacts that's been restored, maintained and cherished with pride.
Plant life would also recover quite fast and be lush in a post-atomic war world—Chornobyl is a prime example how nature claims back human-abandoned land just decades after a nuclear event. Deserts in FO should not be all dreary brown misery; there would be a thriving ecosystem of both flora and fauna. Two centuries is enough time for the most dangerous radioisotopes to decay away and you wouldn't really find places where radiation would stop wildlife reclaiming the land. More mutations and birth defects, yes, but life will find a way.
And this overall miserable representation of post-apocalyptic world is the reason FO games never really clicked for me even though the satire and tone hit the spot.
Well, let's light 'em bridges up in glorious RGB rainbows anyway, just under the pretense of "PC Gaming Month", concurrent with a Steam sale of coincidentally LGBT+ themed games🙃
...And thus a truly cosmic amount of salt shall be generated by both conservatives and g4m3r manchildren🤪
Better controller support—I'm not limited to what MS or Sony deem as "certified" or "authorized" hardware. Most of the really good hardware (VKB, Virpil, Arduino) will never be available for consoles and what little is available is bad at best.
Best sims are PC only (DCS, Il-2, E:D, X series, Hunternet etc)
Sims support 3rd party auxiliary software (TacView, EDDiscovery, OMH, EDMC etc) for better experience and that's simply not going to be possible on consoles, ever.
For other games, modding experience on PC is simply better. SKSE and ENB is what keeps Skyrim going and makes it still relevant 13 years later. Can't have this kind of code injection and wrappers on consoles.
If I ever get into retrogaming, emulation is the way, especially since actually acquiring retro console games in their original physical format is bound to become a very expensive collector's hobby if you don't have your own collection from childhood already or don't have local second-hand options.
Vortex is not a launcher, it's a mod manager. And you don't have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.
This is good. Modding can turn into the deepest dependency hell ever and not having access to a specific version of mod A can make mod B that you really love unusable. See: Skyrim VR and Unofficial Patch.
Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person, and I really recommend giving that a try.
Haven't played FO, but hell, no, Skyrim (and Morrowind, and Oblivion) in 3rd person is janky AF. Bethesda games never were meant to be played in 3rd person—I suspect the option is there simply for vanity cam, screenshots and modding.
My dream vehicle: electric tadpole velomobile. Efficient, stable even in winter conditions, weather protection. Unfortunately unaffordable at the moment, prices starting at around 9000€. Plus living in a condo storing one safely while not in use is a difficult endeavor.
Writes a song at 115 BPM. Makes it use double time. Occasionally changes tempo to 161 BPM half-time. Adds three layers of polyrhythms to it. Spices things up with metric modulation between 4/4, 13/8 and 17/7. Hides a sample of the "trolololo song" somewhere in there.
I find cartoonish moustache-twirling "evil" boring. Playing as morally grey characters is most compelling. Whether my character is a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask and at which point in history. Damage one faction and help another, when it's ambiguous who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are. Steal, rob and assassinate for what you believe is a "good cause". Set up dictators to avert death and destruction, then betray and terminate the them with extreme prejudice when they have served their purpose and become a liability. And so on.
Or just go full mercenary; everyone hates you, believes you have no principles and thinks they have the moral high ground, but at the end of the day everyone needs your specialist expertise. Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client—unless the target is eg slavers or pirates, because you actually do have principles.
For example, in X3:TC I single-handedly brought peace and prosperity into the universe: fought off Khaak threat; contained Xenons and completely denied their incursions into human and alien space alike; set up industry that boosted the economy at large for everyone; hired a lot of people for very good salaries. But, I had the monopoly in most industries; a fleet of warships capable of steamrolling everyone else if I wished so; literally owned a whole sector; controlled trade routes via the Hub; set up alliances with the pirate factions letting them roam free, trading illegal goods with them, building infrastructure for them. In short, very much a shady dystopian megacorps🙃