I know it's unpopular to suggest it, but Star Citizen. For $45 bucks that game is immensely addictive. I've already found myself absolutely hooked.
There is no player character scaling here, you just have to literally learn to get good, and at anything. There is no hand-holding here and everything in the game is either physicalized or becoming physicalized (including the process of manually having to load all the cargo onto your ship yourself).
I mostly stick with bounty hunting because it's easy'ish with my HOSAS setup, but even then the learning curve is steep given that the physics change depending on the atmosphere of the planet (or if you're in space).
Everything has a massively steep learning curve, from mining and cargo hauls, to dogfighting and bounty tracking.
Also a lot of the non-noob missions can involve other players, either teaming up or working against you. Like one mission might have you acquiring an item from a crash site before others get to the crash site, and an NPC might task you with returning the item to them, meanwhile a rival NPC might put out a call for players to acquire the same item and bring it to them instead. So there's an emergent PVP element involved with some the tasks.
I think one of the most useless things in the game right now is probably being a space pirate, just because of the amount of work and skill required to be a successful pirate. You also need a crew with you because you can't really vandalize/steal ships by yourself. You need one ship that's designed specifically to neutralize other ships, but you'll need a separate dropship for boarding (if you have multiple people in your party).
I'm still just learning the basics, but man is it addictive. If you like true-blue sim-sims, Star Citizen is definitely worth checking out.
I know it's unpopular to suggest it, but Star Citizen. For $45 bucks that game is immensely addictive. I've already found myself absolutely hooked.
There is no player character scaling here, you just have to literally learn to get good, and at anything. There is no hand-holding here and everything in the game is either physicalized or becoming physicalized (including the process of manually having to load all the cargo onto your ship yourself).
I mostly stick with bounty hunting because it's easy'ish with my HOSAS setup, but even then the learning curve is steep given that the physics change depending on the atmosphere of the planet (or if you're in space).
Everything has a massively steep learning curve, from mining and cargo hauls, to dogfighting and bounty tracking.
Also a lot of the non-noob missions can involve other players, either teaming up or working against you. Like one mission might have you acquiring an item from a crash site before others get to the crash site, and an NPC might task you with returning the item to them, meanwhile a rival NPC might put out a call for players to acquire the same item and bring it to them instead. So there's an emergent PVP element involved with some the tasks.
I think one of the most useless things in the game right now is probably being a space pirate, just because of the amount of work and skill required to be a successful pirate. You also need a crew with you because you can't really vandalize/steal ships by yourself. You need one ship that's designed specifically to neutralize other ships, but you'll need a separate dropship for boarding (if you have multiple people in your party).
I'm still just learning the basics, but man is it addictive. If you like true-blue sim-sims, Star Citizen is definitely worth checking out.