Star Citizen is the freelancer sequel, it's just stuck in development hell
hodgepodgehomonculus
A Hat in Time and Yooka Kaylee scratch that Banjo itch pretty well.
The first time playing Elite with a headset was magical. Looking around my ship and while flying through space (or even just while sitting docked in the stations), and the spatial audio coupled with VR just put shivers down my spine. That engine whine chefs kiss
SSDs have been around for a long time, and have been affordable for quite a while now. While optimization should always be happening on the developer side, its not crazy to start requiring 30+ year old technology to use modern games.
600ish hours in Hunt at this point, and while you can give away your position to the idle players, that only matters at the top end of the Matchmaking system where the "bush-wookies" lie. With the self-revive for solos trait that got added, it helped even the playing field a lot. Previously getting hit by a sniper was a game-over for solos while for a duo/trio it was the start of an encounter, with your teammates able to revive you after they kill or chase the sniper off. With self-revive you have a chance of popping up when they aren't watching, or when they are pushing to your body from their perch, and either fighting or retreating.
Also I wouldn't say the developers have a toxic relationship with the player base at all. They are constantly making fun changes to the game and adding in new features to change things up. They also test out new features during temporary events and see how people like them before implementing the into the game wholesale. And this is done via looking at gameplay statistics, not just listening to the very vocal subset of people who hate any change to the game.
Really anything by Grant Kirkhope, Banjo Kazooie Yooka Laylee, etc, and on the Rare train, Donkey Kong Country 2 had great music.
Also love the Undertale soundtrack.
Lumberyard was just a fork of cryengine, that's not what required a rewrite. They threw away all the FPS work that they hired a company to make for them, and redid that from scratch, and then also just rewrite systems all the time because they have no plan.