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!

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

Just some feedback from someone who sounds like they may be similar to you in some ways — if you’re talking about SRS / Anki type notes … that’s definitely overkill, for programming.

(And from your description, it sounds like “overkill” is, indeed, killing you.)

You genuinely shouldn’t worry about memorizing programming topics! As a field, we all tend to search up anything we need to know, in real-time, as we run into it; everything from syntax for a programming language we haven’t used in a while, to data-structures we’ve forgotten the details of, even to terminology that’s a bit different than our particular sub-field is using daily.

Mostly, if not almost entirely, the effective way to master “programming” (which, again, is mostly a synthesis of ‘stuff that’s at the front of my brain from working on this current project for a while,’ and ‘everything i can extract from Google on short notice’) … is to just do. And do a lot. Start projects. Get obsessed. Get bored, move on, do another!

tl;dr stop taking notes and just hang your head against code! I swear, it’s genuinely far more effective.

(If it helps you to believe me, some credentials: dev for, idk, more than 15 years; entirely self-taught; have built everything from programming-languages and compilers to mobile apps to massively-distributed systems running across 500,000 CPU cores; I’ve learned, taught, forgot, and then learned again, more languages and frameworks than I can count.

You can do this!)

There’s no reason to be so critical of OP for this … if anything, it’s impressive, or at least cute. Why you gotta be bringing Reddit negativity over here? )=