I've got one word for you. Or acronym.
ESO.
Elder Scrolls Online.
Morrowind - the original single player game - was for a very long time my absolute favourite game, with nothing topping it until No Mans Sky and then Cyberpunk.
ESO was always garbage.
The story and environments are spectacular. But everything MMO about it completely destroys it.
The single player games are synonymous with open / flexible classless character development.
ESO lumped everyone with classes.
Morrowind and later Oblivion included the much loved SPELLCRAFTING.
ESO gave us the opposite, splitting all of the game's magic across the 4 classes so at most you could only ever have access to a quarter of the game's magic. Plus a single magic weapon skill line.
But in the first years they teased us with it datamined assets - which are only dataminable because the developer puts them in the client to be mined for "accidental" PR.
And continued to tease. And tease. And tease. And tease.
Then they bogged the game down with a million and one tediums whose sole purpose is to make you want to subscribe or buy crap from their online store.
As much as I personally love their IP and have played their games largely unmodded - except where absolutely necessary, like giving Skyrim horses enough health to survive more than a casual fleabite - I'm aware of the massive popularity of mods and which ones are. An MMO was never going to have anywhere as broad appeal.
So Zenimax "cleverly" decided to fool us idiot players into believing ESO has all of Skyrim etc's awesome mod-greatness by implementing the shittiest imaginable UI, requiring an absolutely stupid number of UI mods just to make the game minimally enjoyable. Which just makes the game more likely to not impress new players, many of whom wouldn't be invested enough in the IP to bother spending hours searching for the right mods.
Hate PvP? A lot of gamers do. ESO says "Screw you!" cos they've got designs of turning all RPG'ers into mindless MOBA-bunnies. Players are cheap content. Oh yeah baby.
There's no end of insidious attempts to force all players into PvP. Which only have the effect of driving players away. I'm still tuning into many of their twitch things and in-game events. They've lost a lot of players over the last couple of years.
On top of all of this, they've viciously monetized it.
Imagine a game with a great costume system, but there's only costume slot included and each - PER CHARACTER - costs $15.
18 characters.
10 costume slots.
$15 each.
That's $2700 of real money to buy all costume slots.
AND they're about to introduce companions (i.e. pets) who'll probably have their own costume slots, which you have to buy separately.
I could go on for days about the crown store.
Meanwhile, I look at Cyberpunk and while there's a few things I don't love about it - eg. limited attribute and perk points, item RNG, and some of the perk mechanics - a save editor can fix the first two problems and modding potentially the third and also first two.
Then bingo, bango, boffo, Cyberpunk can be damn near perfect for me.
And I suspect that's why CDPR wisely chose to put aside their original plans of an MMO style online game and just incorporate multiplayer into Cyberpunk, and possibly their other games, going by their media release.
Super smart.
Yes they lose the opportunity to viciously monetize with an Arasaka style cash shop, but they sell a crap-tonne more copies of the game and build a massive and very grateful fanbase of players.
I used to be very team Bethesda. Super not any more. With nothing else to play I've spent as little as humanly possible on ESO.
Meanwhile games I enjoy - like Cyberpunk - instil a sense of warm gratitude which makes me want to throw more money at the developer. Not that I want CDPR to implement a cash shop. Yuk. But I'm very favourably disposed to supporting them, with expansions, merchandise etc.
And by way of clothes, wear them in public.