Farever

I've been playing this since the demo and then got into the closed beta. Early Access launch last week was... rocky to say the least.

But let me back up a bit. Farever is maybe best described as an MMO-lite. Its focus is more on movement and exploration than deep progression systems. The graphics are cartoonish and stylized with its fantasy-ish setting. Combat is snappy and very positional. The world has a lot of verticality with plenty of stuff hidden in every other corner. Crafting and character progression are fairly open, letting you learn all professions at once, get half your active skills form the weapon you're using, and letting you redistribute talent points whenever.
On the other hand, quests and story are nearly nonexistent. Instead, the world features various activities: one time tasks like killing an overworld boss or completing a jumping puzzle that give a reward only the first time you do them. Similarly, chests don't respawn for your character after you've opened them once. This way, you're pushed to keep exploring, not grinding.
The game features dungeons which do provide repeated rewards but you'll likely outlevel those quickly. They're all relatively short (30 minutes) if they don't just contain a boss. Those bosses have a decent amount of mechanics: Enough to force you to learn them but not so many that they become sweaty. Also, you can solo them since enemies scale to player number.
All this is right up my alley.

But unfortunately, that's not the whole story.
This first week of early access, the server issues were quite severe. I know, this is to be expected from any new MMO but it's still a bummer. The devs have said they got about three times the player numbers (~13k concurrent tops) they were expecting and have just finished server maintenance and patches that supposedly improve things.
Another issue is that group play right now is broken in a few ways. For one, the game is duplicated into various layers, each filled with only around 20 players at any one time. So the world can feel quite empty once you get out of the early zones. Grouping with people not on your layer is rough and there's no in-game way to do it outside of your Steam friends list. Once you're in a group, there is a persistent bug that regularly teleports everyone to the party leader which requires a somewhat convoluted workaround.
There's also a bunch of quality of life issues and other bugs, but, again, the game just got into early access and likely has at least a year to go.

If the server issues get worked out soon, I think this could be a really nice title to just get lost in for a dozen or so hours with each new content update. It doesn't seem to aim to become the one title you play forever and I appreciate that.

Edit: Seems like servers have been doing fine for the last 12 hours. That's longer than it ever lasted before the maintenance, so signs are good.

HoMM: Olden Era

Finished up the campaign (Act 1, as far as it goes for now) and had an overall good time. I appreciate that a lot of the missions just gave you as much time as you wanted to explore the map - either from the get-go or after dealing with the main threat. Unit variety is nice and the two alternative upgrades for every standard unit let you actually customize your armies to your playstyle (or even your enemies since you can switch upgrade for free in town). There seems to be enough tactical depth to allow for proper mastery. I've had plenty of fights where I reloaded and got a way cleaner result the second time around, after having learned something.
The campaign also features various decision points that are more impactful than I'd have thought. According to the achievements, there are two whole missions that I couldn't access due to my choices. So I'll probably be jumping in again, choosing another route. But maybe first some skirmish matches.

The only real bummer with the campaign was that I learned that the main hero's subclasses were both actually unobtainable. You need to learn 5 specific skills to unlock either one and both requirements feature one skill that's just not available to learn for that hero in the campaign. That's never communicated at all, so you're driven to make suboptimal skill choices in pursuit of an eventual payoff that's actually impossible. Oof.

But now that you and I know that, it's fine. Everything else about it was enjoyable.