Yeah, my intention was to ask more in the spirit of the capital Patient Gamer, as in the community name, instead of just a gamer who is patient. Some good discussions happening here so it's all good either way.
I've been slowly playing through Vampire Survivors again with each hero only using their starting weapon. I did the lightning ring dude on the first map the last time. Only barely made it to 30 minutes with that one.
I very much use the subscription feed. I don't know how alone I am with this, but I usually only subscribe to channels when I want to watch almost all videos they post.
A lot of the time if a creator gets a little bit popular they start to spam videos and that's when I unsubscribe, even if I generally like their content. I feel like I cannot ever keep up anymore so I just watch their videos sporadically from then on.
Academics needs good discipline for the most part provided you have an okay head for it.
Somebody with a very high intelligence can cruise by for a while, but they will hit a wall eventually where they need to sit down and do the boring, borderline useless or administrative stuff too. Lots of people have a hard time to find the motivation to do these parts and fail.
GTA 3D universe games: GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas
You can go as deep as you like from just doing the main missions to 100 percenting them. I think they hold up well enough on most fronts, even graphically, but seeing some of the games in your list that shouldn't matter.
Battle for Wesnoth is a nice and polished turn based strategy game. You need to get used to the sometimes annoying rng hit system, but it can get addicting trying to protect a favourite unit, give them the last hits so they can level up and then faceroll the map.
I don't care much as long as level scaling is gone. It's lazy and it signals that the world is built for and around you instead of you just being a part of that world.
When I'm walking around some well travelled road between cities I don't want to meet wolves first and then some damage sponge minotaur lord slaughtering every guard patrol coming through two weeks later, just because I levelled up a couple of times in between.
Most classic RPGs have lots of combat. What I don't see mentioned here so far is Neverwinter Nights. Especially the first expansion of the second game. Mask of the Betrayer. Lots of combat of course, but a story that your behaviour has an impact on. Search for a cookie cutter build, lower the difficulty. You can skip through the combat parts quickly that way, if you don't like them.
Also mentioning Planescape Torment again because it's weird and not so combat focused.
In the last few years I started actively trying to stop myself from thinking about company code (and other work stuff too) when I'm not at work. You know, work life balance and all that. Did wonders to my mental health.
I recommend a simple little game called Rush. I don't even know what motivated me to get it some time ago, but I had fun with it even though I wouldn't say I usually like puzzle games. It's all of 0.22€ on sale where I'm sitting, might be worth trying.
I used to enjoy arena shooters waaay back in the day when Quake III Arena and later Quake Live had a still somewhat active playerbase so I could just randomly find games. No multiplayer games caught me since then.
Nowadays it's ARPGs (mostly Path of Exile), but I enjoyed Vampire Survivors too so I might go for that genre again.
Also I randomly get cravings for playing Elder Scrolls games. I just started my Nth Oblivion playthrough and I did it with Morrowind last year. It will be Skyrim again next year I suppose...
Oh and I have a few hundred hours in Dwarf Fortress too. And of course I played it the way it was meant to be played. With ASCII graphics!
10k? I hope it's hours and not money. Even though 10k is some insane amount of hours too.