Are we talking about Stardew though? Because IMO it excels in half your criteria and is pleasantly adequate in the rest. If you mean games in general I mostly

Are we talking about Stardew though? Because IMO it excels in half your criteria and is pleasantly adequate in the rest. If you mean games in general I mostly agree. Most teams just don’t seem to prioritize these things and it can be frustrating. Especially when the core concepts are so promising. There are a lot of reasons to idolize John Carmack, but my favorite is his lifelong obsession with latency. End to end. From the player's fingers, through the hardware, through all the many software layers, back through the hardware and into the player’s eyes. From Doom to the Oculus Rift architecture. This is why to me Id games feel and play like no others. He realized from the beginning that latency matters more than any other factor in competitive FPS games, and prioritized it as much as the rendering he’s more renowned for.