We spent a chunk of the weekend--okay, okay, all day Sunday-- playing Myth of Empires. This is an early-access open-world survival crafting base-building sandbox game, which is my jam.
Terse summary: MoE is a less-janky, less-creepy, deeper Conan Exiles. There's a taste of Mount & Blade, but it's a third-person base-builder primarily. The enormous tech tree goes from the traditional "pick up rocks and sticks" to smelting more and more interesting metals.
It's set in 3rd century China, which is refreshingly different. Horses are a big thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHI21W6MNyA
It's definitely in the ARK family. I mean, here are David's horses mating. (Sorry about the dark screenshot. The hilarity happened during the in-game night.)
There's also a major social component with guilds + alliances and some large, difficult PvE goals, as well as straight-up full-loot PVP on (optional) pvp servers. The overall goal is empire-building and territory conquest.
The UX is an unfinished mess with hilarious machine translation everywhere, but the meat of the game is solid. If you like this sort of thing, you'll like MoE.
If you aren't sure it's your jam, here's ESO's livestream from character creation on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-2eCnyx-E
It is (as mentioned in the thread) very much early access, and there's a lot of UX clunk and things that have only machine translations from the original language-- this is from a Chinese development studio!
It's meant to be played in large guilds, but we're having a fine time with two players on a private server with some tweaks to settings to make progression a little easier.
David has gone deep on horse breeding.
We're enjoying Myth of Empires, which is a post-Han-Dynasty-collapse open-world base-building survival crafting conquest game (yikes! buzzwords!) that's like ARK & Conan Exiles got together and had a baby. Kinda. We've just moved into making things with iron.