It helps to understand some of the deeper lore, but AW2 does a good job of letting you know the important bits so it's not necessary to have played the first one.

Tell that to the people who just got denied the ability to sue over an Uber crash because their daughter agreed to the Uber eats eula

I believe the things you are calling out are an integral part of the ARPG genre so there isn't going to be much change to the core without fundamentally changing the game you're playing. Plenty of people enjoy the wanton clicky destruction and seeing numbers rise, just look how popular stuff like cookie clicker is.

Have you tried monster hunter? (Or god eater or wild hearts) Those games sound a lot like what you're describing. At its heart the core gameplay is 'Hunt monsters to gather parts to make better gear to hunt more powerful monsters'

Instead of mowing down tones of small things though, you take down a single large and dangerous foe. As you progress, new and more powerful foes appear, but despite the large roster of monsters, they all feel unique. And while better gear certainly helps, a good deal of skill is also required.

Wait, the three mile island thing wasn't a joke?

I lived the collectibles in Anacronox, they were little golden taco trophies and their lore was that they used to be highly sought after until it came out that TACO stood for Totally Arbitrary Collectible Object and it tanked the market.

You meet a guy that held on till the bitter end but finally had to sell off his collection because he needed the money, so you give him any you find for trinkets and stuff to help him rebuild his collection.

Edge defaulting to the default pdf viewer is the bane of my existence

Kerbal space program 2 was somehow both rushed and delayed :(

Disposable vapes have to be a thousand times worse than k-cups.

I was floored when one of my coworkers was showing off his vape that played games and stuff and said he went through one a week.

Didn't the bell riots really spark on the third though? We still have days to milk this!

I guess way back when microsoft said than win10 would be the last version of windows, what the meant was it would be the last anyone wants to use.

Remember when it was first announced, and they said it was gonna come out like 6 months later? And then it finally came out in a barely playable state like 2 years later

They were originally indie games that were released back in October, and then the dev just recently changed the store info to match that of helldivers