External hard drive formatting

I have a 1TB external hard drive formatted as NTFS. It has around 600GB of downloaded games, so I wanted to keep using it. But, as I was warned, I’ve been having lots of problems — Steam games won’t stop updating, I lost progress in almost all of them, and many won’t run no matter what I try. Because of that, I’ve decided it’s better to just format the drive and re-download everything. I’d like to know which file system I should format it to, and how to do that. Thanks in advance!