Belegorm

Strategy games are way better with mouse and keyboard, like RTS's and XCOM.

My brain made me read the title as "Sins of a Solar Empire" another strategy game that's probably one of the greatest of all time.

I have a bit of a different take on this - I never beat a modern roguelite. I'm bad at the actiony parts of Spelunky, or the planning of Darkest Dungeon.

What I have done is beat Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup three times. This is a really classic style tiles-based roguelike that's been around a long time. I appreciate the slow pace, the many different playstyles, builds, differential routes and such. It's also pretty long - I think maybe 10 hours for a full run? But learning my way through the game is great. Nothing like training up an army of orcs as the orc messiah!

I have not. I have considered it previously though, for a new expansion or big patch drop for FFXI or FFXIV. But the timing never really worked out.

I recommend Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Easy to learn, hard to master, free, and you can see your scores etc.

Turning 30 myself really soon, but will probably end up spending it overshadowed by our kids' birthdays which surround my birthday somehow.

My wife saw me playing FFXIV after a long hiatus and she started playing with me a month or two ago.

I agree WoW is a good idea, but surprised you mention FFXIV might be too much since WoW always seemed like the more hardcore game and FFXIV the more casual game. FFXIV is known foe being a "my first MMO" game, as it is for most Japanese players.

At any rate my wife's been enjoying it. We both play on PS4 controller, MMO hotbars seemed complicated to her. She doesn't really play games much but she's doing okay, even if not top DPS or whatever.

Still, can't go wrong with WoW or FFXIV I think.

Reminds me of the time I got into Granblue Fantasy, a game that I believe has generally well-regarded gacha mechanics. Most people would just spend the crazy number of free pulls as you got them.

However, people who knew what they were doing would save 300 pulls and wait till a particulat event (there were two, one every 2 weels roughly) and spend them all. In addition to what you got from the 300 pulls, you got to choose whichever of the most powerful characters you wanted, for free. If they were new you'd get an increased pull chance for that character. So many endgame competitive players played totally free. Not sure if Genshin has a system like that but I consider that the gold standard of gacha mechanics

@nodima: Just wondering, after playing in the beta why didn't you continue with the retail release?

I could be wrong, but looking at the screenshots, it looks a lot lower res then last time I played. If you turn up all the settings to max in that config tool and then the mess of options menus in game (like finding a 16:9 aspect ratio), it actually looks pretty nice even now IMO, particularly when compared to like EQ1, which FFXI was closely modelled after. Also I hope you used a controller, makes the archaic controls and menus more bearable. Not to mention that there's a lot of 3rd party addons most people use that skip the whole playonline login process now...

I totally get that the game is both horribly complicated and unapproachable these days, both by how much the original, 2002 version didn't give a fuck about you, and how all of the new tutorial quests are overwhelming. The original version was like "here's the town, get on out there!" and you kind of figured things out by trial and error, or by consulting a guide, or asking people. Annoying but just took time.

However, now there's endless quests and menus you're fighting the whole time that definitely makes the new player first 10 hours way more complicated. Streamlines the whole 1-99 process but complicated. Personally the times in recent years I went back I played on a private server for the 75 cap era experience.

It's definitely a relic of its time; you can excuse the archaic MMO design of the original launch due to being pre-WoW and also designed for PS2s. No updates to that are less excusable (well maybe; according to the devs the only way they can develop it further is on like the last working PS2 devkit lol).

I still enjoy the battle system, being slow-paced, using my macros for everything (never using the battle menu lol). Skill chains and magic bursts were great, with a party (still can get that on private servers at least). I always liked getting my newest, coolest weapon skill, the moment I unlocked stringing pummel for my puppetmaster was great.

Two things I think that FFXI still has above FFXIV are its community and incentives to do the end-game content. In FFXI you had to rely on other people, otherwise you'd hit a wall real quick. In FFXIV, it's an MMO but I don't need to talk to anyone hardly. Also in FFXI it feels like there's always some amazing piece of uber gear I need to go figure out some additional battle system to go get, my character is getting stronger over time with all these crazy gear pieces that you swap on the fly. Less true now in 2020, but not long ago (probably in fresh Adoulin era at the latest) you had at least a dozen worthwhile end-game systems to go fight to get stronger. FFXIV on the other hand... you grind tomestones and it hands you the best gear in the game (or almost best gear in the game). If you want to be optimal you can do the hardcore raids, but a tiiinnnyyy percentile of the community (at least on NA) actually participates these days. Whereas in FFXI, at level cap, the end-game gear grind is the game.

That said, I play FFXIV these days since I sadly don't have the time commitment required for FFXI anymore and FFXI is in maintenance mode (some story content came out in August, the first in 5 years which was pretty cool though).