After having spent about five weeks enjoying newly married life, travelling through Spain, riding horses, eating good food, drinking good beer, and driving a powerful car through the Spanish highways, I’m finally back to Iceland.

Despite the depressive shock on my return, there is one positive aspect to it, and it’s that I’m finally able to play more games and write more about it. In the time I’ve been away, the community has continued to grow and The Game Enjoyer has grown with it, and now, in the second year of TGE, it’s time to continue building upon it.

Therefore, and with no more delay, let’s get back to the Monthly Issue!

The Eyewitness

• SONY announces no more physical game copies starting in 2028: Terrible news for gamers that enjoy collecting their games and who are worried about losing access to their digital libraries. For me, personally, it’s a terrible choice. Losing the options is always bad, and while I usually buy digital (because I don’t have space for a lot of physical games) I don’t like the idea of not being able to buy a game disc even if I wanted to. The second-hand game market will die.

• XBOX fires 1600 employees in one day: Asha Sharma published an email in which she explains that a big re-structuring of Xbox will be happening into 2027, including the immediate layoff of 1600 employees, with another 1600 on the way as roles are eliminated. Everything is done in the name of making profit. I get it, it’s a business before anything else, and at least she is being transparent about the real motives, but it’s never good to see the industry shed employees like this.

• IO Interactive’s Project Fantasy has funding pulled and begins independent development: Project Fantasy, an upcoming online fantasy RPG by IO Interactive (Hitman, Kane & Lynch, 007: First Light), was being developed by IOI’s Istanbul studio, but after XBOX pulls their funding, the studio is closed. At least IOI has maintained ownership of the IP, and development will continue independently.

Upcoming: Grand Theft Auto VI (November 19, 2026)

After yet another delay, it seems like, finally, Grand Theft Auto VI will be releasing this November. I have a strange relationship with the GTA franchise. I like the games, but beyond playing the stories and doing some of the minigames, I don’t find them to be particularly interesting sandboxes.

I am pretty sure that the story in GTA VI will be great fun, and I am now very interested in seeing the immersion that the game can provide. However, the one thing that I am really looking forward to is the Online variant.

Whenever it comes out, I am sure that GTA Online (for the new game) will be a great source of fun with friends in the same way that Red Dead Online was great fun if you could group up some people to run missions with.

Regardless of online or single-player, if the game proves to be as immersive as RDR2 can be, I’m in for a good time.

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The following section contains spoilers about the mentioned games.

Journal: Undertale and DELTARUNE

I played Undertale when I was 17 years old. I had an old laptop that was not good for playing any modern videogames, and it even struggled with League of Legends. Undertale, however, ran perfectly. I saw it gaining a lot of attention online and decided to try it out, and it had me hooked for a long time.

I’ve always liked games with deep lore and cryptic characters, but it wasn’t until much more recently that I finally understood the themes of agency that were present in the game, and not just its subversion of the RPG genre and the idea of empathy and morality when you have the power to undo your actions.

When DELTARUNE first came out, I expected more of what Undertale originally delivered, but it is quite different. While Undertale makes a point out of the fact that it is a game, and this affects the story, DELTARUNE’s main theme seems to be agency.

Every character in the game has their own personal story about agency and loss of it, and after having recently beaten Chapter 5, I can’t stop thinking back to the times where I would read theories about Undertale, W.D. Gaster and the possibilities of whether DELTARUNE was a sequel, a prequel, or an entirely different game.

Now Enjoying: Halo: The Master Chief Collection

As you know by now, Halo is my favorite game franchise. Adding up all the games play times, I must have racked up something like 4,000 hours. Those are rookie numbers for most people, but for me, it is a lot.

The Master Chief Collection is, for me, the best way to play the games now. After having beat the campaigns several times, and going back to its matchmaking every now and then for a few games of shooting and riding, it became just a background game for me, something to boot up a couple times a month to play while chatting with my friends. But now I have a goal in mind:

While I know it might take me months, or years, I am slowly chipping away at the massive amount of achievements available for Halo MCC. And not only I am making progress, I am also having a lot of fun with it. Finding little easter eggs, trying to beat par times or par scores in the campaign, and slowly building up to the bigger achievements like accumulating 2,500 Assist medals has been like a breath of fresh air to my Halo muscles.

I will keep you all posted as I make my way through the list.

The Poll: Summer Sales!

When I started The Game Enjoyer, I did it out of three reasons. One, to provide my grain of sand into trying to combat the modern wave of negativity towards the majority of games that have released.

Two, to polish my writing skills, which had become rusty over years of disinterest in writing. Three, because I wanted to try and prove to myself that someone could be considered a decent “games journalist” without having to rely on being unfairly harsh or suspiciously positive.

I never expected this Substack to take off the way it did, but after one year of TGE, it’s clear that something must have clicked with many. I don’t know if it was the interaction with other languages, or a coincidence with Substack’s own Onboarding program putting TGE in front of many new users.

I came to terms with the idea that the subscribers are there, the views are there (although not matching the subscribers yet), and rather than it being an error or an issue with the system, it might be because I am writing something that people want to read.

Am I good at writing?

I’ve always had a pragmatic way of doing things and perceiving success. I never want to jump to conclusions and I prefer to temper my expectations. This is useful, and every time TGE has had a leap in popularity, like my post about old-school RPGs getting hundreds of views for the same time, or breaking the 1000 subscribers barrier in late April, it’s been a huge surprise because I never expected it.

It doesn’t mean I am expecting this kind of hits now, but I believe we have a big community in the gaming Substack now, and I am glad that I am seen by people, because I try to spread positivity, and we are in short supply of that.

My issue with monetization.

Recently, Harrison Polites decided to drop his paywall, and after reading his article, I was impressed by his mindset. Using his paywall exclusively for an archive, but still allowing free subscribers access to all of his new posts.

When I created the Substack account, I was bombarded with constant reminders to set up my pledges and paid subscriptions. At first I refused to do it, because I didn’t think anyone would want to or have to pay for whatever poor quality articles I would write.

Then, just to clear those notifications, I tried to set up paid subscriptions, and realized I was unable to do it. I forgot about it, because from the day that I created TGE, I decided I didn’t want to put any content behind a paywall.

No disrespect to any writers who do charge for some of their posts, of course. I simply thought I wasn’t good enough for it.

Has something changed?

Not really, other than the fact that, during my vacation in Spain, I was able to set up my paid subscriptions and pledges. I had a dilemma about this for some time, because I have settled into the rhythm of 4 posts a month, and I don’t want to take that away from any of the free subscribers. And I finally came to a realization.

The Game Enjoyer’s paid subscription model.

Because Substack writers are, basically, content creators, and Substack does not specify that you must have a paywall, I realized that I could have paid subscriptions on, even if I didn’t offer anything for paid subs exclusively.

The subscription would work simply as a means of support. Pay whatever the pledge was (I recall setting the minimum amount) simply for the action of supporting TGE with some money, which would allow me to declare my gaming costs as business expenses (maybe not, but I am not opposed to researching this).

So, still, one post every Friday, four per month, all free for you to read. And then I realized, July has five Fridays. Then I thought I could offer something for the paid subscriptions.

So here is the paid model. Every time there is a fifth Friday, there will be an extra article that will be paywalled. This is the way I came to terms with both sides of TGE.

I maintain my four posts a month for free subscribers, but I also offer special content for anyone who would like to monetarily support the Substack.

Is this a definitive, forever model?

No, unfortunately. As life goes on, my availability to write can change. If I run out of ideas, I will prioritize the free articles. When I was promoted in April this year, my amount of free time for writing was reduced drastically. Once I become a father (soon, I hope), I might have even less time to write, due to having less time to game.

But I cannot plan so much ahead. For now, this is it.

For you, free subscriber.

With the surge in subscribers since March, I have met many new, wonderful people in Substack. Some are writers themselves, others are readers who engage with comments. Some have even reached out to me directly through DMs to ask for opinions and advice.

When I started TGE, I never expected that it would get to this point, the engagement with the community, the visibility, and most importantly, the amount of people who agree with my takes, in the sense that people tend to be so positive about gaming.

I wanted to write to extend my own positivity towards others, but at the same time, others’ has rubbed off on me, and I enjoy gaming more because of it. So thank you, kindly, and I hope you will continue to read The Game Enjoyer, for free or not!

Even though, like many, I didn’t come to know them until I played Dark Souls on a PS3 (I know, I know). That was right when their games started rising in popularity, with the Dark Souls franchise and Bloodborne starting the trend of the souls-like genres and the now old discourse among gamers of whether these games should offer a difficulty slider or simply present you with their base design.

If you ask me, despite the fact that I find these games particularly difficult, I defend that they should not have a difficulty slider, but at least allow you to fully pause the game (gamers that are also parents would agree with me, I’d hope).

So, if I seem to be positive about their games, why can’t I enjoy them?

I’m at odds with their combat philosophy.

I will first of all state which games I am specifically talking about:

• Dark Souls

• Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin

• Dark Souls 3

• Bloodborne

• Elden Ring

• Demon Souls (the PS5 Remake)

• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

I haven’t engaged with their older games, nor with the Armored Core franchise, or King’s Field. I started with the Dark Souls trilogy, and at first, I followed my favorite RPG tradition: build a tank.

I started putting points into Vitality and Endurance, scavenged for some good, heavy armor, and as expected, I plowed through most areas in the first few areas, as most of the regular enemies were not so dangerous. But the boss fights… I always struggled. It took me some time until I was told that tank builds are different in Dark Souls. You are not going to outlast your enemy by trading blows, and your shield is not going to be an invincible bulwark against the onslaught of your quarry’s attacks. Being a tank simply means being able to survive four or five hits instead of two or three.

I quit that playthrough on the return to the Undead Asylum. Years later I tried again, using the famous GiantDad build, and made it quite far, all the way into the Duke’s Archives, before I quit due to the disappointment that every fight relied exclusively on knowing how to dodge and parry everything and using an overpowered build to smash the boss.

Some time later, I tried one third time. I wanted to play with the fact that in Dark Souls (and other games like it), status effects can be applied to bosses too. I wanted to be smart, see what a boss was weak against, and equip myself properly for it. Still no luck.

Is this in any way me considering the game’s design to be bad? No, but rather me just not understanding something crucial about how the game is played that never clicked.

My experience with every other game was the same, except for Sekiro and Elden Ring. In Sekiro, it was all about the parries. In Elden Ring, I tried using magic and made it quite far.

What I do love.

I am particularly sad about not enjoying the games, because they have many things that I love. Their music, the graphics, the world design, the deep lore…

This is the reason why I keep coming back to the games, even when I am pretty sure that I won’t finish it. I admire From Software for being a developer that sticks to their design philosophy. They want you to play the game their way, to learn from your mistakes, to get up when you’re knocked down, and to feel a true and complete sense of accomplishment when you finally defeat your foe and emerge victorious past the fog gates.

The music and voice acting is always superb, the artstyle fits the world and the vibe, and the world design and lore provide such an immersive experience (and if you read TGE, you know immersion is the prime quality for me).

If anything, the only downside I would give these games is that their worlds always feel quite dead. Of course, this is by design, but I can only play so many games where my character is a nobody that embarks on a quest through the ruins of a once great world in order to accomplish… something.

My bone to pick with the combat.

Not counting Sekiro, I feel like the hitboxes in the FromSoft games are unreliable. For a game that not only expects you to be good at dodging and parrying, but also the consequence for failing to do so is losing progression, being sent to the last checkpoint and losing the items you used, I feel like the quality of its hitboxes does not accompany what they expect the player to do.

Of course, this is a skill issue, but for my taste, when you need to develop extra skill to compensate for a part of the game that is not well made or polished enough, it should not be an expectation for the player.

There’s also something that has been polished over time, but it’s the janky animations. Rolling behind a charging enemy, a hulking titan wielding a huge club above its head, thinking that you’re safe behind it, only for the enemy to turn on a dime, facing you right as it unleashes its attack, is something that always infuriated me.

All it took was more time to get used to it, but why would I have to fight my own intuition as a player? If you ask me, better animations could have (and did, eventually) allow for a more fair challenge.

Still, ultimately, my final gripe with the combat is how far they have gone with the boss combos. I can explain my issue in one single sentence: “I don’t like only being able to hit my enemy once or twice as it does a 10 hit-combo that I have to dodge perfectly.”

Is it skill issue? Yes. Is it still a valid opinion? Yes. And I will continue to play FromSoft games, eventually finishing one, I’d hope. And I will continue to be annoyed when this kind of design makes it through, despite knowing that it is by choice, and my own choice to play it.

Conclusion

I really wish I had the patience for a game like this. I will always admire and enjoy parts of the FromSoft games, and do my best to play them to completion, but it simply does not click with me.

That’s okay, however. There’s hundreds of games for me!

What is my ideal MMORPG?

I have a penchant for massive online worlds, ever since I tried Star Wars Battlefront 2 as a child. When I didn’t know much about games, names like World of Warcraft or Runescape didn’t mean much to me, but I already knew that I liked the idea of being in huge maps sharing a game with other people.

When I was a teenager I dedicated time to my first proper MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and then the concept finally clicked when I fell in love with Final Fantasy XIV.

In the past year, writing for The Game Enjoyer has helped me analyze my own tastes much better, and I feel like I am really in tune with myself, with what I enjoy about videogames in general, and particularly what I seek out of this specific genre that I so enjoy.

What I turn my nose up at:

Over the course of my gaming life so far, I have tried many MMORPGs due to many reasons: lack of a high spec computer, no money for subscriptions, or curiosity about older games has made me play things like Star Wars Combine, Azusa Online and other more well known games like Throne and Liberty or New World.

The reasons I’ve had to not continue playing one have been pretty consistent. I am not a fan of grinding, or daily rewards, and I am put off when a game’s community does not engage with each other.

Games like Black Desert have lost my interest immediately after character creation due to the way the game is played. I am not competitive when it comes to progression, but when a game expects you to perform repetitive tasks over and over for a minuscule increase in stats, I check out.

When a game offers me a nice screen on login with a calendar, expecting me to play the game at least once a day in order to receive increasingly valuable rewards, I check out. Not because I don’t care about the rewards, but because the feeling that I am missing out on a good reward if “I don’t log in today too” stresses me out.

When a game offers me minuscule skill progression, and I have 20 different buttons for combat at level 3 and barely anything new at level 50, I check out. I love to feel how my character goes from a simple low level mage or warrior with one skill at my perusal, gradually, to a high level mage or warrior with two full hotbars to use during combat.

I am very picky with my games. When the supposedly “massively multiplayer online” game is massive, but people are not playing together, then it also turns me off from it.

What I seek, then:

When a game provides me with a blank slate for a character, a relatively weak adventurer that I can develop into a powerful hero, and progression means it takes time to level up, complete quests, and invest into finding, purchasing or crafting better gear, that’s the kind of game I enjoy.

When the story and world are designed cohesively, so that it feels that I am playing through a fantasy world, rather than a theme park created to funnel me into the specific activities that the game wants me to do, I am invested.

When fighting enemies feels like a real threat, and missing out on my skills or gear can make the difference between beating them or being sent to the respawn (or losing my character), then I am invested.

When other players run around and chat and are open to collaborating, to make quests easier or to complete dungeons and other instances, and I don’t need to rely on third party apps or the game’s own party making system, I feel like the game rewards you for socializing.

If you have been following this series of articles, you know what it is that I seek already, so we can really move on with it.

What game, if any, has met my standards so far?

As of June 2026, I have played 5 MMORPGs while following a specific set of rules in order to discover if these games are my “ideal” one: Turtle WoW, SWTOR, The Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2. I spent a month in each of them, more or less, took notes, then debated myself on how well they fit the mold. There will be 5 more games to come in the rest of the year, so I cannot say there is one specific best option, but so far:

The ideal Challenge: Turtle WoW

When it comes to the challenge, I realized that after playing Turtle WoW I had continued to do Ironman attempts in every other game. This was a mistake, because not every MMO treats death in the same way.

You are expected to die at some points in certain MMOs, but the ones that offer Hardcore challenge are the ones where you know the game is designed for you to be able to make it through with a single life. Turtle WoW, and by extension, WoW, are games with a particular challenge, aside from its Hardcore mode.

When I played tWoW, I found every single encounter to be threatening. Some people might find this annoying, as you don’t want to fear for your life every time you fight, but in my case I found this challenge refreshing. Every time I travelled between safe zones I knew that a stray enemy could aggro me, and if I wasn’t prepared to retaliate, I might be in trouble. I also knew that if I wasn’t alert, I might accidentally end up outnumbered, and that could easily lead to death (and it almost did once).

Other games have been challenging in other ways: in SWTOR, Heroic areas provided a big challenge, FFXIV has extra, optional dungeons and boss fights that are harder than their base versions.

Despite that, the game that, so far, remains the undefeated best at providing a fun challenge is (or was) Turtle WoW.

The ideal Immersion: Final Fantasy XIV

What is the point of playing through your chosen fantasy of being a hero in a strange setting, if the setting itself doesn’t feel real? Many MMOs provide players with a huge world, full of interesting lore and characters, and then make the player interact with the world.

Other MMOs create a huge world with interesting lore and characters, but do not make the player interact with it, making most players unaware that they are in a fantasy world.

For me, games where I am forced to interact with the world and its characters are more enjoyable that games where I’m not. If I must go through doors and complicated city layouts to reach my targets, perform manual tasks, look at maps and read journals instead of having quest markers everywhere, then I forget that I am playing a videogame and I immerse myself in the world really well.

In this regard, Final Fantasy XIV is the game that I have felt the most immersed in. Crafting my own gear and actually seeing my character perform the crafts is part of it, but also taking the airship, porters and ferries to move around the world, talking to the different shopkeepers and completing the many, many side quests that provide insight into what Eorzea is like. The MSQ only gives you a quick glimpse of what the world is like, and then encourages you to go and invest more of your time on it by yourself.

The ideal Socialization: LotRO/FFXIV

I have a hard time playing MMORPGs when players act like they are alone in the world, because it somehow isolates me from the online aspect of it. When I see people chatting in the general (or local) chat, emoting together, and generally being open to engaging with strangers, it makes the whole experience feel more real.

In this regard, I have struggled to decide which game fits my ideal better, Final Fantasy XIV or Lord of the Rings Online. On one hand, FFXIV had a community that was very eager to engage in a personal level. Everyone wanted to know each other and have fun together, and during my time in that game I met a lot of individuals who had very interesting personalities.

Meanwhile, in LotRO people who were most open to talking were either roleplaying or mentoring, and most of the conversation was about the game and its world and lore. When I played LotRO, every social interaction made me learn more about the world and the game systems, and while I didn’t make as many friends as I did in FFXIV, I have fond memories of having met strangers during my journey and receiving critical information from them that allowed me to survive even when going into high level areas.

My experiences in both games served different purposes: in FFXIV it tied the social aspect together with the immersion, enhancing how “real” it felt to be an adventurer in Eorzea, while in LotRO, finding people to ask for advice became a part of the challenge instead, and to quote the movie itself, “Frodo wouldn’t have gotten far without Sam”. Without every player that I met telling me what dangers lied ahead, I would have died way early.

Expectations for the future

I will be playing Final Fantasy XI in July, and beyond that I am still undecided. I know for a fact that FFXI will be extremely challenging. I am hoping to find more games that are challenging and rewarding, but I think the aspect I am most interested in at this point is a game where the social aspect is still important.

Since I have seen how third party apps and matchmaking features have made socializing near meaningless in this kind of games, I am looking forward to any kind of game where they have found the design solution to this. Removing QoL features might actually improve the game in some ways.

Recommendations

If you have any games that you think I should try this year, please leave a comment below with your recommendation and the reason why you think it could be an ideal MMORPG!

I first moved out of my childhood home in 2019, at 20 years old. I had lived there for approximately 10 years. After moving out, I would travel back to visit once a year, sometimes more. In the past five years, I started realising that my mother’s apartment was visibly deteriorating: water damage had appeared on some walls, certain rooms had become empty and unused, with the door always closed. Many of my old things had been packed and put in a storage room so that my bedroom could be used by guests, and some doors had become wobbly and didn’t open and close reliably.

This also applied to her car: the keyfob was missing more buttons every year, new bumps and scratches appeared every time, and even the trunk’s opener button was now missing the button cover. This often put me in a state of wistfulness, thinking that somehow, this physical space becoming worn down was a real sign that my childhood and teenage years were also further and further away every time I visited.

Of course, this is simply because it’s what it is. Every year I come visit and things keep slowly deteriorating, and of course, my childhood is further away because I am becoming older. I shed the wistfulness quickly, and instead channel this train of thought into an opportunity for an article.

How I feel when my digital space becomes old and abandoned.

When I was about twelve years old I was introduced to the Halo franchise through Halo 3. What followed was years of spending summers and Christmas at my father’s house, the only times in the year where I could connect my Xbox 360 to the internet, playing matchmaking endlessly in queues of Social Slayer, Action Sack and Big Team Battle.

Even when Halo Reach and Halo 4 had released, I kept returning to Halo 3 because it felt the most fun to me, and it retained its popularity for many years. In 2022, Halo 3’s servers shut down, along with many other games. Of course, you can still play it offline, and if you wish to play Halo 3’s competitive modes, you can always boot up The Master Chief Collection to play it in an improved way.

It’s not the same, and you know it. While the MCC is a great way to play Halo, it’s not the same as the original. The menus are not the same, the culture and playerbase are not the same. Booting up my old copy of Halo 3 through backwards compatibility on my Series X, then trying to access matchmaking, gives me the same feeling as walking through my mother’s house and seeing the things that are missing or broken.

There is the familiarity, and the memories, but the knowledge that, despite being in the same place, you can’t do the same things you could before, and you can never go back to that place, is enough to make one sad and melancholic.

The feeling when the game is alive, but service has stopped.

In a similar vein sits Destiny for me. I am talking about Destiny 1, not the sequel. When I saw that Bungie was developing a brand new space shooter, and saw that it was meant to be an MMO, I was head over heels. I managed to get my hands on it two years later, when The Taken King had already released, but Rise of Iron was still not live.

It blew my mind, to have my very own character, existing in a world that acknowledged that every player was its own Guardian, all working together to defend Earth from the alien threats. I had many hours of fun patrolling the different locations, completing the story, dungeons, and eventually taking the fight to Oryx himself.

Then, when Rise of Iron released, I joined my friends to complete the story, upgrade my weapons, and survive the Archon’s Forge (an Horde-style activity in the open world). I recall having this feeling many times: after having spent a few hours at night playing with my friends, they would call off for the night, around two or three in the morning. We would be in orbit (just a menu, but with delightful design), and each of my friends’ ships would fly away when they disconnected, until only my ship remained. The song “Remembrance” would play while in orbit, and I sat in front of my TV, late at night, listening to it, and a little bit sad that the night of fun was over.

Now the song makes me long for those days. Of course, Destiny 1 not only still exists and is playable, but it’s also in a better situation that Destiny 2, since the sequel ended up removing parts of the game to keep its size low. You can still pick up Destiny 1 for consoles with all the expansions and experience the whole game from beginning to end, and there is plenty of people online who are willing to help new people party up for the harder content.

So, if I am so sad about Destiny 1, what stops me from just booting it up again? My friends aren’t playing anymore, and making new friends is possible, but it would simply not feel the same as when I did it ten years ago.

This is partly because the game was “abandoned” in favor of its sequel, but also because of a different feeling that I will bring up again later.

Why it still happens even when the game is alive.

When I was ten years old, I used to play a browser fantasy RPG called Sherwood Dungeon. Doing some research as I write, I find that this game still exists, even though it has lost almost all of its playerbase.

Back in the day, I would use a laptop and spend hours dungeoneering, collecting loot, and fighting monsters and other players. I never did any social activity or progress especially far. It was simply a silly game that I played for hours, just because it was fun. In this case, Sherwood Dungeon triggers more happy memories than sadness, but it is a case similar to the other two games.

The truth is simple. The deterioration of these digital spaces, whether it comes through abandonment of the game by its developers (by shutting servers or stopping maintenance or expansion) or its community (by players losing interest and moving to a new game), is not bound to make one feel sad by itself. It is because of any emotional attachment that we make to the game of our childhood that we then feel hurt when we see the game become old and abandoned.

Halo 3 is no different than my mother’s car and home in this sense. It’s a place or thing that once felt like home or provided me with an environment to be in for entertainment, and seeing it no longer active is sad, just like seeing your old dog become less mobile.

The fact that I am becoming older and these things are deteriorating can be sad, but it’s also an opportunity to look forward to the future. There are new games, new homes and cars in the future. It’s okay to have a comfort game, but it’s also great to have the time and space for a new one.

When you don’t let go of your abandonware.

In 2024 I spent a month playing an old, small online game called Underlight. The experience of playing this game was so bizarre that I don’t know if I can properly explain what it' is supposed to be.

This is a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) Online RPG that focuses on heavy roleplaying. The game itself presents a slightly meta narrative where your avatar is simply the projection of a dreaming person, into a plane called the Dreamstate, where the game takes place. There is no storyline to follow, as every single piece of lore other than the inception of the game has been crafted by the community through their roleplay and interactions.

In the game, one can fight monsters to level up, but new skills can only be learned from other players who are teachers. There are no quests, other than the ones posted by other players, and there are no NPCs at all. All shops are run by other players too. In its heyday, this was sustainable, but at the time when I played, this was simply a barren collection of abstract levels, inhabited by monsters, with empty rooms with lore to read, and the occasional presence of another player.

This other player was either a newbie trying out this free game from 1998 (such as me), or a veteran of the community visiting their favorite game. My time playing Underlight was quite enjoyable. As I like heavy roleplaying, I did my best to participate, and other players, both old and new, were happy to engage with me. I eventually quit the game, as I tend to do with sandboxes, because it is difficult for me to play for a long time if I don’t have a specific objective in mind.

In the topic of this article, what makes these veteran players stick to their abandoned game after 28 years? Underlight on Steam peaked at 23 players online back on the official Steam release, and averages about 2 players per day. At the time when I played, the Steam counts showed about 10 average players.

Clearly, the veterans who still play Underlight have a strong attachment to the game. Maybe they personally contributed to the lore, or they have great friends that they only ever meet in game. It makes me wonder if they don’t feel any kind of sadness seeing their game, which once could have a few hundred concurrent players, now an empty world for them to reminisce.

If they wish to spend part of their free time in Underlight, I cannot complain nor criticize, God knows I also spend much of my free time indulging in my own pointless gaming affairs.

Conclusion

If you have reached all the way over there, I want to thank you for tolerating my rant about such a simple topic. Yes, I feel sad at times because I miss how gaming felt when I was a kid. But I am also excited to see my future and what new gaming experiences await.

Normally I would ask you to comment with your own experience of feeling nostalgic over an old game, but I also want to ask, what is a modern game that has you excited to keep moving forward?

Who would’ve thought? Not me. Last year I started The Game Enjoyer because of two reasons. First, to simply engage my writing muscle as a hobby, as I had done it less and less over time and I found myself with an increased amount of free time.

Also, to try and spread some positivity around the gaming community. I struggled to find unbiased reviews from "professional gaming media, and content creators lean more and more into negativity, as this is what brings them money and attention.

Being completely unbiased would require a professional effort, but I am not a professional, so why wouldn’t I just allow myself to be more optimistic? It’s been one year since, and I’ve played many games, written many articles, and given deep thought to certain aspects that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’ve enjoyed writing, and it’s all thanks to you!

The Eyewitness (looking inward)

• Over 2,000 subscribers in one year: While 2025 was a slow beginning, 2026, with the current MMORPG series, consistent posting, and collaborations, has made the subscriber count skyrocket! A year ago I didn’t imagine getting to 100 subs, let alone over 1,000. It’s incredible to me and I’m really happy to be a part of the community.

• Extra languages not originally intended: While I exclusively write in English, I have found great members of the gaming community in Substack in Spanish and Italian. Substack is truly a gold mine for seeing other perspectives!

• Shoutouts and collaborations: I wasn’t aware of what Substack really is, and I was so happy to find great Substacks such as Peter Monks, Amy J, Brian Schneider, Luca Castronovi, Fran Pérez, Alex Antra and Harrison Polites, all writers that I very much enjoy reading and who inspire me to put more effort and polish into every article.

Upcoming: Another year of The Game Enjoyer

It’s one year done, but I’m still aiming to write for longer. I’m just getting started. I tend to alter my plans as I go, and considering how little I had in store at the beginning of this adventure, I think I ought to plan ahead better this second year.

For the rest of 2026, I am looking forward to continuing my monthly MMORPG series. In July, I will be playing the beta for Phoenix XI, a fan-server for Final Fantasy XI that aims to maintain the original of the classic versions, in a similar vein to how Turtle WoW did it.

Other than continuing the Monthly Issues, I would hope to still find inspiration and ideas to continue adding two extra articles every month. I would love to do more collaborations with other writers in the platform, both for The Game Enjoyer and for their own Substacks.

Something that I have thought about, but that I am unsure on how to put in practice, is the idea of interviews. If I can meet anyone in the industry; a developer, composer, writer… and talk to them about their game, it would make for interesting articles, but it’s a difficult thing to do, and I will have to plan it really well if I want to do it.

Regardless, I am sure that ideas for articles will continue to flow in for yet another few months, and I wish to continue writing The Game Enjoyer for long.

Journal: Looking back to 2026 so far

After having made the case in 2025 about being able to complete my game backlog easily when I take things in a more calm, casual approach, I found that I am now starting to juggle too many games at once.

For the months of April and May, I have been playing the monthly MMORPG for the article series, while also dedicating some good time to Red Dead Online, as well as playing some Halo: The Master Chief Collection in my pursuit of the most achievements I can reasonably manage to unlock. At the same time, I have been watching my wife (read the next section) play through Red Dead Redemption 2, and even started a Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Shield (which is making the game much more tolerable).

At some point I started feeling overwhelmed with the release of many other interesting games, such as PRAGMATA, or the new 007: First Light, doing my best to juggle them all so I can write about everything and also enjoy them personally.

I believe one month away from the computer, enjoying my vacation, will serve to reset my mindset and get back to what was working before.

Now Enjoying: Being married in Big 2026

At the end of May, me and my partner tied the knot and are now officially married. This doesn’t change much. We have been living together for over five years, we have many commitments and are in it for the long term, and now are officially recognized as a married couple with all the legal conditions it comes with.

Now that she is finished with Red Dead Redemption 2, once we are back home we will be playing 007: First Light, and I will continue with my own endeavors. With my trusty laptop to enable me to continue writing while abroad, I am playing some simpler games such as Warsim: The Realm of Aslona and Super Fantasy Kingdom, the kinds of games that I can play for twenty or thirty minutes when taking a break in between activities, or in the morning while having some coffee before the day truly begins.

The Poll

And if we take into account that it is still in development, and the release date for the final product is expected (and take this with a grain of salt) to be 2027 or 2028, it might become the most expensive.

It has been in development since 2011, and now, 15 years later, the currently playable product is a massive mess that is as impressive as it is disappointing. You know me as the Game Enjoyer, and there is a lot to love about what one can find in Star Citizen, but also a lot to frown at.

The project has currently surpassed $1 billion in crowdfunding. They made all this money simply from selling merch, game packages, ships, and sometimes even images of ships (I am not even kidding).

I am a big lover of sci-fi, and Star Citizen has been a game that I’ve been looking forward to since 2016, when the videos I saw about the game and its promises left a hole in my heart that I unsuccessfully tried to fill with No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous. Those two are good games in their current iterations, but there is something that Star Citizen does that no other game has managed to replicate right now, for better and worse.

The Project: What is Star Citizen supposed to be?

Star Citizen is led by Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing Commander series, as a spiritual successor to Freelancer, which was originally led by him but finished by Microsoft after he exited the project.

Much like its’ spiritual ancestor, Star Citizen is a space simulator, with a coat of MMO and expanding the gameplay with a lot of new mechanics and systems. The game was originally expected to be much smaller in scale, but as crowdfunding met goals further and further, the company, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG from now on) made more and more promises.

With every promise came the expectation of something new; a new addition to the list of playable ships, new gameplay mechanics, new planets and systems, new activities, etc.

Most of the features were delayed, but over time, the game became playable, crumb by crumb. First came a playable demo that allowed players to walk around an enclosed hangar to inspect the finished ships, including their exteriors and interiors. After this came the Arena Commander module, which allowed players to test fly the ships in combat and races in controlled servers and maps.

Then came Star Marine, the space-legs (first person view) portion of the game, as a PvP mode where players would fight each other with firearms in different maps.

Finally, in 2015, the Persistent Universe came out, the game as we now know it, which allowed players to seamlessly use their ships or walk, use other vehicles, and move around the system at will to perform different activities. The biggest update to this mode was delayed until December 2017, when Alpha 3.0 was released, signaling the beginning of the game’s real “early access” phase, in which we are now stuck.

Star Citizen is supposed to be, in its current state which is not the final release, a big space sandbox. Within it, you can live out the fantasy of being a freelancer in its set of 3 different star systems (Stanton, Pyro and Nyx) to do all kind of careers: you can be a trader, a mercenary or bounty hunter, a ship scrapper, a courier, a miner, and engage in all kinds of odd jobs such as hunting wildlife, repairing and fixing stations, refueling other ships, being a medic, hunting other players with bounties on their heads, finding missing people, scavenging for loot, etc.

This is not even taking into account the variants for each career, as it is not the same to make money trading legal goods than to make money running drugs.

Aside from the established missions, the game often offers events with bigger contracts that often require the cooperation of the community or server in order to be completed, with more complex and chaotic environments and bigger rewards awaiting at the end.

What about Squadron 42?

A single-player campaign was scheduled to release in 2014, but kept being delayed date after date, until it was put on hold. It seems to be slated for release at some point in 2026, but at this point I won’t believe anything until I see it with my own eyes.

Squadron 42 is meant to be a cinematic, single-player campaign featuring both space combat and ground firefights, with a storyline featuring a cast of renowned and probably quite expensive individuals such as Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Henry Cavill (The Witcher), Gary Oldman (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) and John Rhys-Davies (The Lord of the Rings).

The biggest aspect of Star Citizen to me is the freedom in its sandbox, so while the single-player campaign is not particularly appealing to me, I will play it if it’s well polished and has decent reviews.

The Persistent Universe: What it really is

At this point, I have explained what Star Citizen presents itself as, and where some of its flaws lay. However, the real product is quite different to what is promised.

In truth, logging into the Persistent Universe is simply crossing a threshold into a realm of randomness and endless possibility, as long as every possible good outcome also has an equally possible bad outcome.

Per example, one day I may decide that I want to spend some time doing bunkers. That’s the community’s way to describe the specific Mercenary contracts that involve you travelling to a planetary location to travel on foot and eliminate hostiles from a specific building, usually an underground facility, but not always.

As I boot up the game, I wake up in my last location, in an apartment at my last space station or city. I then commute towards the hangars: in a space station this simply requires taking an elevator down to the hangar hub, but in the city it involves having to take a shuttle or metro to reach the spaceport. The public transportation doesn’t usually bug out, but it can happen that it never arrives to its destination, or simply that it takes off into space (and no, it’s not supposed to).

If I make it into the hangar, I then head to the terminal to retrieve my ship of choice. When I click the button, I am assigned a temporary hangar as my ship is spawned. I take an elevator that takes me to the hangar. Sometimes, a bug causes your ship to simply not spawn, but if it doesn’t, then you can simply climb aboard and sit at the pilot’s chair. From there, I pull up my Mobiglas, the terminal for all useful info in the game, and get my list of contracts. I find the contract, if available, that asks me to help eliminate hostile forces from a facility in exchange for a few thousand credits, then turn on the power in my ship, engines on, and signal the hangar to open the doors so I can take off.

All of this usually works, and I particularly appreciate that hangar doors don’t open until you request so, as you could otherwise be an easy target for griefers.

I pull up the Mobiglas again, to check my star map, and set a route for the facility where my contract is meant to take place. I take off, leave the hangar, spool my Quantum Drive, align myself with my destination, and set off flying towards my objective.

This usually works well and rarely bugs out, and if it does, it’s due to the server itself failing, and not due to the game bugging.

On arrival to my destination, I already see some enemies crowding the entrance to the facility. Rather than landing and making an easy target of myself, I dispose of them with the laser repeaters at the front of my ship. Once the area is safe, I land, loot anything noteworthy from the bodies, and take the elevator down into the bunker.

Server FPS: The hidden dynamic difficulty.

Here, many things can happen. In Star Citizen, server decay actively shapes the game experience. A fresh server, with anything from 15 to 30 server FPS (the maximum I have experienced is 21), delivers a snappy and solid experience: doors open quickly, terminals react immediately, and enemies, both in space and on the ground, act smart and aggressively.

In the bunker, two things can happen. If server FPS are low, then the AI controlling the enemies (and, if alive, the allies) is sloppy and slow. Enemies seem lobotomized, they don’t make logical decisions, their reaction speed is slow, and eliminating them is more a matter of methodically sweeping the area rather than engaging in a proper firefight.

When server FPS are high, you go from predator to prey. The moment you make your presence known (either by taking shots at your enemies or by being seen or heard), hostiles become efficient hunters, closing in on your location, taking cover, providing suppressing fire for each other, and even retreating into areas that give them the advantage. Coming from someone who has played hundreds of hours of Halo campaigns, I must admit that, when it works, the enemy AI in Star Citizen is quite impressive.

If CIG manages to ensure that servers retain this performance even during peak player concurrency, then one of the aspects of the game will be praiseworthy.

After contract completion.

Once the enemies have been eliminated, I receive my payment, along with a notification that I am no longer allowed access to the facility, and I have 30 minutes to exit the premises before I am considered to be trespassing. This is enough time to loot the bodies of my enemies for ammo and other valuables and make my way back to the ship with no hurry.

Over time, I have accumulated enough money to purchase improvements. Maybe I am changing the components of my ship to make it better, or straight up purchasing a different one. Maybe I am renting a ship for a limited time to partake in a different loop, or getting a good set of heavy armor and weapons to tackle on more challenging content.

Regardless, there is no specific “endgame” right now, and all I have is the freedom to fly around and do any contracts that tickle my fancy, until the game has received enough updates that the developers say it’s time to wipe all progress again.

Eventually, if the game comes to a full release, the wipes will stop. And now, after reading all this, fully honest, first hand account of what playing Star Citizen is like, you must be thinking, “Mr. Enjoyer, why do you play it?”.

Why I still choose to play Star Citizen despite it all.

First of all, I must simply give credit where it’s due. Star Citizen is an impressive display of cutting-edge technology, and I believe whatever CIG comes up with in order to make their project come to fruition is only gonna benefit the games’ industry.

On the other hand, why do I play Star Citizen? Why don’t I just wait for the game to be fully done, so that I don’t have to wrestle with a myriad bugs, progress wipes, and the unfinished experience?

I love Star Citizen. No other game gets even close to its sense of scale. The idea of flying your ship with its fully rendered interior, landing it inside another ship with a fully rendered interior, as it also flies in the universe, all seamlessly and in real time, being able to land on planets or fly into space, it’s simply something that seems impossible and yet it exists.

Star Citizen can be one of the most immersive experiences of all time. Deciding to go out for missions and preparing your ship with weapons, ammo, food and drinks, medicine, then flying to the location, fighting your enemies, looting them, carrying the loot back to your ship and then taking off again? No other game does it like Star Citizen.

No loading screens, no tricks. Everything is physicalized, everything can be interacted with in one way or another. And of course, it doesn’t always work. In fact, it rarely ever works fully. Players have developed a kind of sixth sense for bugs, and they have learned the workarounds to all of them. That’s part of what makes Star Citizen be a really difficult game to get into: one can only truly play the game after learning how to avoid the bugs.

That’s no way for a game to exist, of course, which is why I don’t usually recommend people to play it. But if you are like me, and you love sci-fi, and you love immersive games, and you are willing to put up with a game that seems to actively work against you at times, then you might love it. After all, the cheapest entry level is $45.

Conclusion

Have you played or currently play Star Citizen? Have you thought about it? Most of my friends consistently refuse to engage in it, and I can’t possibly convince them to try it, because they have a point. Maybe it’s too late for me and I have been charmed by what the game offers. I’m looking forward to reading your opinion.

…and I spent it playing a big game. Guild Wars 2 is an MMO that I have played once before, but I never got too far into it. This time, after learning more of the mechanics in the game, I had a much more complete experience, even though it wasn’t my favorite

My objectives and rules

As it is the norm now, I created a new character and started playing following my specific set of goals and rules, which are as follow:

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

  • I will not use teleportation skills or features, but will use porters like horses when they are available.

And I spent May playing Guild Wars 2. This game is different to other MMORPGs in that there is no questing system per se, and anything outside of the main story is done dynamically with events and Renown Hearts, NPCs that lead a specific area and have a specific set of objectives to complete, but the world was open enough that I was able to pursue my goals and do my research more than properly.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 was released in August 2012 as a sequel to the original Guild Wars, with a story that is tied in from the first game through three novels (that I haven’t read). With its heavily customizable classes and some interesting features like a “choices matter” storyline and a huge open world to explore, Guild Wars 2 transported me back to the insatiable curiosity that I felt once before in Turtle WoW.

The game arrived to Steam in 2022, and became free-to-play in August 2015. With over 15 million created accounts, an original soundtrack which includes Jeremy Soule (The Elder Scrolls), and Liam O’Brien seems to be everywhere for the Sylvari. Echoing back to the January attempt, I made an Asura Thief.

The Challenge

While Permadeath is not a mandatory rule for me, I have pursued it in every MMO in the series so far, and I continued it with Guild Wars 2. The game offers a middling challenge, as every class has some survivability options, and the game itself has a very interesting system to give you a second chance if you fall in battle.

You enter a “downed” state where you are still able to (barely) fight your opponents, become invisible for a second to lose aggro, or possibly heal yourself (as long as you are not being attacked). The presence of jumping puzzles with fall hazards means that dying is still more than likely, but luckily I only had two brushes with death, managing to survive by reviving myself from the “downed” state after clearing off my enemies at the very last second.

The only quest to follow is the main story, which is unlocked in chapters every 10 character levels, while the rest of content is area locked. Every area has a certain amount of things to complete, including helping factions, climbing to find Vistas, completing Hero Trials, etc. as well as some dynamic events that happen occassionally or can be triggered manually.

I meddled with crafting for a while, but I found it to be so annoying and dependent on drop rates (that weren’t enough) that I did not want to engage with it. For now, FFXIV’s crafting system reigns supreme.

The Immersion

Guild Wars 2 puts a big focus on worldbuilding. Every race has its own lore, story and social environments. In the case of the Asura, the capital city, Rata Sum, is a confusing set of rooms and ramps distributed among three or four different floors. Even after spending some time running around the city during the main quest, I could never find my way around without looking at the map.

The game design allows for a quite immersive experience. Some quests involve you using tools or disguising yourself to interact with the world in a different way than simply fighting enemies. The gathering of resources occurs through mining, chopping or harvesting items in spawning pools that can be interacted with.

The game offers its own in-world explanation for the prevalence of teleportation devices, but the world itself is not designed for immersive journeying. Without looking at the map, it is not possible to go from point A to point B (two landmarks) unless there is a specific environment mark that shows the way or you check the map.

To put this into perspective, Turtle WoW had signs that told you where each road led, while FFXIV did not offer guidance on the overworld, but it had signs in the cities to show the way to different guilds and shops.

The Socialization

You’d think a game called Guild Wars 2 would focus on guilds and other kinds of player interaction. You would be right. The majority of the game environment is open and you can see other players participating with you in real time, and the group content like dungeons and raids is supported by a matchmaking system (that I wouldn’t use, anyhow).

During my time playing, I quickly made friends with a few players that I met in the starter area, Metrica Province, as well as the next zone. One friend in particular spent a good amount of time trying to help me understand the crafting system and being supportive.

Guild Wars 2 seems to have a welcoming community of players who love Tyria and wish to see more people enjoying their game. This time I did not join a guild, despite the name of the game, and did not participate in the biggest mode available, World vs. World.

The time I spent walking around Rata Sum let me see hundreds of other players, but I did not interact with most of them, except for one occasion where some hijacked my conversation with a friend to ask me questions about my play rules.

In general, I would say the social aspect is the peak of what Guild Wars 2 has to offer, not because the challenge and immersion are lacking but because the game itself is designed around allowing as many people to interact together at the same time, and, in the month that I have played, I have seen a surprising lack of toxicity compared to other modern MMOs (allowing myself to call this game modern due to its control scheme and design philosophy compared to others)

The Conclusion

To be as transparent as possible, I must confess that, after having played LotRO in March and Final Fantasy XIV in April, it was difficult for me to get fully into a new game. I was still particularly hung up on wanting to continue the previous adventure.

Still, I want to highlight the welcoming attitude of everyone in the community that I’ve talked to, and the fact that Guild Wars is full of content and does not force you to play it in a linear manner. The spirit of adventure, and choosing where to go based simply on your own eagerness to explore and the difficulty of mobs in each area, is preserved in this game in a manner that many other MMOs of the same era do not, including SWTOR, FFXIV or Neverwinter Online.

Because of the skill-based combat, the social environment and the decent immersion, I would rate Guild Wars 2 an 8/10 for this specific challenge and set of rules. It could do with a more fun and less grindy crafting system, but it’s overall a great MMO to play.

In June

In June 2026 I will be travelling for vacation, so I won’t have time to play any MMOs. This eventually led me to decide that the MMO series will settle at 10, 5 from January to May and then 5 from July to November, with a final article in December to bring the series to a conclusion.

I am hoping that the time off in June will help me recharge my MMO battery, as playing Guild Wars 2 after FFXIV has been quite draining, since they are two modern games with a big variety of mechanics to engage in.

• Read the January attempt: Turtle WoW

• Read the February attempt: Star Wars: The Old Republic

• Read the March attempt: The Lord of the Rings Online

• Read the April attempt: Final Fantasy XIV

In fact, the ability to capture screenshots and photos natively from the game (without resorting to third party software) has already existed in videogames even in the XXth century.

Games like Metal Gear Solid (1998) included a camera among usable items, which would then save photos to the console’s Memory Card.

Gran Turismo 4 (2005) included the Photo Mode, where the player could choose a car to display in tracks or other locations and take pictures of it to then save to USB devices.

Halo 3 (2007) evolved this idea with their inclusion of the Theater, a mode that would allow the player to observe replays of any previous content, from Campaign mission playthroughs to Matchmaking or Custom Games matches (including Forge). In it, players could observe the events from the perspective of any player in the match, follow them with a 3rd person camera, or simply control a free camera that could be moved through the environment as the replay progressed.

Players also had direct control over enabling or disabling certain HUD elements, name tags for players, and stopping, advancing or replaying segments of the recording, in order to make clips or take screenshots, which could then be shared into the game’s online "Shared Files” system.

In other words, virtual photography has been a possibility for almost 30 years now. What has really made it go from a gimmick to a requested feature is the graphics evolution in recent years. Players amazement and immersion in more realistic virtual environments pushed some people with the artistic penchant to become virtual sightseers, in a genius symbiosis that provides free marketing for a game, at the same time as it creates a new activity for players to engage in.

My first stint into virtual photography

Having no internet at home during the early 2010s, I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing Halo 3 in any way possible, including exploring maps in Theater Mode and watching recordings of my own campaign playthroughs.

I would often take screenshots of things that I considered cool, but would not upload them due to the impossibility of accessing the network.

It wasn’t until much later, in 2018, when Marvel’s Spider-Man came out for the PS4. I played that game a lot, and it’s one of the first videogames I completed to 100% including unlocking the platinum trophy. Other than the many things to do in the game, I also spent a decent amount of time playing around with the Photo Mode.

Back then I never considered it to be a particularly artistic endeavor, maybe because it was a superhero property or because the environment wasn’t so interesting (sorry, Manhattan). Still, this was when I started seeing more and more kinds of screenshots and composed pictures from people online, including some that were really cool or fun. Despite the simplicity of the Photo Mode in Spider-Man, some players managed to get really creative with it.

Photo Mode evolved and improved

Taking screenshots wasn’t anything that I was looking forward to, until I fell into a specific habit during certain times of the year. When my partner went on vacation while I still had to stay home for work, I would often send her emails once a day or every other day, telling her about my day, asking her about the vacation, and, at the end of the email, I would attach a screenshot from the game that I was playing at the time.

This was like a journal of sorts, where, in order to better illustrate what I was doing (like Alan’s attempts to escape the Dark Place or exploring the criminal underworld in Star Wars Outlaws, I would attach a recent photo from the game in question.

Now, I am not great when it comes to visual arts, but my partner’s interest in the photos that I took made me want to try harder to produce better looking shots. This was made easier by the fact that more recent games put more effort into their Photo Modes, allowing you to remove characters and items from the background, changing the time of day, adding extra light sources, altering field of view and depth of field, and many more details.

Photo Mode journaling

After I got used to taking photos in games, I started looking forward to it. In consoles, it’s easy to reach the photos’ location, allowing you to collect an album of your experience with the game. In PC, different games use different methods for screenshots, and the quality can be better, and it’s more convenient for later editing.

Eventually I would play something like FFVII Rebirth and take photos throughout the 100+ hours playthrough, and then sit back and look at them when I wanted to remember the game. This, in fact, tracks back to one of my favorite games ever.

Final Fantasy XV and Prompto’s photography

Final Fantasy XV, which turns 10 years old in November, is a game with a lot to love and a lot to hate. At least, that’s the average opinion, as some people consider it to be one of the worst games in the franchise, while others see past its many flaws and consider it to be one of the best.

Personally, I love it, admitting that its development and post-launch treatment was disastrous is not mutually exclusive with fawning over the beauty of its world, the great characters, and the amount of immersion it provides. One of my favorite things about it is, in fact, Prompto’s photography skill.

Throughout the game time, Prompto, one of the party members, will take photos umprompted (I’m sorry), whether it’s during combat, exploration, or other moments like camping, resting at a hotel, or in the car. Once the party decides to sleep, the game’s interface shows you the last 10 pictures that Prompto took. You can choose to save some to the album, up to a max of 100, as far as I remember. The album is then presented back to the player right before the final boss fight, asking the player to choose one photo to take with them into the final encounter.

This system automatizes something that many players would otherwise not do, and adds to the emotional strength of the game’s story as you are then reminded of the whole journey from its very beginning.

Journaling for Substack

Back in 2025, when I started this Substack, I wanted to use my own content as much as possible. Ever since then, I take screenshots in all my games as I play them, if I intend to write about them. I would say my Substack posts include about 90% of screenshots taken by me, with the rest of them being taken from Google when it’s about a game I haven’t played recently or it hasn’t come out yet.

Despite the motive for the journaling being Substack, it is an activity that I enjoy to a great extent. No matter what game it is, I have come to love fidgeting around in Photo Mode and would greatly miss it if a game came out without it.

Whether I’m playing through a horror story, a sci-fi adventure, a fantasy RPG, or hunting outlaws in Red Dead Online, the ability to capture my experience with the press of a button adds a lot to it.

And for those games that really lean into the photo aspect, I have slowly tried to improve my composition and be more artistic about it. If I really feel like it, I even post them to online communities.

Online communities

Photo Mode in gaming has reached a certain level of popularity, and one can browse through online communities like Virtual Photographers or Photo Mode Phantoms in Reddit or similar ones on Discord to see how many people really like sharpening their photography skills while in games.

Games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding (and the sequel) are some of the most popular games to take screenshots due to their graphical fidelity and the ability they offer to play with the frame and setting.

I have had a lot of fun with Alan Wake 2, Star Wars Outlaws, Death Stranding 2 and No Man’s Sky, and looking at other people’s pictures have inspired me to learn more about what makes for a good shot.

These gamers are no longer a minority, and it’s quite common to expect a modern AAA game to include a photo mode. Whether you are exploring the cosmos, fighting monsters in caves, investigating a case in the rain-soaked, neon-lit streets of a dystopian metropolis, or enjoying an emotional road trip through large expanses of forest engulfed highways, these digital tourists will be spend hours of their game time finding the perfect location, best angle, and specific settings to take the best photos possible.

And I will also be doing my best to provide The Game Enjoyer with the best screenshots that I am able to take. What about you? Do you engage with Photo Mode when you play a videogame?

When I was a kid, my only source of games was buying them physically at game stores and blockbusters (until they disappeared). For a console gamer, this was no problem. What else was there to do? Digital gaming did not reach the consoles until the 7th generation, and even then, bigger games were not easily available at first, with the PS3’s first fully digital “big” game being Burnout Paradise in 2008, and Microsoft turning the market in Xbox Live with their “Games on Demand” service in 2009.

When it came to computer games (whatever my old laptop could run back then), my only source of videogames was digital, and with no ability to spend money online, all I could do was pirate. This way I enjoyed TES III: Morrowind, UNDERTALE and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.

On the day I turned 18, I headed to the bank, commissioned a debit card for my bank account, and purchased UNDERTALE on Steam officially. I made a vow then that I would never pirate another game. Since then, I follow a simple rule of three steps for a videogame that I would like. I purchase it. If I cannot purchase it for any reason (if it’s too expensive, can’t afford it at the moment, or it’s not available for my platform), I wait for it to be available (waiting for a sale or new platform release). If it won’t be available to me, I don’t play it until my conditions change.

Following this rule so far I haven’t been unhappy about my gaming choices. This is where the Monthly Issue stops being about media piracy. Moving on!

The Eyewitness

• Turtle Wow shuts down: On a forum post, a team member of the WoW fan server announces that all services will shutdown after May 14th (today). I contacted one of the guild members that I played with in January to ask about this, and it seems to be a pity that most people will simply have to move on or play something else.

• PS5 digital games now have DRM: Playstation Support confirms that PS5 digital games purchased after the March update will be unavailable after 30 days since last PSN connection, even if your PS5 is set as the primary console for the account that owns the game. I don’t really know what’s the point of this, since most people keep their consoles online and those who stay offline do it out of necessity mostly.

• Gang of Dragon could be cancelled: After NetEase stopped financial backing of Nagoshi’s new project, it seems the developer has not been able to secure additional funding. With the studio's Youtube channel now having been scrubbed and deleted, the only sliver of hope that the project may be completed remains on the Steam page, which is still up.

Upcoming: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced (July 9th, 2026)

As I've explained before (The Game Enjoyer: Issue 3), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was the first game that made me cry, about 12 years ago now. Emotional attachment aside, I still consider it one of the best games in the series. It retains the classic combat style, which I see no fault with, while introducing a very nice RPG flavor to the naval side of things.

I have no negative opinions about Ubisoft, and I would like to see them succeed again. If Black Flag Resynced is simply a nicer coat of paint and a slight expansion to what was already a great game, then I will happily support them. I just hope it doesn’t mean that Ubisoft will be another company that makes all of their business simply remaking old games instead of creating new ones.

Journal: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is surprisingly immersive. While I didn’t explore all it offered back in the day, like playing Checkers or Nine Men’s Morris, fully engaging with the Kenway’s Fleet system, or even going all the way to upgrade the Jackdaw (the main ship) to its max capacity.

What I did engage with, however, was its notoriety system, with different levels of danger based on how many crimes you commit, which has pirate hunters spawn and come for you at sea.

I also spent a great amount of time sailing simply to listen to all the available and collectible sea shanties, as well as hanging out in taverns where NPCs play period-accurate music.

I spent many hours playing Black Flag, and I’m curious to see if the same thing will happen when Resynced drops in July.

Now Enjoying: Windrose

I picked up Windrose after seeing a lot of hype about it, mostly because I wanted to stick to the pirate theme for this month’s issue. However, this game has done nothing but surprise me in good ways.

I am not a big fan of survival-craft games, and normally I can only tolerate one for longer than two days if I am playing it online with friends. Windrose quickly relegates the survival aspect to the background, after a tutorial stage that leads to you rebuilding your ship.

Once you are able to sail, the game opens up and, despite it being in Early Access, the amount of polish and content already included in its current version is better than some of the most recent pirate games on their respective official launches.

Windrose offers an open story, RPG-inspired leveling and skill trees, base and ship construction, and resource management in a small scale that, personally, feels better. Of course, this is specifically because I am not a big fan of heavy management in games outside of a few very specific cases that have caught my attention.

Now, if only there was a Windrose that exchanges the Caribbean setting for a sci-fi one, I might have found a forever game for myself.

The Poll

Starting with their iconic showcase of Watch Dogs at E3 2012, Ubisoft has been considered to be on a downward spiral when it comes to the quality of their releases. Personally, I have found some of their post-2012 games to be quite fun, particularly For Honor (2017), The Division (2016), Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2017) and Star Wars Outlaws (2024).

Despite this, they have gone through a lot of trouble, and it seems now, with the upcoming release of Black Flag Resynced and their recent restructuring, they might have a shot at redemption, at gaining back the trust of some gamers (I know some who will never trust a developer after it messes up this badly), and becoming a successful company once again.

For me, shooters are one of the most enjoyable game genres out there. No matter the perspective (first person, third person or top down), there’s always fun to be had in shooting hordes of baddies, throwing explosives and punching them through the many levels a game offers.

However, when I was a kid, shooters were a foreign concept to me. I recall being 8 years old, sitting at my brother’s computer when he was out of the house, and launching some game he had installed. It was either Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, but I played it. I launched a tutorial mission, where the sergeant prompted me to pick up a gun in order to begin the training. Me, not knowing what button to press, tried everything I could while the sergeant became increasingly aggressive at my inaction, which ended up with me being shot due to insubordination, and a game over screen.

About 4 years later, I was introduced to the Xbox 360 by my cousin. He had it hooked to the ADSL router, and was playing a colorful and engaging shooter, where two teams of 4 soldiers clad in futuristic armor, blue and red, killed each other repeatedly as a deep voice announced the score.

My first foray into Halo was through playing Halo 3 on split-screen with my cousin. I played matchmaking with him, and I recall that I sucked. My hands sweated, my heartrate shot up. I had never played a shooter before, and he threw me into the deep end of the pool: my cousin was one of the best players in Spain at the time, and playing with him meant we often were matched with people around his skill level when we played ranked playlists.

While I became immediately hooked to the matchmaking, it wasn’t until he launched the campaign that I truly fell in love with Halo. The first few notes played by the flutes as the Chief speeds through the atmosphere, crashing into the jungle, with Cortana’s monologue playing in the background, were simply a prologue to a campaign that I would end up playing over 30 times by the time this article is released.

My history with Halo

After those first few days of experiencing the peak of Halo, I begged for an Xbox of my own, and, in December of 2010, I was blessed with my very own console, along with a copy of Halo 3. From then, it was ODST, then Reach, then Combat Evolved: Anniversary, and Wars, and the original Xbox version of Halo 2, and Halo 4…

Halo simply ranked at the very top of my overall gaming rank, did so for many years, and even now, if I had to name my top 3 favorite games of all time, I am pretty sure that a Halo game would rank in there.

After all, it is a franchise with over 20 years of tenure. Before I talk about it any longer, I would like to make sure that every Halo game is included.

• Halo: Combat Evolved (2001): The original and first. Difficult, with wonky physics and crisp sound effects. It retains its charm and is one of my favorites in the franchise.

• Halo 2 (2004): The sequel and entry that turned Halo into the king of competitive shooters at the time. Possibly the most difficult game in the franchise and arguably the entry for the hardest game challenge of all time, Halo 2 LASO.

• Halo 3 (2007): The final piece of the epic trilogy, nearly a masterpiece, and the greatest multiplayer game of the seventh console generation.

• Halo Wars (2009): The real-time strategy spin-off, which was surprisingly good and introduced some neat pre-rendered cutscenes. Local units!

• Halo 3: ODST (2009): The Halo 3 spin-off which bridged Halo 2 and 3, flirted with open world, and introduced a different style of soundtrack. Personally, the best game in the franchise, even though it is a hard competition.

• Halo Reach (2010): The end of an era. A prequel for the first game, and Bungie Studios’ farewell to their biggest franchise. A fantastic game with a tonal shift.

• Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (2011): The shoddy remaster of the first game, and the game with which I experienced Halo CE originally. Not so good, but still a fun game.

• Halo 4 (2012): The first game I ever preordered. Back in the day, I enjoyed it. Later on, I thought it wasn’t very good. I came back around to liking it after seeing what came next. It also featured a nicer looking version of Cortana.

• Halo: Spartan Assault (2013): A top-down, twin stick spin-off that contains a story set between Halo 3 and 4. I only played this for half an hour, it is fun, but not particularly memorable.

• Halo: The Master Chief Collection (2014): While this anthology had a really rocky launch, it is currently the single best way to experience the majority of what Halo has to offer.

• Halo: Spartan Strike (2015): A sequel to the top-down spin-off. I cannot speak about this one, as I haven’t played it yet.

• Halo 5: Guardians (2015): What is, in my opinion, the worst of the main entries. While not a bad game, it doesn’t hold up to the others. To be fair, its multiplayer was a lot of fun.

• Halo Wars 2 (2017): A sequel to the real-time strategy game from 2009. It was bigger, looked crisper, and was great fun, but it included some kind of deckbuilding mechanic that didn’t go down well with the fans of the niche.

• Halo: Fireteam Raven (2018): An arcade shooter, and by that I mean a big machine in arcades around the world. Unfortunately I have never had the privilege of trying one, although my best friend did and he said it was a lot of fun.

• Halo Recruit (2018): A mixed-reality experience. Honestly, I have nothing to say. I learned this existed just now.

• Halo Infinite (2021): The new main entry after 6 years of waiting, returning Halo to a more classic artstyle, open world, new storyline and eventually building up to be a great multiplayer entry. Unfortunately, it lost the majority of its playerbase before the game was good.

• Halo: Campaign Evolved (2026): The campaign of the original Halo, remade and being brought onto PlayStation systems as well! I am skeptical, but I will be following it with great interest.

With 25 years of history and over 15 entries, Halo is not only a shooter that changed the way FPS games are played on console, but it refuses to die, and it might yet make a comeback.

To me, it continues to mean a lot. I have great memories playing Halo, made many friends, spent many sleepless nights unlocking achievements. Seeing what Halo is now makes me a bit sad, but no game franchise remains great forever. Even Tetris has some bad versions.

To me, there are many things that make Halo feel special. In this article, I want to talk about two specific themes.

The lore

You cannot have fantasy or science-fiction (or science-fantasy) without a good amount of worldbuilding. Even the shortest story must include some background in order to provide context. Halo is an interesting case, because its lore is quite simple in the games, but it hides many layers of complexity that are explored in the books, but also in the game’s collectible terminals.

Most of Halo occurs in the 26th century. Humanity has expanded through the galaxy, under the banner of the UNSC, the United Nations Space Command. While originally only finding conflict with rebelling groups of colonists, most of the games focus on humanity’s war against the Covenant, an alliance of several alien species with a common religion, as well as the resistance against the Flood, an alien parasite that could potentially consume the entire galaxy. Of course, most of the conflict happens around the titular Halos, massive weapons of mass destruction that span the galaxy.

At this point you can already see some themes: the Covenant and the Flood, two biblical references. Halo is full of biblical references, quotes, and themes, but I will talk about it in their own section.

The main character in Halo is John-117, also known as the Master Chief. He is a Spartan-II, a super soldier, genetically enhanced, with a set of advanced armor, and often accompanied by an AI, Cortana. Master Chief is the protagonist in all the numbered entries of the franchise, as he faces Covenant, Flood, Prometheans, and Banished. With this very basic lore, one can understand most of Halo: The Covenant wish to activate the Halos in zealous ignorance, while the UNSC must stop them. The Flood are there to consume everyone. Every game progresses the plot in this kind of story.

But you can delve deeper into the lore. There are several kinds of Spartan, as different projects were made. Spartan-IIIs are disposable version of the IIs, with a higher rate of successful production. Spartan-IVs are an advanced version of the IIIs, less disposable, but not as effective as the IIs. The Covenant undergoes a civil war and separates in two factions. The Halos were built by the Forerunners, who also bickered among themselves. Humanity might have been chosen by the Forerunners as successors, or perhaps humans ARE Forerunners…

Through a combination of reading books and unlocking the terminals that can be found starting in Halo 3 and future games after it, anyone interested can discover the depth of the lore behind Halo. As a big nerd, this has always interested me, and I spent some of my pre-teen years writing fan-fiction about Halo, with my own characters taking on their own missions during the war.

The music

The music is, in my opinion, the single most iconic thing that Halo has going for it. It is no wonder that, for Halo Infinite, 343i (now Halo Studios) decided to re-use a piece of Halo 3’s soundtrack, and brought on Gareth Coker (Ori and the Blind Forest) to compose a soundtrack that got closer to the original trilogy’s as oppose to Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians’ soundtracks, which diverged from the original style while still maintaining some of the classic Halo leitmotifs.

When it comes to the music, there are two names that are legendary: Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori. Of course, I must add here that I consider Martin O’Donnell to be one of the quintessential videogame composers, alongside other massive names like Nobuo Uematsu or Yoko Shimomura, but I do not engage with him anymore in his involvement in politics in America. The Game Enjoyer is based in Iceland and I do not intend to discuss politics in any way.

As for the music, Halo: Combat Evolved would not have been what it is without its great themes, from the menu theme with those classic gregorian chants to the intriguing drums of Covenant Dance. O’Donnell and Salvatori cemented their status as legendary composers with Halo, and their work in Destiny continued to be great and one of the best parts of the Destiny franchise.

Even now, when I have played Halo so much that I cannot reasonably give these games any more of my game time, their music accompanies me. I don’t actively listen to it, but the themes just come to mind when I’m absent-minded or in silence.

Conclusion

Let’s take a break right here. The lore and the music are, in my opinion, two of the three key elements that give Halo its identity. The third is its gameplay, which has been altered in several ways throughout the franchise’s lifespan, but maintained a specific core.

Other than its gameplay, I would love to talk about the impact that Halo had in the market appeal of Xbox as a brand and consoles. How its multiplayer was an element in shaping the online culture of the time (especially between 2004 and 2010). This article would be quite long if I included everything I want to say, so I will have to continue in a separate post.

This one will do for now! Halo is a special game to many, and it is to me. How about you? Drop a comment!

Leave a comment

In April, I decided to play Everquest. Not Everquest II, but the original, which can be found on Steam to play for free. After doing a little bit of research on what kind of game it is, I decided to create an account and give it a try. However, I found it to be more complex than I was willing to put up with: the User Interface was really rough and required a lot of customising, the amount of servers to choose from was astounding, and each server offered a different amount of content and progression.

I decided to set Everquest aside and return to one of my favorite games of all time: Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn.

My objectives and rules

As usual, I wasn’t planning on playing the game in a normal way. Since I am looking for a game that will give me a very specific feeling, I have a set of rules and options that I must follow in order to find out the real answers to my questions.

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

  • I will not use teleportation skills or features, but will use porters like horses when they are available.

And I spent April playing Final Fantasy XIV Online. Since it is a game I am more than familiar with, I went ahead and added a special set of rules specifically for this game:

• I will only follow the Main Story when my progress is blocked.

• I will only use gear crafted by myself, once the ability to craft is unlocked.

With these rules in place, I intend to circumvent the issue with Final Fantasy XIV: Much of the gear is completely irrelevant, as the leveling is extremely fast and you find better gear just by completing the main quest.

Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn

Final Fantasy XIV Online was originally released in September 30, 2010, although the modern version of the game that has received critical acclaim, A Realm Reborn, was released in August 27, 2013, after Square-Enix gave the project to Naoki Yoshida to salvage it.

The original release was resource intensive, slow, laggy, and was designed similarly to Final Fantasy XI, the previous online iteration of the franchise. With its rework, A Realm Reborn made the game akin to other, modern MMORPGs, and it surrendered graphical fidelity in the pursuit of stability and polish.

10 years later, the story that was originally started in the original release came to an end after a set of expansions, from the masterful Heavensward, the expansive Stormblood, the edgy Shadowbringers and the final act, Endwalker.

I have a personal history with FFXIV, and you can read about it in Love Found and Lost: Final Fantasy XIV, as well as in Gaming's greatest moments by Harrison Polites.

Still, I decided to set all my bias aside and create a brand new character and stick to my rules. I wanted to experience the game from the perspective of a completely new player. Does FFXIV meet my standards in the golden triangle that I am, slowly but surely, formulating month by month? Let’s dissect it.

The Challenge

While FFXIV has always been an extremely easy game (to me at least), it does include some content than can be difficult. For the most part, its Savage Trials (Boss Fights for 4 players), Savage Raids (Boss Fights for 8 players) and Alliance Raids (Dungeons for 24 players in three groups of 8) are the biggest challenges available, and they sit in the endgame of their respective content packs.

Outside of this optional “hardcore” content, every quest, dungeon and trial that is available in the base game, either as part of the main story, or as an optional unlockable, is extremely easy, for many reasons:

• Lack of meaningful mechanics:

  • In the dungeons of A Realm Reborn, there are often side paths and puzzles that must be completed before finishing the quest, but in future expansions, every dungeon has been reduced to a hallway with a singular path to follow, cluttered with groups of enemies. All modern dungeons up to Endwalker are simply tunnels to fight through.

  • At the same time, boss fights have been simplified. While in A Realm Reborn, bosses could have specific mechanics, like having to hide behind pillars for certain attacks, or using items in the environment to weaken the boss, the modern ones only ever provide one mechanic: avoid the AoE attack or otherwise deal with it as appropriate.

    • To clarify, the different attacks that bosses can do often leave markers on players: some markers require players to spread, others require them to stick together, or stand in specific areas.

• Overpowered gear and stats:

  • The majority of quests in the game often reward you with gear matching the quest’s level, which means you are always able to equip yourself with some of the best possible gear for your level, ensuring you are never behind the best stats.

  • As the game is updated, classes’ skills and spells are buffed to match them to the new content, which in turn makes them stronger than older content. This caused a “stat inflation” which made content from 2.0 be extremely easy to beat in later years, although this was fixed not long ago by lowering all numbers and equalizing fight levels.

When I started the game, I quickly understood that I would breeze through the first 50 levels at a brisk pace if I played normally, even with my restrictions on party gathering and transport. This is the reason why I decided to only use gear crafted by myself, and why I wanted to avoid the Main Story Quest (MSQ) to not level up too quickly.

With lower stats as a result of not being able to constantly replace my gear with better items, some of my time spent journeying between Ul’Dah and Gridania was relatively difficult. Playing as a Thaumaturge, I had to fight enemies one on one, and make intelligent use of spells like Addle (to lower an enemy’s attack power) or Sleep (an Area spell to put enemies to sleep for 30 seconds) to ensure my survival.

The time spent crafting my own gear also slowed down my progress, but did not make it any more difficult. By the time I reached level 15 with my Thaumaturge, I realized I had to continue the MSQ, as I did not have access to Limsa Lominsa or La Noscea, the other areas available in the map, and therefore no access to airships, ferries, and some other guilds and quests.

Intermission:

Enjoying the read? You can check March’s attempt here.

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The Immersion

After removing the minimap, teleportation spells, and other players’ nameplates, I turned FFXIV into a more immersive experience. Starting in Ul’Dah as a Thaumaturge, I navigated the city by following the signs leading to each guild and important location, reading quest descriptions (which, thankfully, often provided directions to reach my destination without checking the map), or even trailing other players whose gear hinted at their destination.

By suggestion of a kindly Lalafell I once met in the city, I also put my camera in the first person perspective, and the scale of Ul’Dah really surprised me, even as an Elezen. Being able to teleport around made it so the scale of the world felt smaller, and so that you stopped visiting certain locations once you got done with them. When I wanted to go from Ul’Dah to Gridania, I couldn’t teleport, and I couldn’t use the airship (I unlocked it later), so I had to go from the city to Central Thanalan, to Eastern Thanalan, then to South Shroud, Central Shroud then Gridania. The whole trip would take a minimum of 10 minutes if I used the Chocobo porters, but longer if I just ran from one city to another.

While the world was designed in an extremely immersive way, and engaging with every crafter class all at the same level surprised me by showing that the NPCs often discuss items and ingredients related to their crafts, there was still the clash with other players. By level 15, I was clad in a full set of High-Quality Hempen Robes crafted by myself, along with some Leather Boots and Mitts. With my Brass Cudgel and Leather Targe, I looked exactly like any NPC Thaumaturge that you could find in the game.

Then I would take a walk through the city and pass a Mi’qote Dark Knight (If all these words mean nothing to you, imagine Gandalf the Grey standing next to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) with a greatsword with neon lights, wearing a sweater jacket, a t-shirt and some shorts and sneakers. As much as this used to annoy me, I was so focused on my mission to craft myself the gear and progress as much as possible within the month that I simply ignored them. There was still enough people who still looked like Eorzean adventurers.

On arriving to Limsa Lominsa, I saw more of the outfits that broke my immersion, but at this point, I had made my peace that this was simply part of the game, and I had found many other things that made the game immersive for me.

The Socialization

My first attempts at Socialization in FFXIV were some private chats with some high level players, asking them questions about the modern status of the game, and their thoughts on socialization. Most of the information I got was what I expected: most people originally made friends directly from the game, but then slowly ended up moving their chats to Discord, and now don’t meet many new people since their community is closed.

Later on I had a spontaneous chat with two Lalafells who were extremely friendly. They offered support and advice for my challenge, cheered me on (one of them sat down and played Megalovania on the bongos), and we even came to the agreement that they would spread the word of my challenge to have other players come chat to me if they found me in the world.

While every server has a specific vibe going on, Zodiark, the server I chose, seems to still have a little bit of that old-school life in it. Eventually I was invited to a Free Company (a guild) called Wildwood Sentinels, which set me in a position similar to how I was back in the January attempt.

Since I refuse to use Duty Finder, gathering a party for a dungeon is a matter of finding players in the overworld. When the MSQ finally prompted me to brave Sastasha, my first thought was to visit the closest city to gather a party. In Limsa Lominsa, which is infamous for being the most crowded and most inactive area in the game, I tried twice to convince fellow adventurers to join me, and I was ignored.

I tried to recruit players in Ul’Dah, my starting city, but it was so empty, the few players who were standing around who weren’t “afk” simply ignored me.

When I made it to Gridania, it took a while, but I convinced three random players to join me for the adventure. At first, a Lalafell, the Chocobo Knight, Nonovachi Tatavachi, who bought into my challenge, and then Noxer Skyblade and Mei Atoei, who agreed to help me. When I told them to meet me at the entrance of the dungeon (even though, technically, I could have prompted the dungeon start on my own even if they were somewhere else), they insisted on accompanying me in my slower pace of travel. We walked to the airship docks, took the airship to Limsa Lominsa, then walked down to the docks, took the ferry to Aleport, and finally made our way to the entrance of Sastasha.

The dungeon was extremely easy, but the experience of gathering my own party made a big difference. While the Duty Finder provides you with players, it is easy to see them simply as NPCs or tools to progress, and more often than not, you forget about who you were travelling with as soon as you part ways.

This is not the case. I will not forget any of the people who aided me, and I would like to think that, for however longer they continue to play FFXIV, they will remember the time when the weird guy who insisted on not teleporting rallied them to challenge the easiest dungeon in the game.

The Conclusion

As much as I love Final Fantasy XIV, I must be unbiased for the sake of this article. It is not a difficult game, and my set of rules don’t make it any harder, although they do make it more complex.

When it comes to immersion, I ended up accepting that, with the newer lore introduced to the game, more modern clothes and technology is simply part of it. I managed to remain immersed for as long as I avoided Limsa Lominsa. The socialization aspect was reduced compared to my original playthrough of FFXIV, but it was still there, so long as I was willing to initiate conversations.

Even though it was difficult, it was definitely possible to find party members to tackle on the group content through local chat, so in that regard, the socialization might be better off than I originally expected.

All things considered, for this very specific challenge, I would have to rate FFXIV a 7/10. While the immersion and socialization are taken far, the game provides a very underwhelming challenge.

Special Thanks

• Hidril Niort and the members of the Wildwood Sentinels.

• Nonovachi Tatavachi, the Chocobo Knight.

• Noxer Skyblade.

• Mei Atoei.

• Kofia Jenkins.

• River Lynn.

• Shinji Hirayama.

• Darsial D’ayalavalva.

• Rasadri Sirb.

• Adriras Sira.

• Nora Osatu.

• Eve Armstrong.

• Lucia Lockhart.

• Nick Rosenberg.

The May Attempt

After some research, I have decided I might attempt to play Guild Wars 2, although I am always open to suggestions!

• Read the January attempt: Turtle WoW

• Read the February attempt: Star Wars: The Old Republic

• Read the March attempt: The Lord of the Rings Online

• Read the May attempt: Guild Wars 2

As I complete the final mission, three days away from the article deadline, I decide that it’s enough. I have all the info I need for my article, and playing the game any longer only tempts me more to quit the challenge series and simply play the game itself.

I met so many people and took so many pictures, that since they can’t all go in the main article, I figured I could post them here.

The beginning of the journey! Just arrived to Ul’Dah.

First steps as a crafter, in this case a Weaver, which allowed me to craft my own robes.

After I braved the journey on foot from Ul’Dah to Gridania, and hanging out at the tavern.

Meeting Ras and Adriras Sira, two Lalafells who overheard me chatting in Ul’Dah and came to interrogate me about my challenge.

Cutscene time, unlocking the first of the crystals as part of the main scenario quest.

After taking the airship to Limsa Lominsa, I finally unlocked the remaining crafter and gatherer classes. Here’s me doing my very first fishing.

During some quests in the Black Shroud, I had to steer clear of this dangerous level 50 monster. A target for someone else.

After gathering a party in Gridania, my new friends and me completed Sastasha.

For the next dungeons, the Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Copperbell Mines, I gathered a completely different party: Kofia Jenkins, River Lynn and Shinji Hirayama accompanied me for the first and Darsial D’ayalavalva and Nick Rosenberg replaced the latter two for the Mines.

To get to the mines, Kofia provided me with a passenger seat in her mount. I got to be behind the passenger seat, in any case.

One night, I simply hung out at the Gold Saucer with friends, and even played a match of Mahjong with them.

For the final challenge, I tackled Ifrit alongside Kofia, Eve and Lucia.

And that was as far as I was willing to go, afraid that otherwise I may go off the deep end and abandon my articles to simply play Final Fantasy XIV.

Being the massive Star Wars fan that I am, when I first saw a video showcasing the fan-made Galactic Contention mod for Squad, the mil-sim PvP shooter, I had no choice but to give it a go. With my old gaming laptop, I was forced to keep the bells and whistles to a minimum, but it still resulted in an extremely immersive experience, where you don’t just play as a soldier, but as a member of a titular squad, coordinating with your teammates in order to build fortifications, capture points of interest and advance against the enemy.

I have felt the most immersed in Galactic Contention when playing as a partisan. Choosing the Engineer role, which armed me with remote explosives, I left my squad to fight on the frontlines while I stealthed my way through the enemy backlines, hoping to hit them in their supply lines. In order to maintain my location unknown, the role involved long periods of crawling through the jungle, hiding, observing enemy movements through binoculars, while informing my squad through radio, and occasionally, laying down explosives in their supply routes, waiting to trigger them at the right moment.

With nothing but the landscape and the ambiance, I often entered a sort of “trance” where I forgot I was playing a videogame. Instead, I had become the engineer and partisan, all of my senses entirely focused on the task at hand.

Being chased by Jack Baker in Resident Evil 7, by Tobias James

I grew up with horror movies, but for whatever reason, I actively avoided horror games for a long time. There is a comfortable distance that is exercised when watching a film–the idea that the viewer is simply a passive onlooker to events that have long since passed. Games tear down that barrier. Instead, the player is invited into its world and asked to become an active participant.

Mistakenly, I picked up Resident Evil 7: Biohazard thinking it was a traditional zombie game, as my only experience with the franchise up to this point was the mediocre Paul W.S. Anderson films from the early 2000s. Unknowingly, I went into the experience just as blind as Ethan Winters did.

As Jack Baker chased me through the halls of the Baker Estate, his constant taunting had me on edge. The instinct to run from danger is a primal one, and the first-person perspective made that fear omnipresent. Despite being infected by the Mold, Jack still appeared to be human, and it made his encounters feel less fantastical and the danger far more real.

I could not separate myself from Ethan, as we both shared the same terror. Unconsciously, I became him.

Living through Aloy in Horizon: Zero Dawn, by Margot Plays

I have been thinking a lot about immersion in video games lately, mostly because I know I have often used gaming as a form of escapism. Sometimes that means switching off after a difficult week, and sometimes it means stepping into a world that feels far enough away from real life to be comforting, while still believable enough to hold my attention. For me, immersion works best when a game gives me both wonder and logic.
That is a big part of why Horizon Zero Dawn had such a strong effect on me, and why Horizon Forbidden West followed it so well. Aloy being a female protagonist genuinely helped my personal immersion. It made it easier for me to connect with her perspective and feel grounded in the story rather than simply observing it from a distance, as I am a woman as well. That connection matters more than I used to admit, and I love that we see more and more female protagonists.

The sci-fi setting of HZD also felt unique in a way that stayed with me. Robot animals could have felt silly in another game, but here they felt imaginative and strangely plausible. Because I work in tech, the idea of a computer virus spiralling out of control and helping create this broken, beautiful world did not feel completely far-fetched. That balance made the setting easy to rationalise. It was different enough to feel like an escape, but understandable enough that I could really place myself there.

That is what immersion means to me: a game world I can disappear into without having to stop believing in it.

The introduction to Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, by Fran Pérez from Reverse

Translated from Spanish by The Game Enjoyer

Looking back, I can think of many games and specific moments that made me feel heavily immersed. Inside comes to mind, with its disturbing visual narrative that drags you into its world without text or voices, or Red Dead Redemption 2, which is so immersive, you sometimes forget about the missions and simply stroll on horseback while you observe the way the world and its characters interact.

If I must pick a specific, recent moment, I choose the introduction to Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

What Kojima Productions achieved with this intro is insane. Their opening, with its photorealistic imagery and Woodkid’s Minus Sixty One is impressive on its own, but I was beyond amazed when the game maintained the immersion with the transition to the very first moments of gameplay. Even with the gradual appearance of certain HUD elements as the tutorial progresses, the transition does not push the player outside the starting proposal, in fact it reinforces the opening’s staging in a way that overwhelms and grips you in equal measure.

Even if, over time, the immersion may change and turn into a different thing, with a bigger creative agency (which could be an improvement or a downgrade, subjectively), the opening moments of the game fully manage to immerse you in it and make your hair stand up.

Escaping the bedroom in Resident Evil 7, by Harrison Polites

There’s one genre of game that absolutely stands out for me when it comes to immersion, and that’s survival horror. It’s hard to be both scared and absorbed in what’s going on, so developers pull out all the stops to break down that wall. Picking a single moment from the entire genre is tough, as there are some fantastic options. But if I had to think of a time I was truly invested and terrified — to the point where I didn’t finish a section of the game — it would be the “Bedroom” DLC of Resident Evil 7.

In this section, you play as a cameraman captured by the Baker family while filming a horror documentary. Strapped to a bed, you need to find your way out of the room — structured a bit like an escape room — while being guarded by the family matriarch, Marguerite.

She periodically leaves the room, giving you an opening to explore. But here’s the catch: she occasionally comes running back, and you need to ensure everything is left exactly as it was, otherwise she realises you’re trying to escape and kills you. It’s all presented in first person, and is perhaps the most terrifying part of this — already pretty scary — game.

Not for the faint of heart, and apparently not for me either. I got close, but was too nervous to actually finish it!

Being the friendly neighborhood hero in Marvel’s Spider-Man, by Peter Monks

As Spiderman climbs up a tall skyscraper in the PS4 game (one with a distinctive “A” logo on the side) and perches on the topmost spire, you’re allowed a panoramic view of Manhattan below you. To the left you can see Chinatown and the Financial District, to the right you see Harlem. It’s very quiet up here, except for the faint humming of traffic and populace you can hear far below. After a peaceful moment to admire the view, you look down, take a breath, and jump.

As you plummet thousands of feet to the street level - head first, arms outstretched, wind howling past you - the adrenaline kicks in and, at the last second, you pull the trigger and shoot a web line to the nearest building. And you swing majestically up, remain in temporary freefall at the top of your arc before you fire another web line and do the same again. The thrill of actually being Spiderman is what this game pulls off so well, letting you feel like you’re in the movies. It feels effortless, allowing you to do whatever a spider can.

What about you?

Whether it was living your game from a first person perspective, or being heavily immersed in a well crafted cutscene, what was your favorite moment of immersion?

The year goes on: every day is longer and every night shorter in Reykjavík, and I carefully balance how many hours I play each game in my library, as I ensure I have enough material to continue writing in Substack.

I’ve fallen into a specific pattern. One post a week, always one about MMORPGs, one Monthly Issue, and then two freebies for whatever I feel like writing at the time. This is working out, so expect The Game Enjoyer to operate like this for a while longer. Moving on…

The Eyewitness

• Home consoles change prices: At the beginning of April, SONY announced price hikes for all PS5 variants, generally increasing by 100€ each (or 150€ in the PS5 Pro’s case). While Xbox raised their prices back in October, so far they have not announced any extra increases. I consider myself lucky that I bought both consoles before their respective price changes.

• Nexon cancels “GTA-style fantasy game”: Nexon, South Korean developers behind The First Berserker: Khazan and MMO Looter Shooter The First Descendant announces organizational changes and cancellation of their project codenamed EL, a “fantasy-style GTA” open world game that had been in development for two years. I had not heard of it, but it’s always sad to see a game cancelled.

• indie.io launches “Indie Pass”: The indie publisher behind titles like Cat Cafe Manager and Siegebreaker has released Indie Pass, a subscription service that will give users access to a library of indie games, in a similar vein to Xbox Game Pass. For all indie lovers out there.

Upcoming: 007 First Light (May 27th, 2026)

Last time I saw a James Bond videogame was back in 2012, when my dad took me to a games store to rent a couple of videogames. I rented Skyrim, while he rented James Bond 007: Blood Stone. He never was much of a gamer, but as a fan of the legendary agent, he had his fun for a couple of days before we returned the game to the store.

Now, James Bond is poised to return to the gaming world after 14 years of wait (since 007 Legends) from the hands of Hitman developers, IO Interactive. Having recently enjoyed the World of Assassination trilogy, and agreeing with my partner that we are looking forward to a James Bond adventure, I am hyped to see what this game will bring to the table.

Disguises, social stealth, Bond’s charisma and careful sneaking will be standard for IOI, but this game is set to also feature heavier action pieces a la Uncharted, and I am really curious to see if it delivers.

Unfortunately, the game is set to release just two days before I leave on vacation, so I will have to wait until after the summer before being able to play it.

Journal: Red Dead Redemption 2

I am always reticent to write about Red Dead Redemption 2, because it’s one of the games that I believe should always be experienced blindly. It’s up there with Outer Wilds and Alan Wake 2. I am writing about it now, because I haven’t played RDR2 since I beat it when it came out, but I am experiencing it for the first time again, through the eyes of my partner.

As she plays through the story, I sit next to her to be the audience. If she needs help with the controls or what to do at certain times, I will give her advice. I will remind her of certain mechanics, or look up info for her when she needs.

I am mostly there to see her react to the story itself. This was a game that had an impact in my perception of story in games, of what an open world should be, and even in my own thoughts about life as a whole. It’s one of the games where you sit in silence after the credits roll, just thinking about what you’ve experienced, and getting philosophical about it.

I know many people who refuse to play it or quit it early on, because, let’s be honest, it’s a big, slow game that takes many hours to complete, even if you focus on playing only the main missions. I am glad that I have the patience and focus to be able to play a game like this.

Now Enjoying: MGSV: The Phantom Pain

This year, I subjected my partner to sitting through the entirety of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, promising her a cool story about spies during the Cold War era. Instead, what ensued were absurd villains with powers, slow pacing through the jungle and mountain while avoiding enemies, and long cutscenes of exposition as the game tries its best to explain everything in detail.

At the end of it, I was left with a good impression, but she was not very into it. I promised her the next entries would get better in terms of storytelling, and her interest was piqued as we went through the short but intense Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (after having seen a recap of Peace Walker). After Ground Zeroes, we started The Phantom Pain, and slowly but surely, we are progressing through this tale of war, revenge, and 80s music.

The sandbox style of the missions is much more to my taste than the closed levels of the previous entries. Being able to select my loadout before deploying, I can alter between different tactics depending on the mission, and I love to simply take my time, scout from away, mark my targets, approach slowly and complete my mission unseen.

There’s also a lot of situations where an unexpected enemy triggers the alarm and I have to do a real firefight. Regardless of what happens, the whole thing feels so emergent to me that I enjoy it greatly, and I have spent more time completing Side Ops to improve my base than following the main story for now.

What I am wondering is, once we finish The Phantom Pain, will we continue through the franchise together? Or will I have to enjoy the next games on my own?

The Poll

If you’re on the other side of the pond, then you’d be thinking of “soccer”, but I will be referring to the sport by its proper name. Football has been involved in gaming since as far back as Taito’s Soccer in 1973 (although that was a glorified version of Pong), all the way to all the modern variants of videogame football we have, from full team games, manager simulations, arcade versions…

When it comes to the modern iterations, it’s easy to come up with examples of each one: EA Sports FC would be the yearly version of the most well-known, almost fully licensed association football videogame; Football Manager is the most well-known football management simulation; other variants could be Soccer Story or Despelote, as an indie RPG and indie adventure, respectively.

Now, management fans are in their own niche, and indie games are indie games. I enjoy football mostly as a sport to play in real life, occasionally watch during national team competitions, and to play in videogames if the game is good enough.

With all of these niches, subgenres, and different games, you must be wondering, what is that specific niche that I am talking about today? Well, it is…

…individual control team games.

The specific niche here is the one for an online game, where each player controls one character in the team, with two teams of players facing each other. There are at least two games that fit this niche: EA FC’s Pro Clubs and Rocket League.

In the case of Pro Clubs, the proposed gameplay loop is actually really interesting. You create and customize your own player, male or female, your height and weight affect your stats, and it remains an RPG, with your character starting with a low set of stats that you can increase through a skill tree after gaining levels by playing games and completing challenges. In the matches, a team can include anywhere from 2 to 11 players per team, with the remaining positions being controlled by the AI. A player can fill any position in the team, including the goalkeeper, and will exclusively control their own character through the match.

In the case of Rocket League, the football aspect is heavily distorted by the addition of rocket-powered battle cars, but the basis remains the same: two teams of 2 to 4 players each face each other with the objective of scoring more goals than their opponents, using tactics and skill to come out on top.

With such big games in this niche, why is Rematch a fresh proposition? How does it compete against Pro Clubs and Rocket League?

On one hand, Pro Clubs suffers from stat imbalance. A player that has just started the game will always be at a disadvantage against players that have maxed out their level, and in that case skill and tactics become less relevant. If you play as a right-back and you cannot catch up to your opposing winger, the game becomes unfair, and then unfun.

In the case of Rocket League, it is all about skill and tactics, but it is such a special game that it does not directly clash with Rematch. I still wanted to mention it as I have seen Rematch referred to in the past as a potential "Rocket League killer”.

The Rematch pitch

What would Rematch offer that made it stand out? Made by Sloclap, developers behind titles like Absolver and Sifu, the French team wanted to combine their knowledge and experience behind these fighting games with their love of football to create an enjoyable, skill-based competitive experience.

Rematch was presented as a team-based, competitive, arcade football game where every player character has the same abilities and stats, and victory is achieved by overcoming your opponents by being more skillful and having better tactics.

With great animations and several match sizes, from 3v3 to 5v5, the original proposition was simple, but it was more than enough. The game immediately sparked interest among the football gaming community, and it released to moderate success, with close to 93,000 concurrent users at the peak, and now having settled at a monthly peak of about 4,000 users.

So what happened to Rematch? How did it have so much potential, and how was it squandered? And most importantly, is it possible to salvage the game? Before we go into detail about this, have you considered subscribing?

The vision vs. the meta

Sloclap, the developers behind Rematch, had a very clear vision for their game that they communicated during the private beta tests to the small community that had formed. For them, Rematch is a game where tactics and teamwork are the key to victory. The game’s prologue emphasizes the importance of passing the ball and moving as a team, and they stated several times that their goal was for the game to be mainly played as a team game.

However, they still wanted to allow a measure of skill expression. Along with the most basic functions to pass and shoot the ball, they included different dribbles. On an Xbox controller, holding LT and pressing A will perform a ground dribble based on the directional input, while holding RB and pressing A will perform a flick or otherwise raise the ball over your own player. These, along with simply tapping A to push the ball in a specific direction, are the main controls for dribbling with the ball.

The vision for Rematch was for players to use passing and teamwork to overcome their opponents, with dribbling used as a crutch to get out of tough spots or to get a better position before taking a shot. Players had a different idea of how to play the game.

Many people who played Rematch during the private tests did not know a lot about tactics, and working as a team is made difficult when your team is composed by random players from the matchmaking system. As such, the meta of the game became learning to perform specific dribbles that were considered the most difficult to defend against. For the majority of players, victory in Rematch came as a result of gaining possession of the ball and then dribbling your way to the goal all on your own.

While this went against the developers’ vision, they admittedly enjoyed that players found their own way to play, but this went beyond simply refusing to pass the ball. As players learned more about the game’s engine, and defenders learned how to defend against the best dribblers, players pushed the game to its limits, and started breaking the game in order to dribble.

In the first few months of the game, players would break the game in order to fly with the ball, perform impossibly fast dribbles that made the ball cover great distances while being untouchable, or teleport themselves short distances by abusing the game’s lock-on mechanic. Rematch was (and, to this day, remains) a buggy game, and these players found ways to abuse this to their advantage. Soon enough, the playerbase was divided between those who wanted to win matches by using better tactics and those who wanted to win matches by being better dribblers. The latter faction relied on glitches and bugs, and Sloclap could not allow that.

Fixing the game: too little, too late

As Sloclap started pushing patches, they fixed and removed some of the most egregious bugs. For certain bugs that allowed special dribbles to be made, they went the extra mile, added new animations and made these dribbles "legit”, albeit not as broken as they used to be. Once they were fixed, they weren’t a guaranteed path to victory, and now they are just another tool in a player’s kit.

Other bugs were fixed, only to return in future patches. Sometimes your power bar will reset when you’re charging a shot. Sometimes the ball will phase through you when you’re trying to stop a goal, or you will be unable to interact with the ball.

Fixing a game is not easy, and I don’t intend to criticize Sloclap for their slow progress or inability to solve certain problems, but I will criticize Sloclap for something else. While almost a year has passed since release, certain problems remain in the game, unfixed. At the same time, they have continued to work in adding collaborations with brands like Adidas or Puma, or certain players like Marc-André Ter Stegen or the legendary Ronaldinho.

For a team that reportedly counts with over 100 employees, I can understand that not everyone in the company is dedicated to fixing bugs, but I (and most of the community) finds it egregious that they continue to push for more monetizations and microtransactions when the base experience of a game that is not free-to-play is so bad, even a year in.

The fall

Rematch released to a decent amount of players, over 100,000 across platforms, and quickly added cross-play to ensure that no console would end up with too small a playerbase. Unfortunately, in just one month, the game lost approximately 60% of its playerbase on Steam, and more in another month. It is fair to say that Rematch currently holds around 10,000 players across platforms at its peak.

Every patch was a drop of water trying to put out a fire. Players demanded the game to be fixed, to have certain basic features added, and to not have to put up with players who abuse glitches in every match. Unfortunately, as Sid Meier and Soren Johnson said, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Even now, almost a year from launch, Sloclap continues to patch away exploits and glitches to keep their vision intact, while players continue to find new ways to gain an unfair advantage. Is there really a solution to gamers’ endless tenacity in their pursuit of the unbeatable strategy?

Is there a solution?

Sloclap has not made a comment so far stating that they will send the game into F2P (Free to Play) territory. Doing so could bring in many new players who refuse to pay the 24.99€ for the base edition of the game, but if they do it before the game is properly fixed, then there would be no hope for it.

At the same time, is F2P the solution? If they really fix the game, could part of the playerbase that quit early come back? I believe so. On release, I played often with a group of 7 friends. Now we are 3. Using my own experience, that’s a 57% of my playerbase that quit the game within the first two months. All of them have already said they are willing to return to the game once it’s fixed. Of course, my experience doesn’t translate to the whole community, but there is a general sentiment that some things are missing before the game is “ready”.

An ability to create player Clubs, and more solid netcode that doesn’t cause visibles glitches and rollback would go a long way. However, it’s all on Sloclap hands. They must either:

• Stick to their original vision for a tactical football game, and heavily nerf or remove all the newer dribbling tech that players discovered by abusing glitches. Rematch goes back to being a heavy team based, tactics game.

• Stick to players’ skill expression, fixing glitches but leaning more into new animations and button combinations to perform dribbling moves. Rematch progresses in the direction of selfish players who refuse to pass the ball, but it at least is not glitchy, and passing is still an option.

Regardless of what they do, I find it difficult to believe that Rematch will ever make a comeback, although a small sliver of hope remains. As much as I can criticize Rematch, the truth is I enjoy the game greatly.

Conclusion

This is my best read on what I consider the attempt for a newcomer to carve a niche for itself. Unfortunately, the developers were not up to the task, but I am hoping they will not surrender. I have a question for you, however.

With the arrival of a new month, it was time to start up a new MMORPG adventure. Considering that my time spent in SWTOR was cut short, it has been a while. As suggested by various comments in previous entries in this series, I finally returned to The Lord of the Rings Online. This is another game that is dear to me, and my Steam account registered around 145 hours before I started the new attempt.

Once again, I would be testing the game’s flexibility against my specific set of rules and constraints, in order to find out if LotRO is my ideal MMORPG.

My objectives and rules

As usual, I wasn’t planning on playing the game in a normal way. Since I am looking for a game that will give me a very specific feeling, I have a set of rules and options that I must follow in order to find out the real answers to my questions.

• The goals:

  • Every month this year, I will play a different MMORPG.

  • With this game, I will look for my ideal triangle of game experience: challenge, immersion, and socialization.

  • For a challenge, I’ll hope the game can make the leveling experience fun but not too easy, forcing me to be careful when playing.

  • For socialization, I’ll be looking for player communication, group features and content.

  • Once the month is over, I will move on to the next game.

• The rules:

  • I will not look for game info (quests, builds, etc.) outside of the game, limiting myself to read within the game itself or asking other players for advice.

  • I will not use general or world chats, and use only local (/say) chat, DMs (/whisper) and group/guild chat.

  • I will only party up with players that I’ve met in the area, rather than using matchmaking features.

  • I will not accept help from players in the form of better gear/items or money, unless it is in exchange for a service or simply advice.

  • I will choose Roleplaying servers where possible.

And I spent March playing The Lord of the Rings Online.

The Lord of the Rings Online

The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO for short) is an MMORPG released for PC in 2007. It is set during the time of the War of the Ring, with the first few quests set at the time that Frodo and his friends leave the Shire. In the game, you can create your fantasy of denizen of Middle-Earth, and you can also ignore the main quest to simply live out your adventure exploring from the northern regions in Eriador all the way to Mordor and even to the region of Harad, south from Mordor, in the most recent content pack.

The game feels closer to an old-school MMORPG, and is more similar to WoW than to SWTOR in the way it plays and looks. While the game offers the option of “Monster Play”, it is not like WoW where players can choose between two equally developed factions, instead being something akin to an asymmetrical option for players to engage in PvP.

Now, does LotRO meet the goals to suit my needs?

The Challenge

For my LotRO character, I decided to make a Dwarf Guardian, a dual wielding, high-damage dealing warrior. I named him Thrauki (or Þráki, if the game allowed these characters), and started the tutorial and following the main story, also known as the Epic Questline. The game was extremely easy, similar to SWTOR, where I was able to tackle on groups of enemies even at a higher level than mine, and dispatch them effortlessly. While I am sure that at higher levels it becomes harder, I went ahead with the “Path of Valour”, an optional challenge where you can set different difficulties in order to make the game harder in exchange for certain rewards, like extra XP from monsters or some titles for bragging rights.

If you start a Path of Valour before level 11, you are eligible for specific titles at level 50 and 130, depending on whether you chose difficulty 1 (Adventurous) or 3 or higher (Fearless or Heroic). I chose Fearless, difficulty 3, since it was the bare minimum to apply for the titles, and I didn’t trust myself to succeed on a higher difficulty.

Fair enough, this makes the game closer to tWoW in terms of difficulty. Fighting an enemy at my own level makes it relatively difficult, with the enemies receiving buffs in combat and me having to dodge extra AoEs that appear specifically in these difficulties.

In Ered Luin, where Dwarves and Elves begin the journey, I spent some time doing main and side quests and managed to get to level 9, but unfortunately, I became too bold, and died in a fight against an Elite enemy.

So, is LotRO a suitably difficult game? Yes, and in fact, the ability to tweak the difficulty to suit every player’s preference is great. In terms of challenge, LotRO is an excellent option.

After having lost Thrauki, so early in the month, and with not enough data about the game, I decided to create a new character to continue the research. This time, a Human Minstrel, a hybrid class able to heal and buff, as well as deal decent damage, named Bandakh. I set the difficulty to Fearless again, and this time decided to ignore the Epic Questline, to explore at my own pace for the sake of the other two questions I still had unanswered.

Intermission:

Enjoying the read? You can check February's attempt here.

The Immersion

Having started a brand new character, I decided to completely ignore the Epic Questline, instead focusing on doing only side quests of whatever region I was in at the moment, and travelling out of my own volition. With this I wanted to emulate how my progression happened in tWoW, where there was no linear progression between zones, and I was able to level on my own path, even switching regions halfway through to keep things interesting.

With Bandakh, I started by going to Bree as a main hub (similar to Ironforge in tWoW). I leveled in the Shire first, then Ered Luin, then I went back to the Bree-lands, then south to Cardolan…

My time travelling between zones, completing quests and fighting enemies was very engaging, with XP being gained at a decent pace that meant I was able to level faster than in tWoW. Not only that, but skills are gained as you level automatically, without needing to visit a trainer for this. I wasn’t a big fan of this, but it didn’t really affect my immersion.

I picked up 3 crafting professions, as well as the two available hobbies: Bird-watching and Fishing. I was also tempted to purchase a house in one of the many available neighborhoods, but felt there was no point since I wouldn’t be playing past March.

The game offers a mount from very early on, and many more ride stations than tWoW, although not as many as SWTOR. You are forced to “discover” a station first before you are able to ride from one point to the other, and even then, some routes are restricted, which means you need to follow specific routes for you to go from Mossward to Michel Delving in the Shire, per example.

By the time my time with the game came to an end, I was almost level 25, and I had set myself a goal to reach Rivendell, but unfortunately I ran out of time.

The Socialization

I created my characters in the Meriadoc server, which was labelled as “EU” and “RP”. Despite this, the game’s population is low to the point where RP rules are no longer enforced. At first, I was having a really hard time getting people to chat, but found success as I leveled up and met higher level PCs.

In a certain occasion I teamed up with another PC to do a “fellowship Quest”, which are higher difficulty quests meant to be completed as a group.

On another occasion, I roleplayed briefly with a PC called Catalinna, who very kindly also answered certain questions I had about the game. Per example, one of the reasons I was unsuccessful in communicating with other players is that the French and German servers were merged with the English one, and many players simply do not speak English and mostly stick to their own language. There are specific times of the day where certain players meet in locations like the Prancing Pony inn to roleplay and socialize, but normally it is difficult to do so without directly DMing someone or using third party communications (which I cannot do in this case).

Catalinna also highlights the great writing and landscapes in LotRO, as well as the mini-events and festivals that happen often in game, bringing the community together for specific things. In her own words, “Any gamer could find something to like about [LotRO]- whether you’re a Tolkien fan or not.”

As a final answer to my questions, apparently Hardcore challenges are not particularly common, which is understandable given that the final title you get for surviving is given at level 20 and never again at any point.

I felt like, in terms of social life in the game, LotRO has less to offer than tWoW for someone who stubbornly refuses to use third-party apps to find a community, but I think that is simply related to the player count. While tWoW has three servers and an overall player count of more than 10,000 players concurrently across all three, LotRO has eight open servers, with 15,000 active players across all them, but not concurrently.

The game is alive and well, but playing off the peak hours makes it seem less active. However, I still managed a healthy amount of interaction with other players, and in this case I would say it is a decently social game.

The Conclusion

I had low expectations for this game, for no particular reason other than thinking it maybe had too low of a player count or it would be too easy, but I was pleasantly surprised. With some player chosen tweaks, similar to tWoW, the difficulty is high enough to provide a thrill in my one life run. The world is amazing, not only as beautiful as Azeroth, but also a very loyal and accurate rendition of Middle-Earth, the OG fantasy realm. Everything is made with such attention to detail and love for the lore that just taking the walk from the Shire to Bree is extremely immersive. If I had to rate this game according to my specific set of rules, I would give it a 9/10. Once again, I am sad that I am leaving the game behind temporarily as I move on to a future MMO to test.

The April Attempt

I am currently waiting on a very promising fan-server for Final Fantasy XI which aims to recreate the original game’s feeling before it was tweaked for easier access to the endgame, however I doubt it will be ready in April. I have been looking at some less popular MMOs on Steam, and of course I still have Final Fantasy XIV in mind, but not quite sure of which one to play yet. As usual, I would love some feedback from you, reader, to help me pick my next adventure.

• Read the January attempt: Turtle WoW

• Read the February attempt: Star Wars: The Old Republic

• Read the April attempt: Final Fantasy XIV Online

• Read the May attempt: Guild Wars 2

I have watched the whole of Vox Machina (the actual play, not the animated TV show), and I am halfway through the Mighty Nein actual play, although I will admit I am not as interested in it as I was in their first campaign.

Critical Role is a great example of Dungeons and Dragons taken to the peak in the roleplaying aspect. The world, the story, the characters… everything comes together in every session that the group plays to provide viewers with the modern equivalent of a radionovela, where each “episode” advances the story while showing dramatic encounters between the different player characters as well as the non-player characters narrated and performed by the Dungeon Master, Matt Mercer.

However, as much as I would say that I enjoy Critical Role, I must say… I don’t think they have helped make the hobby better. Allow me to explain.

The Impact of Critical Role on the tabletop role-playing community.

Critical Role officially started streaming in 2015, as the group, composed by voice actors Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, Marisha Ray and Orion Acaba brought their home game onto the set to play on livestream for any viewers.

As this is a gaming Substack, I’ll point the obvious. Matt Mercer is an incredibly prolific voice actor (McCree in Overwatch, Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom and Vincent Valentine in the FFVII Remake trilogy are just recent examples of his work), while Ashley Johnson and Laura Bailey are well known for their roles as Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us.

Outside of the cast’s talent for voice acting, I will mention how they made D&D look extremely fun and appealing. The cast’s rapport and ability to understand timing, pacing, and most importantly, each other, allowed them to role-play during their game sessions in a way that was extremely engaging from an audience perspective.

However, while it made the game look very fun, it also made it look like something it wasn’t. Many people joined the hobby with certain expectations, that roleplay, performance and narrative should follow a certain direction. Anyone that plays tabletop RPGs knows that each table is different. This issue has come to be known as the “Mercer Effect”.

The Mercer Effect

While far from being the only culprit to bring D&D onto the mainstream, Matt Mercer, the Dungeon Master for Critical Role, is the one that names this phenomenon, in which new players or fans of the show attempt to play D&D for the first time, only to find that the big majority of tables out there do not have the budget nor production values that are showcased in Critical Role.

This often leads to disappointment, sometimes complaints and demands, and occasionally rude comparison. One needs only look at subreddits like RPG Horror Stories or Crit Crab, like this story of a player attempting to copy a Critical Role character (and failing at it).

From my point of view, while I think that making the hobby approachable and interesting is a positive thing (the more the merrier and all that), there is a certain type of player that does not have the skills to coexist with a group that does not partake of the same obsessions. Matt Mercer himself has spoken against the “Mercer Effect” trying to still the waters, claiming that “[CR fans should] relax. [Their] DM is kicking ass, doing this for [their] enjoyment and journey… [they] should abandon expectations and just have fun together as friends.”

The Good: Production value and communication

Critical Role is very popular for a good reason. Whether you are watching it as a fan of D&D, or because you enjoy the specific voice actors, or love the concept of fantasy drama, it is difficult not to appreciate what is good in the show.

Many will talk about the incredible 3D maps that the DM brings onto the table, or the light show and fog, the curated music playlists, but there is something I particularly love about Critical Role, and that is how well each member of the cast knows each other. In their sessions, you will often find that every player knows what to say and also when to say it. Per example, Scanlan (Sam Riegel) performs a lot of comic relief during the Vox Machina campaign, yet his character does not come across simply as comic relief. He has a strong storyline and character arc, that resolves without stripping away his penchant for comedy.

This is what makes the show engaging to watch, for me. Seeing these people improvise while having a good understanding of how dialogue works, and knowing what each other wants and needs in a given scene, puts into perspective the big contrast when someone inexperienced tries to emulate it and fails.

The Bad: Performance over gaming

Over time, Critical Role has evolved to be more and more of a show and less and less of a game. The group went from being a close-knit group of friends to inviting other actors for variety and novelty, and the pacing of games dragged or rushed as the group strived to keep things interesting despite being off-script.

This caused the show to have some episodes that were intense and engaging, and others that felt like filler. The players’ interest in engaging with any and every NPC for deep conversation and roleplay meant that any moment in the game could turn into an hour long scene. At the same time, this also created a certain expectation in fans when it came to their own games: if a DM was not willing to turn every NPC into a fully named character with a page long backstory, ready to converse with the party, they felt it was lazy and shallow, and “Matt wouldn’t do it this way.” This falls back into the Mercer effect.

The performance over gaming also leads to people finding D&D to be something less than what it is. D&D is mostly a combat game, with some rules for exploration, survival and roleplay. There are other games that focus more on the roleplay aspect, and to prove this point, Critical Role eventually created Daggerheart, their own tabletop RPG where roleplaying takes the main priority.

Eventually, some people who played D&D started considering combat and exploration a minor aspect of the game, which lead to friction and frustration as parties clash when one member cannot fight effectively for the sake of “their character arc”, or one person insists on roleplaying when the rest wants to move on.

The Ugly: Parasocial Toxicity

As with any other celebrity, fans took to the Critical Role cast like moths to a flame. I’m not even going to talk about the cases where the cast itself was under fire (per example, Marisha Ray being so criticized during the first campaign), but rather, how the ideas of these players thinking they are just like the cast causes them to separate themselves from the actual table.

To put it bluntly: Critical Role’s party is a bunch of professional actors. The fan who is now going to try D&D is (in the great majority of cases) not a professional actor. There is this delusion that if Liam O’Brien can have ten minutes in a solo scene to monologue about his character’s perception of the party, then this other person who is not him can also have the table listen to them monologue for ten minutes, without the gravitas nor immersion that comes with years of acting under your belt.

When this spreads to a party-wide expectation, the results are catastrophic. You don’t want to point the finger at your friend and tell them “you’re bad at acting, so please tone it down”, but you also don’t want to sit there being judged because you don’t want to expose yourself in roleplaying scenes that last an hour, when you made your character to fight monsters and get rewards.

There is a fine balance here: you shouldn’t be too shy to roleplay! It’s a great experience when everyone immerses themselves in their character and forms real bonds as the characters rather than the players. But you should also understand that the ability to make others care about your character is not directly tied to how good of an actor (or actress) you are. You can play a year-long game without a single action spoken in first person, and have the table cry when you die.

You can also drag games to last twice their original length by forcing everyone to listen to you roleplay and narrate everything dramatically, and instead have them be relieved when your character dies.

Conclusion: You aren’t Critical Role.

This article may be a bit more angry-sounding than usual, but that’s because, after I found out the type of player that I am, I found myself between two worlds. I am too much a roleplayer to fit with the tables that don’t care for it, but I am not so intense or delusional to fit at the tables that think they are professional voice actors.

Everyone has their limits, things they shine at and things they don’t do so well. I am not good at accents and making voices, but I am great at using different vocabularies based on my character’s education, per example, and understanding what drives my character to do X or Y.

Still, if I reach a table where people want to roleplay, and someone insists on acting as if they were on a stage, or chatting for 10 minutes with every NPC we meet, I’ll be leaving that table. That’s just me, though.

Final Thought

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As the days continue to getting longer, I move away from horror. Having finished Silent Hill: f on the last day of February, March has come as a month of variety where I have been playing and beating some many different games, like Lost Judgment, Hitman: World of Assassination and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

It’s also the first month of 2026 where a new game release catches my eye, and for the first time the “Upcoming” section will include a game that releases in the same month. Let’s get on with it.

The Eyewitness

• Xbox announces the codename for their next console: Project Helix will be, reportedly, a “hybrid console” capable to play both PC and Xbox games, and it will “lead in performance”. In other words, the next Xbox console will likely be insanely expensive and might be able to run Steam?

• Gang of Dragon in financial trouble: It seems NetEase, which has been providing financial backing to Nagoshi Studio, will stop funding them, while they are still 7 billion yen (approx. 38 million euros) away from completely funding the development. Toshihiro Nagoshi is reportedly looking for alternate means of funding the studio. It would be a shame to see it cancelled since the Like A Dragon series has moved in a different direction away from crime thrillers.

• KotOR Remake is not dead: In a recent interview between IGN and Tim Willits, he claimed that the remake of the 2003 RPG is still in development. Considering there is also a new Old Republic era game in the works, it might be a positive for fans of the time period (such as me) in the galaxy far, far away.

• Valve under legal assault: The UK has sued Valve over their “excessive” 30% commission and price-parity rules, New York has sued them over their lootboxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, and the Performing Rights Society has sued them over their “illegal” use of copyrighted music across the platform. Somehow, Valve keeps winning the lawsuits, and personally I hope so, I don’t want to see who’d fill the Valve void and how.

Upcoming: Crimson Desert (March 19)

When Crimson Desert was first announced, I rolled my eyes. A single-player RPG that looked a bit generic to me, from developers who made Black Desert, which is an MMORPG that I am not particularly fond of? I did not think I would care.

Over the past few months, developers Pearl Abyss have been showing an immense amount of gameplay and content from the upcoming game, and the community has replied with increasing amount of incredulity. At first it was “The game can’t really have all of that.” then “Surely the requirements will be through the roof.” and after the requirements were shown, I am now reading a lot of “It must have some kind of downside, perhaps the story will not be very good.” There’s also the appearance of Denuvo, which many think will drag the performance down. However, I want to see it with my own eyes.

After seeing the kind of immersion the gameplay promotes, I believe it could be an interesting game, and so I have pre-ordered it, hoping it will really be all that it promises and more. And if it is, of course, you will be first to know.

Journal: Judgment and Lost Judgment

I am a big fan of the Yakuza (now Like A Dragon) series, and consider many of the games to be great crime thrillers with epic action on par with some of the best action movies. When the franchise moved into the JRPG genre, I felt a slight disappointment, but then they announced Judgment and I thought that the ARPG Beat ‘Em Up king would pass the crown down to another character, from Kiryu to Yagami.

While combat is slightly boring in Judgment, it improves greatly for the sequel, but unfortunately, most boss fights end up as a delicate dance of “dodge and punch” where the possibility of tanking the opponent in order to lay on them a whole combo is impossible when you are playing in Hard difficulty.

On a separate topic, I always found Kamurocho and the other settings in the series (Sotenbori and Ijincho, per example) to be extremely immersive, and I loved walking through the streets at my own pace, learning the layouts, and beating thugs against walls and signposts. With Judgment and its sequel, however, I haven’t felt the same way (nor when playing as Ichiban). Maybe what made the game special was Kiryu, and not the city itself?

The plots from the Judgment games are incredible, bound to hook you in within the first hour, with mysteries and twists that all make sense somehow. By all acounts, they are great games (especially Lost Judgment), but they did not hit for me the same way the Yakuza games did, back in the day.

Now Enjoying: Hitman: World of Assassination

I’ve always known about Hitman, since it’s a franchise sitting at over 20 years old. For some reason, I never really played any of the games, and even when the modern rendition of the games was released, I tried a demo for Hitman (the 2016 reboot that still counts for the official timeline of the game), and found that it was extremely fun and engaging.

Despite that, the games evaded my library until I got my upgraded rig. With the new performance, the most modern version of the games, Hitman World of Assassination, was very attractive, as it remasters the three games into one collection with all the bells and whistles like ray-traced lighting and sharper textures.

After seeing what IO Interactive has to offer, I am pretty confident that the upcoming 007: First Light will be a banger. The sandbox of each mission is so deep yet so well developed. Every opportunity to kill a target is designed in a way that completely fits the environment, and the result is that I am able to play the game without following any specific mission guidelines, and can still reliably find convoluted ways to kill them other than a garrote or silenced gun.

Overall, it’s a great game when had in smaller doses. Having one contract every other day gives me the time to enjoy each location (which tends to be gorgeous), plan my route in and out, commit murder, and move on to play a different game without feeling like it took me too long.

Before we get to the end…

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The Poll: Console and/or PC?

Assuming we’re all gamers here: what platforms do you use and prefer? In my case, I own consoles for the comfort of playing on the TV, but also have a decent gaming rig for those games that are exclusive or to play with friends.

This is a conclusion I reached recently as I listened to “Ronfaure” from the Final Fantasy XI soundtrack. I could not put my finger on why, but it seems all of these games have a common effect on me; a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for exploration of an unknown world, and somehow, a level of immersion that most modern games seem to be unable to achieve.

There are many aspects of these old games that contribute to their mystical feeling, and some of them apply to games other than RPGs. In this article, I will be exploring what these aspects are and why they work the way they do.

Sound design is a slingshot to the past.

Why is it that interface sound effects feel so different now? Games like Kingdom Hearts, Pro Evolution Soccer, Pokémon, etc. had such crisp sound effects for their interfaces. After thinking on it, my conclusion is that the connection between the clicking on buttons and hearing those heavy sound effects is simply satisfactory. These games that often require you to spend a certain amount of time in the menus (before more and more games started including QoL features like quick-access radial menus and shortcuts) needed the menu to feel comfortable, and providing the interface with this rhythmic, heavy sound helped make the menus so iconic.

Modern games have taken a lot of different directions since, with some menus opting for quiet “swooshing” sounds or even removing the interface sound effects entirely. Next time that I play a modern game, I will pay attention to the UI sounds. Do the sound effects make me feel comfortable as I browse the menus? For a recent entry, Dragon Quest XI felt old-school when it came to its menu design.

Something else that I will try not to comment on too heavily is the audio quality. As an example, comparing the audio quality of a native PS2 game against a native PS5 game, we find that not only the audio quality is better (a higher bit depth and sample rate), but the amount of audio channels played at once is much higher on the PS5 than the PS2. A modern videogame can indulge on allowing any object within the game to emit audio, while an older game may have been conservative with its audio sources to ensure that every track would play properly. This contributes to giving the older games the sense of quiet, sometimes eerie, that permeates games of that era.

Negative space was used masterfully.

Most modern games that try to offer open worlds try to fill them with content. To be fair to them, many reviews use a big but empty map as a flaw, and developers try to ensure that the player will always find something to do in their world no matter how far they stray from the path. In this way, we have gone from maps like Final Fantasy XV’s empty Eos to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s impossibly crowded England. For some people, this is a positive. AC Valhalla has so much to do, that even after 100 hours I was unable to finish the game. Personally, I think that knowing when to offer negative space in a map is proof of great design.

What is negative space? It is simply the space that surrounds the main subjects. In Shadow of the Colossus, the journey between fights is often an empty space. Sometimes inhabited by collectibles like lizards or fruit, the game simply consists of a series of fights against colossi in between long stretches of traversing the land. If we removed all of that empty space, so that the game was simply a series of boss fights accessed through gateways from the altar room, would it feel as epic or colossal?

Another example of negative space is the famous ladder scene in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. After having battled The End (or, in his absence, an Ocelot squad), the game slows to a crawl for a couple of minutes before sending us into the next area. We are forced to manually climb a ladder while the vocals of the game’s main theme, Snake Eater, play out. This is a great example of negative space, or perhaps “Ma” (in Japanese), in the same vein as Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa movies famously used. Allowing the narrative (or the game’s world) to have the empty space, emphasizes the moments where things are happening. In case of a game’s world, the emptiness is what gives it scale, and allows the player a moment of respite to meditate on the journey so far.

In Final Fantasy XV, the driving mechanics are extremely simplified, which was heavily criticized. To put it plainly, it was boring; you were not allowed to drive off the road, and in the beginning you weren’t even allowed to drive manually unless you chose to drive at night, which came with a new set of dangers. While an off-road option was added later, I never cared much for it, and found the normal version of the Regalia to serve its purpose perfectly: allowing Ignis to take the wheel and drive me to my destination gave me time to observe the beautiful world of Eos, think about the game, plan my next move, and simply take a break from the action.

In older games, like World of Warcraft, the empty space gives the world a sense of scale, and the inability to easily teleport between main locations gives the player two new factors: danger from enemies that lie in your path, and calm from simply having to run forward until you reach your destination.

A lack of realism enhances the experience.

Something that adds to the mystique of these old games is the liminality of their worlds. I am not referring to the modern usage of “liminal spaces” as an aesthetic, although that does not differ a lot from how it applies in this case. I am, instead, referring to the more literal meaning of liminal (from the latin limen meaning “threshold”). These older games feature fully realized 3D graphics, with a higher or lower polygon count, and textures and shaders of varying resolutions. In modern games, the polygon count and resolution is so high that many games have achieved photorealism, looking so accurate to real life that they can often be indistinguishable from it, per example, racing games like Gran Turismo or the Forza franchise are able to produce graphics that can easily be mistaken for real life.

The recent Death Stranding 2: On the Beach features landscapes so realistic that, were it not for the appearance of technology and creatures that simply do not exist, one could take a video or photo in the game and pass it for real life.

This realism can sometimes be counterproductive. While these modern games with incredible graphics can be a visual treat and they use these cutting-edge advancements to their favor, the older games have a dream-like quality to them. It’s common to go back to an old game from your childhood and think “wait, I remember this game looking better than this”. Your brain will fill in the blanks, or to better explain it, the lower graphical fidelity in older games “leaves more to the imagination”.

This sense of liminality does not simply apply to the way the world looks or how realistic the graphics are. Modern games can sometimes have a city, in which you can find hundreds of NPCs. This can look impressive, however, some observation reveals the NPCs are shallow, and they serve no purpose. It’s rare for a game to actually make its NPCs contribute to making the world feel alive (per example, Red Dead Redemption 2’s NPCs are surprisingly reactive to the player’s actions, and this helps make them feel alive), and once you can tell that these NPCs are simply ragdolls moving to the rhythm of the game’s heartbeat, it breaks the illusion of being in another world. I find Cyberpunk 2077 to be particularly egregious on this, as the NPCs serve no purpose and often do nothing but walk or pose in their designated areas.

Older games would include less NPCs, due to hardware limitations, yes, but this doesn’t mean that it didn’t help the design. Kingdom Hearts’ Traverse Town is eerily quiet, with only a few sparse NPCs available to talk to, but this does not break the immersion of the town being a world in the game. Instead, it helps make Traverse Town feel like a dream: within the town there are monsters, and so the people in it are hiding indoors. Only a handful of characters venture outside, and despite the lack of traffic, the town continues to work during our time there.

My personal take and conclusion.

I give flak to content creators who try to state their opinions as facts. Just because I think that the games’ design means X or Y, it doesn’t mean the developers intended it that way. It is an aspect of games as art that they can make anyone feel differently about them.

For me, old-school RPGs are the perfect game, and my words in this article reveal the how, but not the why. Why do I love that playing these games feel like being in a dream? Why is it so important to me that the UI sound effects are crisp and loud? Why do I prefer to have an empty world to traverse with aged graphics, rather than a realistic, inhabited world?

Maybe playing a modern game does not separate me from my current day self, and playing a retro version allows me to forget about the current day and transports me to the past.

Maybe the day-to-day has me overstimulated, and I simply need an older game with less going on in order to truly relax. Perhaps older games were made with more love and care, and they are more enjoyable as a result.

I don’t have a definite answer, and what my thoughts are can vary on any given day. I love old-school RPGs, and more specifically, Fantasy RPGs, because they really feel like an alternate world. Their stories of adventurers, knights and wizards, being prophesied to save the world from a massive catastrophe, are much easier for me to engage with, so removed from any aspect of my real life.

What do you think?

Do you love old-school RPGs? Do you think my ramblings are non-sensical, and modern games are better? I would love to read your thoughts if you’d leave a comment below.