Garwoofoo

I originally did the final dungeon as an 8-man back near release. Every other player skipped all the cutscenes and went charging off, leaving me to trudge slowly through an empty dungeon to the end after they’d killed everything. It was shit. I’m very glad they changed it.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

This is "just" the original game portion of what has become a vast and sprawling MMO, but it's as lengthy as any single-player RPG and has its own storyline so into the Completed pile it goes.

It's a game of two halves really. The first half of this is still tremendous, it really goes heavy on the world-building as it leads you on a tour of Eorzea and introduces you to all its characters and nations. Alongside this you'll be levelling up a job (or two, or more) and they've all got their own little storylines as well. It's surprising how much gravitas the game gains by having its great Calamity as something that actually happened in a previous version of Final Fantasy XIV that was completely destroyed and which only now exists in players' memories and a handful of fuzzy YouTube videos.

The second half, where its plot kicks into gear, is less successful: the game's Evil Empire are laughably stereotypical bad guys, easily defeated by what appears to be six people plus Richard Branson in an armoured mech, and the whole thing is hamstrung by The Worst Voice Acting Ever, seriously it's so appallingly bad that they sacked the entire cast once they got to the first expansion and just started again with a whole bunch of new actors.

But it's all still been really fun, it looks great still, it's definitely been streamlined since the first time I played it and the fact you can now do the multiplayer dungeons with a team of NPCs if you want makes it all incredibly frictionless. Hitting level 50 has opened up a vast array of new stuff to check out plus I get to continue onwards towards the first expansion Heavensward. All of this is still well within the scope of the free trial so it's cost me absolutely nothing so far.

Play

007 First Light - I'm only a few levels in but so far this is marvellous. It's maybe more like Hitman than I was expecting - it's kind of like a scrappy version of those games, where you can start off with all the same sort of planning and the best of intentions but rather than reloading when it all goes wrong you just have to go with it and either fight or bluff your way out of the situation. Production values are through the roof, the voice acting is superb and the representation of Bond is spot on, with just the right amount of insouciance and swagger without ever quite tipping over into punchable. It's a big, expensive, generous game and I'm really glad that it seems to have been a big hit for IOI who increasingly can do no wrong in my eyes.

Final Fantasy XIV - still loving this, I'm about to finish the original A Realm Reborn section (one dungeon to go) so I'll post some more detailed thoughts in the Games Completed thread shortly.

Forza Horizon 6 - I like it to dip into every couple of days but just like all the other games in the series I find it a bit repetitive. There's still no real sense of progression so it's just log in, drive around for a bit, log out again. I get why people love these games but the formula feels a bit stale to me these days.

Want

I think that's enough to be getting on with for now. Like others here, I have a Backlog.

Bin

UK politics is a complete mess at the moment. Seriously starting to think we're going to have to go through a period of Nazis to get back to the good stuff again.

That’s not bad, for a 15-year-old MMO that no-one seems to talk about any more.

MMOs are a dead genre (when was the last time someone tried to create a new one?) but they all seem to keep on trucking. I’m guessing the big three these days are WoW, FFXIV and ESO, but there are still loads of smaller ones, often very outdated, that are doing well enough to sustain a player base and regular updates.

Is The Old Republic still going, as in actively getting updates? You never seem to hear about it at all these days.