Like we’re not triple-A machine possessors at this point. A friend and I played in the era of the original Age of Empires, and StarCraft; Worms, and Dune. We were core SNES-PS2 era. We were never the ultra competitive hotkey speed run strategy types, but just played for fun.
Anyone out there in your late 30s to early 40s that have managed to connect to old friends despite long distances, what are you playing now?
I am now in a process of trying to “re-group” some of my friends to play together again. I don’t have any specific games yet that I am gonna propose to for us to try out but definitely there is one general thing I’d recommend.
You mentioned you were never “the ultra competitive types” but I’d suggest to not go into even a mild competitiveness territory (no Dota, LoL, Apex or any competitive games of this sort). We even tried stuff like mythic + dungeons in WoW in past or ultimate raids in FFXIV as casually as possible but over time it was obvious it’s basically “impossible” to get everyone on the same page. Various expectations and goals evolved for everyone and we eventually couldn’t agree on anything and splintered and eventually fully disbanded all of our tries into even “very mildly competitive gaming”. Usually these games are IMHO not very good at rewarding “failure”. And I think this will sooner or later lead to some issues (sure did for us).
Obviously, YMMV but I’d strongly recommend (based on my experience) only absolutely non-competitive, fully chill gaming that is basically aimless and the only aim is to have fun together. Not beat a certain boss or get a certain rating or anything of this sort.
Here is a list of games I am thinking about: Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Portal 2, Divinity: Original Sin 2 (also Baldur’s Gate 3 coming soon), Deep Rock Galactic, Risk of Rain 2, Monster Hunter Rise, Grounded for example.