“I have Final Fantasy XIV and Overwatch. I never need to play anything else ever again.” Famous last words from 23 year-old me. In many ways, 2016 was the peak of my gaming career. I had just graduated from university and transitioned into a full-time editor role with Twinfinite. At that point, I had already been doing the video game critique gig part-time (and largely for free) for a few years, and built up quite a bit of goodwill with my then-boss, so I knew I was pretty much set for a full-time role right after graduation.
I was flying high, then. The games media industry was thriving, but the privilege of landing a remote full-time gig in that space was not lost on me. I had been incredibly lucky, and my passion for playing and enjoying video games was burning bright. 2016 was also the year Overwatch came out, and it happened to be the year I properly got into FFXIV at the same time. With both of these being live-service games, my days passed in a hazy blur. Daily roulettes, lootboxes, legendary skins, and feverish op-eds about the games I was playing then blended together to become mush.
A typical day went a little something like this: I’d wake up, have a spot of breakfast, wash up, then boot up the PC. Oh right, the PC. I had also built my PC around that time and, of course, my top requirements were that it should be able to handle Overwatch and FFXIV with no issues. Those were my forever games, after all.
Anyway, I’d jump onto FFXIV, say hi to my FC mates, then knock out my daily and weekly roulettes. If there was a new patch out, I’d do the new content on day one. If not, I’d just do the roulettes, maybe spend some time leveling up other jobs, then hop off. Then, it’d be Overwatch time.
2016 also saw the release of No Man’s Sky. This was a controversial one but even when it became clear that Hello Games was unable to deliver on their lofty promises at launch, that didn’t stop me from enjoying their game. This was my first proper brush with a survival game, and what a majestic one it was.
No Man’s Sky captured the space exploration vibe so well, and it definitely helped that Hello Games had nailed down its sleek aesthetic right from the start. It was the very definition of emergent gameplay, where players found their own fun by role-playing and making up their own space farer stories. After finishing up my dailies in FFXIV and when I needed a break from the competitive toxicity of Overwatch, No Man’s Sky would be my go-to relaxation game.
It’s now the year of our lord 2026 and somehow, I’ve found myself drawn to all three games once again. Okay so maybe FFXIV never quite left my rotation, but I definitely took an extended hiatus from it shortly after Dawntrail. But Overwatch and No Man’s Sky? I hadn’t even thought about those games in years.
After a brief stint with Overwatch 2 and deciding that it was no longer for me, no one is more surprised than I am to find that Blizzard’s soft reboot of Overwatch is a stark reminder of everything I loved about that game. As someone who’s severely challenged in terms of aiming a reticle at a target, I’d always found myself gravitating towards Overwatch‘s tanks and supports, but would be inevitably disappointed when I realized that support characters were never the playmakers and I’d always be at the mercy of my team.
Overwatch‘s more recent additions to the support roster, however, are extremely impactful. Jetpack Cat — the latest inclusion and best-named hero in the game — is a joy to play, and comes packed with an Ultimate that could blow the match wide open if used correctly. Messing around with Overwatch‘s newer supports is the most fun I’ve had with this game in years, and it’s a huge reminder of why I’d spent hours upon hours in Quick Play and Competitive back when it first launched.
Even FFXIV has wormed its way back into my heart after my extended hiatus. As painful as it is to jump back in after being away from so long, a quick server migration and a new FC have me invested in Eorzea all over again. It’s a fresh start, so to speak, and there are few things more exciting than the prospect of rebuilding your roots in an MMORPG.
The biggest surprise, of course, is No Man’s Sky, a game I had more or less written off a few months after its initial release. Not that I hadn’t been keeping up with all of Hello Games’ updates — props to that team for sticking with it and releasing every single update for free, by the way — but I’d just felt like I’d gotten everything I needed out of that game and was ready to move on.
Weirdly enough, the Switch 2 was the key factor in bringing me back into the fold. With how powerful Nintendo’s new console is, it’s more than capable of running something like No Man’s Sky with virtually zero issues. Plus, I managed to get it on sale, which is always nice.
But more to the point, guys, these No Man’s Sky updates are insane. The procedural generation for the flora and fauna is more varied. There are new planet types. There’s base-building now. There’s a whole new storyline to follow, which is great, because let’s face it, the whole Atlas plot in the original release was way too thin. I’m hearing that you can recruit aliens to your space fleet once you commandeer a freighter??? There’s underwater exploration??? And there are Corvettes, which are basically mobile bases you can take with you?
As someone who goes crazy over comfy coziness in survival games (Valheim‘s Switch 2 port was my most anticipated game from the Nintendo Partner Showcase after Paranormasight), No Man’s Sky sounds like a dream. It’s been incredibly exciting to dive back into this game with 10 years’ worth of updates to catch up on, and my daily gaming routing now looks a little something like this: Get home from work (because, alas, I have a big girl corpo job now that I’ve been laid off), get them dailies and weeklies done in FFXIV, mess around in Overwatch for fun, then end the night by chilling out in No Man’s Sky.
Man, 2016 really was the best year.
