Gaming

I mostly play fighting games, which can be alienating with a large group of friends who don't grind them as much as you do, because then you reach a point where you win every match against them, and they're not having fun. If you go to locals, and I do, you make fighting game friends, which is some kind of solution, though not ideal. Perhaps the 2v2 mode of Project L will help that problem, but I don't trust Riot to make that game work without an internet connection, and online-only games are a deal-breaker for me at this point.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game a lot of my friends and even my brothers are interested in playing co-op, but I know from experience with Divinity: Original Sin and attempts to co-op long games like Factorio and Starbound that eventually adults' schedules will not align to be able to finish the game you started. For BG3 in particular, I think I'm going to play it solo for the first time, and then I'll try co-op with one of my brothers and maybe a separate game with another friend of mine where I play a character in their worlds; that way I can try different builds and strategies, and if our schedules diverge, they can keep going in their game with the character I was playing.

Unfortunately, most other co-op games are online-only these days, and I think we're going to start seeing a swing back to allowing LAN and split-screen again, not the least of which is Baldur's Gate 3, but it's going to be slow going for a while. FPS games in particular have dried up immensely, at least for the style of game I'm looking for. Competitive FPS games have become live service, second job, battle royale or extraction shooters; and the campaigns, when they happen at all, have become open world checklists. So in the meantime, my favorite co-op games have been session-based games like roguelikes. Things like Vagante, 30XX, Streets of Rogue, and such. The one exception for FPS games is that cross play, split screen, controller support, all that good stuff added to the Quake remasters has myself and a friend of mine eyeing finally playing those games co-op, because we're not going to get anything like it for a long time.