Actually, nowadays it’s very soloable: you can experience all of the story by yourself thanks to the Trust system. I only recently tried it, and control scheme wasn’t as bad as I expected (but you do need some patience). From what I gather you don’t really need to learn about macros and gear swapping mid fight in order to clear story content.

free trial players can be friend-requested and party-invited from non-trial players :)

I haven’t played Dawntrail yet, but I have to admit that I felt something was troubling the game even in earlier expansions: as I finished both ShB and EW I couldn’t help but be left with a state of “oh, tome grinding… again… in the same exact way as all the other expansions”. No one seemed to care, however, so I thought it was my problem. And it’s a big shame, because I expected differently from Dawntrail: from what I heard, it feels more like the character going on a vacation than anything, with really just the same gameplay loop.

Another thing I was expecting from Dawntrail, apart from big gameplay changes, is to redefine the story more significantly: FFXIV up to Endwalker was a great story, but sometimes I couldn’t help it but feel like I didn’t want to be so central to everything: it’s great when MMOs make you feel like “a hero from the sidelines” because there’s less immersion breaking (and FFXI did this succesfully, if I recall). I think writers really dug themselves in too deep of a hole:

From what I hear - reason I haven’t played it yet - is that Dawntrail is fram from such expectations. I agree that once you try FFXIV’s legacy controls you can’t go back. Same thing goes for gamepad optimization.

You got it a bit confused! Flatpak is not a way to store roms, but a way to deliver the software (RetroDeck) onto your device. Retrodeck, once installed, will create a “retrodeck” folder in your steam deck filesystem, which will again contain folders for roms.

All you need to do at that point is to place rom files inside already existing folders for their own systems (psx, psp, etc). Those files can be of many filetypes. For example, psx roms can be in chd, cue/bin, iso, etc

It is as straightforward as it can get!

• Signalis
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
• Vampire Saviour
• FFXIV (through XIVLauncher)

Like many others, I highly suggest Retrodeck instead of EmuDeck. Not only it is a flawless experience, but having it all packaged in a flatpak means it won’t scatter files around for every emulator which are then hard to clean up (like EmuDeck does, usually).