Where Do We Go From Here?

As I slog through the grim, last days of Winter, eyes fixed yearningly on the slender promise of Spring, it would be nice to sense some stirring of excitement for the future. After all, everyone else seems to be enjoying some kind of frisson.

My Feedly and blog roll are alive with the thrill of the new as people lay out their plans or share their adventures in fresh worlds, hunting monsters or saving the world. Me, I'm just not feeling it.

I had all week off work. I had a few gaming plans but none of them involved anything I hadn't done before. There wasn't a single new title I could think of that I wanted to try, although there are plenty of them out there, in Early Access, alpha or beta, unfinished but available.

Looking sideways, I was going to re-subscribe to WoW because apparently all it takes to get me back is a bit of extra free time and the hint of something just a little more solid and satisfying in the leveling game. Then there was Rift. I had some idea of poking around Telon so I could get my disappointment in early before the rush.

I considered a return to LotRO or FFXIV, since I have established characters in both that i can play for nothing and I like the early levels in each of them. There's Project: Gorgon, flirting with that Steam launch yet again. I believe still haven't sorted out my account to register my Kickstarter credentials. I thought I might do that but it seems like work and I'm not at all sure I'm interested enough in P:G any more to make the effort.

Every time anyone mentions Black Desert I remember how much I enjoyed my time there. I'd give it another go but it's somewhere on a hard drive I took out of my old PC and I'd have to find which one and put it in an enclosure. Same applies to Blade and Soul and Dragon's Nest and...oh I just can't be bothered.

And on it goes. I could list a dozen more MMORPGs that flit through my mind most days, a brief flurry of curiosity that fades to gray the moment I consider what I'd need to do just to log in. All those usernames and passwords to find, the updates to install, and for what?

Disorientation, confusion, a sense of rising panic. That's what. An apprehension that none of these "games" are pick up and play. A growing understanding that each and every one of them has a learning curve that's not dissimilar to learning a new language or starting a new job.

Is that fun? It used to be fun. It guess it still would be - if I thought I was going to commit. It's clear from all the neophyte Monster Hunters turning journeymen out there that once those claws catch they hook. I could be caught that way again, I'm sure, only by what?

Looking ahead I have a desultory interest in Crowfall. I'm guessing it will be a disaster but an interesting one. I'm very far from sure I want to pay $50 to be there when it happens but I don't rule it out. They hope to make Soft Launch "as early in 2018 as we can". I have another week off work in March...

Oh, who am I kidding? Crowfall isn't going to launch in March this year, "soft" or otherwise. Neither is anything else that interests me. I'll be here in a month doing just the same thing I'm doing now - shuttling between three or four MMOs I've played for five, ten, fifteen or twenty years already.

If I somehow find any extra energy and manage to make the effort I might throw in a few more of similar vintage. If I do, all it will be is a quick nostalgia trip followed by a swift retreat as the prospect of the sheer commitment required to make  meaningful progress sinks in.

All of which sounds like I'm in something of a gaming funk, that I'm suffering from the notorious MMO malaise, but really I'm not. I spent most of my week off playing MMOs, just as I planned and wanted - it's just that the only MMOs I played were the same MMOs I'd have played had I been working.

I'm writing this almost as an apology to myself, some kind of penance for sins of omission. I feel kinda sorta guilty that I didn't use the time "better", somehow. But what, really, would "better" look like? If I'd dabbled around in a dozen different games, would I have had anything much to show for it? Anything more than I have?

Well, I'd have a few more blog posts, for sure. Maybe less introspective and solipsistic ones, at that. A bunch of screenshots and some memories. But isn't that a tail wagging a dog? Best hope, I'd have some fresh ideas, a new gaming crush.

Didn't happen. Not going to happen.

Instead I played many, many hours of GW2. I added a whole bunch of ranks to my main account as I spent hours and hours in World vs World, pointlessly trying to defend or recapture doomed keeps against overwhelming opposition in an utterly meaningless match, which our team wanted to lose anyway.

I ran race after race around Divinity's Reach for no better reason than an NPC announced there were races to be run. I did The Maw and Claw of Jormag for the ten thousandth time for loot I don't need or want. I opened Lucky Envelopes and set off fireworks and generally hung out with the crowds, wherever the crowds were, doing whatever the crowds were doing.

And when I wasn't doing that I was in EQ2, adding more homes to my housing network and more materials to my storage depots. I spent most of a session ferrying in house pets and setting up a duck pond.

Then for a change of pace I put ten levels on my Bruiser in Sinking Sands, a zone where I have probably spent more time than all my holidays from the last five years added together and I enjoyed every minute of all of it. I still have three days left before I go back to work and I'm going to spend much of it doing more of what I already did. And then when I'm back at work I'm going to do it some more again.

Does the WHO maybe have a point, d'you think? Or maybe it's just that I'm very, very lazy and very easily amused?