Currently Playing...

Time for a quick update on what I'm playing, I guess. Because that's what we do here, right? 

Not sure I could explain to a space alien why it's what we do, even assuming it's anything a space alien would want to know, which seems unlikely, now I come to think about it. You'd imagine, if they'd come here all the way from Alpha Centauri, which always seems to be where most of them come from, any self-respecting space alien would have better things to do with their time than quiz random bloggers on why they keep telling everyone what games they're playing.

Or not playing, come to that. It's not like I'm keeping a tally but I'd have to guess I've read as many posts about what games someone has stopped playing as I have about those they still are. And that's not even getting into the count for games we're all thinking of playing!

So, what started all this introspection, if that's the word? ( I was going to say "nonsense" but I think Belghast has that one trademarked.) Well, if you really want to know it was Jeromai.

Jeromai's signal blinked back to life yesterday after a couple of years of silence, proving yet again how crucial it is never to remove anyone from your blog roll. Well, not anyone you would actually want to hear from again, that is...

The name of Jeromai's blog is Why I Game, which seemed exceptionally appropriate for his post on coming back to Guild Wars 2 after a long layoff. Among other things, he talks about coming home to a former MMORPG and indeed back to the corner of the blogosphere where he used to chat about such things. His conclusion is that you can't really come home to somewhere that was never really home in the first place, which really puts another layer on that overused line of Thomas Wolfe's. 

I have a seasick feeling I covered all that stuff here once before and anyway it's not what I wanted to talk about today. I'm a lot more interested in something I said in my reply to Jeromai's post (Well, there's a surprise...).

Looping around to those blogging about blogging discussions that always come up during Blaugust, I've mentioned a few times how I tend to just sit down and type to get a post going and how that sometimes means I end up writing something I wasn't planning. Like this, in fact.

It goes further than that.

Writing the way I do, not just in posts but in comments as well, sometimes means I hear myself saying things I had no idea I thought. It's not that unusual for me only to find out what I think about something when i read back what I've written. It's even more common for me to think I think one thing, only to discover, as I try to put it down in words, that I don't quite think that at all but something else entirely.

In this case, what I discovered when I replied to Jeromai is that right now I prefer not having a "main game", as I did for more than twenty years from the late 90s onwards. It's liberating. And relaxing. And more fun.

I remember how important it felt to have that one game, always an MMORPG, naturally, as the spine of my gaming anatomy. How unmoored and at sea I felt whenever I reached the end of my time with my game of choice at the time.

There were many times when I felt the urge to move on but it always seemed extremely important to have a new game to go to whenever I considered leaving an old one. Gaming was like serial monogamy back then. You stayed faithful to one game until you broke up, then you either began a new relationship with some other game you'd been eying up for months or you thrashed around desperately until you either swallowed your pride and went back to what you knew or somehow managed to convince yourself you'd fallen in love all over again with something else - anything else.

The life of an MMO gamer could all too easily descend into a series of intense, increasingly short-lived relationships or, if you prefer a less emotionally taxing metaphor, an endless skip across a line of ever-decreasing stepping stones, heading always into deeper water, farther form any safe shore. OK, that wasn't much more re-assuring.

It absolutely wasn't just me, either. It was the way it was for a lot of people. Leaving one MMORPG for another was reckoned a Big Deal. There used to be all kinds of talk about loyalty that seems positively delusional now: loyalty not to the people you might have been playing the games with but to the games themselves. As though they knew or cared.

Some of that still clings to the periphery of the hobby but the zealots and loyalists eem ever thinner on the ground. No-one cares as much and ironically that feels like progress to me. Or  perhaps I mean persepctive.

Even calling it a hobby is telling. No-one ever called it a "hobby" back then. It was a lifestyle as much as anything. Maybe even a calling, a vocation.

Now, it's a hobby. Maybe even a pastime. A bit of fun. If we're lucky, a lot of fun. Just not anything that really matters any more. That has to mean some kind of emotional growth, doesn't it?

It feels that way, to me, anyway. Or it does at the moment. In that comment to Jeromai I surprised myself when I said "I tend to get heavily into each as it comes, play for 50-100 hours then get caught up in the hype for a new one and move there instead to do it all again. I think it’s a vastly more healthy way to play games than getting stuck with one and just trying to keep convincing myself I like it because it’s familiar." 

It's true, though. And now I point it out to myself, I realise I've been doing it ever since I stopped playing GW2, which may have something to do with how loathe I am even to consider going back. I don't want to become one of those bitter vets who can't leave their old game alone even though they haven't played for years but sometimes the metaphor that comes to mind is less one of a relationship that soured than of a substance finally purged from the system. And you know how careful you have to be about those.

This blog has always been a record of my gaming infidelity, of course. I've played countless games, gotten excited by them, posted frenetically about their pleasures, then dropped them and moved on to the next. And often I've gone back, again and again. As with romantic relationships that turn into friendships, it's always good to keep in touch and hang out together occasionally. Sometimes, though, you have to make a clean break.

All of which is an extremely long and uneccessarily introspective introduction to a post that was going to be about my having completed the main questline and all the sub-quests added to Wuthering Waves for the Moonchasing Festival, about having done as much of Solasta as I think I'm ever going to and about why I'm not playing Once Human at all at the moment

I was full of praise for Wuthering Waves' first major update, when I wrote about it almost three weeks ago and I'm very pleased to say the high standard was maintained throughout. There's hours of content in the event, all of which I found involving and entertainning. The storytelling is solid, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is convincing and the mini-games are fun. 

I didn't run a timer but I would guess the whole thing took me six or eight hours to do, a great deal of which was watching and listening to scripted narrative of sufficient quality to hold my attention throughout. There was hardly any combat at all and the couple of set-pieces that did pop up were quite manageable even for someone as bad at the fighting part of the game as I am. (I'm really bad.)

The whole thing ended with an excellent, lengthy cut scene of the quality usually reserved for promotional trailers. Don't take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself.

Of course, without the kind of parasocial relationships built up between player and NPCs over dozens of hours in game, the emotional impact is lost, but the production values still shine through. Wuthering Waves is a quality game.

So is Once Human as far as I can see, although even people who like it insist on describing it as "janky" and "full of bugs", neither of which has been my experience. I was fully intending to carry on with OH once the Season system came into operation but I just haven't and I can't even say why, for certain.

It would be neat to claim it had something to do with the way the Seasonal process derails progression but I'm playing Wuthering Waves still and that has absolutely the worst "progression" system I've seen in years. I probably ought to do a whole post about that but the tl:dr is that almost every reward and drop is some kind of consumable used to upgrade your character but as yet I haven't felt that upgrading any of them is something I much want to do. I just do the bare minimum I can get away with and then carry on enjoying all the excellent narrative content, most of which doesn't seem to care whether I've upgraded or not.

At the moment I'm sort of thinking about letting my server in OH expire, forcing me to Eternaland, then waiting for the next PVE scenario, whenever that is, before picking the game up again. By doing that, though, I feel there's a real danger I might just never get around to going back in any serious fashion at all. Once Human would then become yet another in my large pile of games I used to like but don't really think about any more. Which would be a shame.

And yet, I can't say I really care. That old loyalty to individual games that used to come so naturally is a lot harder to find, now. It burns hot still when the games are new but allow it to cool and it gets harder and harder to fan it back to life.

It seems much easier and a great deal more enjoyable to get excited al over again about something new. If there was a shortage of good games to try (Or, indeed, old ones to revisit.) then cultivating a loyalty to a specific title might make more sense. As it is, though, I feel the problem revolves more around finding the time to try all the interesting new possibilities than finding something to hang onto like a life-raft.

Which brings me to Solasta, about which I haven't really posted anything and now most probably never will. I've been playing it somewhat obsessively and with considerable pleasure for what Steam tells me is more than fifty hours but now I'm all but certain I'm done with it. 

A couple of nights ago I found myself unexpectedly in the midle of what felt like it had to be the grand finale, the big battle to decide the fate of the world. I was completely unprepared for it, both in terms of where I'd thought I was in the game and in the sense of being in a position to have any chance of succeeding. 

After the first couple of catastrophically unsuccessful attempts I did some googling and found that, yes, it was indeed the very last fight but also that, if I somehow managed to win, the game would literally flash up a Game Over screen and that would be that. I wouldn't even get to loot the corpses of my enemies.

That put a pretty large dampener on the prospect of completing the game at all but I still might hve tried because the comabt in Solasta is a lot of fun and I would quite like to have finished that last fight. When I found out through trial and error that there didn't even seem any way to back out of the whole thing and start over, having prepared myself a bit better, short of going back to a save that was several hours of progress in the past, it seemed to me that the rational reaction was simply to treat the game as over and move on. So I have.

An that's a good thing. I was never a completionist. I never felt I needed the closure of a Game Over screen in a single player game and I'm happy to say I no longer feel the need of a "good reason" to stop playing an MMORPG. 

Now I think when it's time to stop, you know. And if you don't know why you're still playing, then it's time to stop. At least, that's what I think now. I'll know what I think tomorrow when I read what I've written about it then.