Pulling The Trigger

As I settled down to play a game this morning I realised I had no real idea which it was going to be. After a couple of decades of almost always knowing, it suddenly struck me how weird that was. I'm not sure whether I like the feeling or not.

Things have been trending that way for a while. I suspect the pandemic and the large amount of enforced leisure time it created has something to do with it but for me the watershed moment would be when I finally gave up on my Guild Wars 2 dailies and stopped logging in to that game altogether.

By then it had already been a while since I'd played GW2 with anything like serious intent but for much longer than I'd been able to retain much interest in the game as a whole, "doing my dailies" had represented a structural event in the day rather like brushing my teeth or doing the washing up. About that exciting, too.

Once that went, it marked the end of almost a quarter of a century of structure centered on a specific game. Which game that might be changed a lot over the years. At various times it could have been EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest II, Guild Wars, Allods, Vanguard, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online, Wizard 101, World of Warcraft, The Secret World and finally GW2. 

Those and one or two more I've probably forgotten were games both Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together for at least a couple of months, sometimes several years. Since Mrs Bhagpuss has only ever played one MMORPG at a time, those titles became my de facto "main" game because we played whichever it happened to be almost every day until we finally had enough and looked around for another.

Mrs Bhagpuss no longer plays MMORPGs although she still sometimes talks about maybe starting again. Guild Wars 2 was the last she settled down in and she played there very regularly for nearly ten years. By the end, though, she was down to mostly just doing dailies, as was I. The third expansion pretty much drained all our enthusiasm for the game and it never returned.

Pets > Games

When we got Beryl, Mrs Bhagpuss finally stopped loging in to do her dailies because a new puppy is a lot more fun than a stale, old game. I carried on out of habit for a couple more months out of inertia before finally accepting there wasn't really anything to do in the game I was interested in any more and then I stopped too.

All the time I've played MMORPGs, though, right back to the turn of the millennium, I've had alts. Not alternative characters - alternative games. Even when I was playing EQ as much as forty hours a week I still wanted a change of pace, sometimes. 

I tried all the well-known or heavily hyped MMORPGs from Asheron's Call and Ultima Online to Horizons and Anarchy Online. I played The Realm and Endless Ages, Neo Steam and Rubies of Eventide and any number of under the radar titles. I signed up for every beta I heard about and got into many of them. When the imported titles started to roll in I tried as many of those as I could, too.

Among the games I played on my own, without Mrs Bhagpuss, quite a few stuck with me for long periods - Black Desert, Dragon Nest, Blade & Soul, Bless Unleashed, City of Steam and plenty more. I stopped counting the MMORPGs I'd at least dabbled in when the tally passed two hundred. 

That was years ago. It could be three hundred by now. I did a couple of posts about that but I can't find them. I really need to tag things more coherently.

While I was trying to find those "MMORPGs I've Played" lists earlier today, I noticed that I've also written posts like this a fair few times before: ones where I go on about how many games I'm playing and how I can't quite settle on any one of them. It's obviously a particular trope of mine.

It's all just a blur now...

This, though, is probably the first time I've posted about it when I also don't have an anchor game to rely on when inspiration and enthusiasm fails. These days, my pattern seems to be intense but rerlatively short-lived obsessions with new games or games new to me - Valheim, New World, Dawnlands, Noah's Heart, Chimeraland - interspersed with even shorter, largely unsatisfactory returns to games I remember enjoying in the past - LotRO, Final Fantasy XIV, half the titles I've already mentioned and most recently Star Wars: the Old Republic.

This year so far my focus MMORPGs (Or Open World Online RPGs or Open World Survival Games -the boundaries are blurry now.) have been Palworld, Nightingale, Wuthering Waves and Once Human. That's four pretty solid titles in about six months. 

I'm not sure why there's sometimes a narrative going around that these kinds of games aren't as good as they used to be or that it's harder to find good new ones. I'm convinced there was never a steady flow of must-try titles like this even back in the post WoW gold rush days. I seem to remember the gap between titles I wanted to try being more like three or four months at least, not three or four weeks as it frequently seems to be now.

October, for example, sees the arrival of Throne and Liberty, which I will probably try since it's F2P. It certainly seemed a lot more interesting than Tarisland, when I briefly investigated it during open beta. Not that Tarisland wasn't fun, too. Then the New World Aeternum revamp is due right after that and Pantheon goes into public Early Access (Not a soft launch!) in December. 

Are we really doing all this again? Seriously?

I imagine something worth a look will turn up in November. There seems to be a never-ending production line these days.

I haven't even mentioned expansions for games I'm playing. Or could be playing. There have been a slew of those this summer and more to come. Not that I bothered with any of them. I already had more than I could handle. I'll get the EQII expansion out of habit and loyalty but for the first time in years I haven't finished the last one yet and I can't say I believe I will before the next one lands.

All of this is nothing I haven't monologued about before, of course. I go through phases of playing a single game almost to the exclusion of all else and then I have periods when I can't make up my mind what to play at all. This is one of those times.

It sometimes helps to write it out. Not always. This time, what setting it all down on paper has done is to give me a little perspective. And you know what? I think the problem might be that I'm a little over-extended.

There have been plenty of times when what was stopping me from picking a game to play was not being able to summon up much enthusiasm for any of them. Right now, it's quite the opposite. I keep starting new games before I'm finished with the old ones. 

I haven't run out of steam yet with most of the games I've been playing already this year. About the only one I don't much want to take another look at just at the moment would be Palworld. And Palia, I guess, but I never really got going with that one anyway.

Because the old fool can't decide what game to play, apparently.

Instead of running out of ideas, I keep generating new ones. Every time I see a news item about some interesting development in a game I used to play or read someone's enthusiastic post about an MMORPG I already have installed I think "Oh, that sounds like fun!" and have to restrain myself from going to patch the thing up then and there. 

In the last month alone, I've been toying with re-visiting LotRO, Black Desert and Blade & Soul. I just about managed to resist those - so far - but I failed to put the brakes on for Allods, Bless Unleashed and SW:tOR. The first two didn't stick but SW:tOR is very likely going to be what I log into right after I finish this post.

And that pretty marks the end of this rambling. I started out with the hope that writing down the names of all the games I could play would give me a hint which one I wanted to and now it has I can stop!

Never had this problem when I had a main game.

If it even is a problem. 

Which it's not. 

Is it?