Sometimes It Pays Not To Play

Since I'm not playing any games right now, about the best I can manage in the way of posts about gaming is either to poke at the news or to talk about the games I would be playing, if I was playing games. I have a couple of ideas for the first but I'm saving those until I have enough for a Grab Bag. Or until I'm desperate for something to write about, which could be very soon, the way things are going.

This morning, though, I'm going with the second option: games I might start playing any day now, if the weather wasn't so damn glorious and I didn't have this unquenchable obsession with creating an imaginary past where I really did something with all those songs I wrote in the 'eighties. 

And the game in the spotlight today is, once again, Once Human.

I got an email from Starry this morning. It was one of those "Come back! We miss you!" ones that all the good PR departments toss out like old toddlers throwing bread to the ducks. Bread, as we all know, is really bad for ducks but most ducks are too dim to know that, so they all pile in and scarf it up anyway. 

I'd like to think of myself as smarter than the average duck and even if I wasn't I'd hope at least to have better self-control and more discernment. In order to maintain that delusion, I try not to hurl myself at every inducement to return to games I stopped playing for what were probably very good reasons, if only I could remember what they were. 

The litter of past posts here, chortling over freebies I've claimed for games I went on never to play again, or at best that I played only for a desultory number of sessions after I filled my imaginary pockets, is all the evidence anyone could need to convict me of self-deception and maybe even hypocrisy. I say one thing and do another all the time although not, I hope, when it involves anything that actually matters.

It's true, then, that I'm a sucker for a freebie but it's also true that there are plenty of offers I can easily resist. And most of the "Please come back" offers plop squarely into that pot. Blizzard send me begging letters pretty much every week and so do ArenaNet but I haven't touched World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 for years now. 

Of course, that might be because their offers aren't all that. Certainly ANet's aren't. The best they ever seem to be able to come up with is long notes about what I'm missing and promises to sell me stuff for a bit less than they usually ask. Blizzard occasionally tempt me with some kind of "Play for a while for Free" but they largely scuppered their own ship there, when they came up with the endless free trial.

I try to avoid regionalist generalizations on the lines of "Asian games be like this but Western games be like that" but there are times when it's hard. Cultures do differ and its daft to pretend they don't. 

And one way the Eastern and Western gaming cultures definitely differ is that the Eastern ones give better freebies. They hand out more stuff, more often and it's better stuff. I've been taking their largess happily for years and it still puzzles me why they're so generous. It makes it completely unnecessary to give any of them any money at all. 

Cultural differences aside, as has been pointed out by angry players on both sides of the continental divide many times, developers are prone to giving you more stuff if you don't play their games than if you do. I receive a continual stream of inducements to return to games I haven't played in years but do I get any "Thank You for being a Loyal Customer" emails from the games I'm actively playing?

No, I do not. I get emails telling me what's new and suggesting I log in and enjoy it but they rarely, indeed almost never, come with rewards attached. The theory seems to be that if you play the game already, you can damn well log in and play it if you want stuff.  

It's no surprise. It's the way the world works now. Apparently I'm an idiot for not changing my utility suppliers at least every six months and I should be swapping my savings from bank to bank every time the interest rates change.

Well, screw that. There was a time - and I'm old enough to remember it - when the norm was to find something you were happy with and stick with it and that suits my personality a lot better than all this chopping and changing. I'm fundamentally lazy and I don't mind paying a small surcharge just to be left alone.

Unless, of course, all it involves is my pressing a few buttons. If it's that simple, why not? 

I pressed a few this morning and now Once Human is downloading to my external SSD. Again. Let's hope it's easier to keep updated this time.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just the "10+ cosmetics" that hooked me back in. Or the 40k Starchrom currency. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Starry have finally seen sense and opted for permanent servers. They've also added a Scenario in which the whole of the map is available. Those two moves directly address and to some extent resolve my two biggest problems with the game: impermanence and artificial boundaries.

So, I was going to come back at some point. What the latest offer did was bring that point forward to "Now". Whether I'll do any more, once the game has finally downloaded and installed itself, than log in to claim my loot, I can't predict. I suspect not but at least the client will be back on my hard drive and the possibility will be there again.

Since I was thinking about the game and since it was right there in the email, I also took a moment to pre-register for the upcoming Mobile version. I thought I'd done it already but it seems not. More than thirty million people have, though. Once Human is a popular and successful game.

There are freebies for pre-registering, naturally, along with a draw for real-world prizes ranging from in-game goods to computer peripherals and money. Top prize is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

You get draws for various "tasks" - registering your interest, providing an email or a phone number, following the game on social media and so on. I got two draws for registering with an email address and I won... a thank-you. That's an actual prize. I got thanked twice.

I imagine most people get a thank-you, unlike the Lone Ranger, who famously never did. I would hope quite a few people also get the "In-Game Bundle", whatever's in that. As for the rest, well they have been kind enough to reveal the probabilities. Not that I can make much sense of them. I'm not sure how there can be a 60% chance of a "Redeem Code" if there are only 30,000 of them and more than thirty million people have pre-registered...

For once, though, I'm not in it for the freebies. I want to see if the game will run on my phone. I don't imagine it will but it will be an interesting experiment, provided it doesn't catch fire trying. 

Steam is still working on getting the PC version up and running as I type and the mobile game doesn't go live until 23 April so for now it's back to what I really want to do - enjoy the spring sunshine and start work on another music video for my new YouTube channel. 

Once Human can wait. It's not going anywhere and anyway, if I leave it long enough, they'll almost certainly give me more stuff.