A Few Games I'm Not Playing And A Couple I Am

Just a quick update on the games I'm playing today, I think. And I am playing games. After several weeks, or possibly months, of droning on about how I don't seem to have the time and/or inclination these days, the interest, at least, has returned in full force, as I suspected it would. The necessary time hasn't come along with it, unfortunately, or not yet, but maybe once the holiday season is out of the way...

I also seem to be running through games at a heck of a pace, just like the old days. By which I don't mean I'm finishing them or even making steady progress, sadly. No, the familiar pattern I appear to have fallen back into is starting new games, or returning to old ones, then posting here about how much fun they are and how much I'm enjoying myself, before dropping whatever it was I was so happy with just a moment ago in favor of something else.

Wuthering Waves is the prime example. I love Wuthering Waves! I think it's a great game. I haven't played it for months. It's now reached the point where I haven't played it for so long I find it difficult to imagine starting again. I'm so far behind. It took me forever to catch up the last two times and I can't see myself doing it again.

Then there's Crystal of Atlan. It's no Wuthering Waves, that's for sure, but it's a fun game all the same and I was planning on getting to the end of the storyline, at least. And then I stopped logging in for no particular reason and I haven't started again. I did move Atlan from one drive to another yesterday, to make room on the SSD for Ashes of Creation, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't intending to get back to it some day. When that day might come is anyone's guess.

I'll come to AoC in a bit but before then there's New World to consider. After Amazon mothballed it, all the publicity about the game dying counter-intuitively made me want to play it again, so I did. And it was as good as I remembered, if not better. I was happily working my way towards the level cap and learning to ride around Aeternum on wolf-back. I had clear and definite goals I wanted to achieve.

So am I still playing New World? I am not. I mean, I will be playing again. And soon. Probably. Just not right now.

I suppose I could say the same about Once Human. I went back to that one with considerable enthusiasm just a few weeks ago. Or was it months? There were all kinds of interesting things going on. I wanted to see them and do them and post about them. 

I didn't, though. I logged in a few times, wandered about aimlessly, then drifted away again. It wasn't through lack of interest. It just happens. 

Here's the problem. All of the games I've mentioned demand a very significant time commitment. Or they do if you want to get anywhere with them. And yet, thanks to the way the online gaming market has evolved, you can still enjoy them without putting in the hours. Or indeed the effort. 

Almost all modern games "respect the player's time", by which they mostly mean you can log in for half an hour, every day or a few times a week or whenever you get a spare half-hour, and get something done. Then you log out, satisfied, and forget all about the game until the next time, whenever that happens to be.

I was doing that in all the above games for most of the Autumn and it was a little bit annoying, if I'm honest. That's why I keep low-key complaining about it. 

It's great that you no longer need to dedicate an entire weekend to getting half a level but in a way it was the knowledge that, if you didn't do it, you wouldn't get anywhere at all that kept you playing. Until you burned out, deleted all your characters, uninstalled the game and spent the next five years bad-mouthing it every chance you had...

So it's swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Anyway, where I've ended up right now is with two games on the go, the aforementioned Ashes of Creation and good old EverQuest II. Only one of those is almost certainly not going to make it into the New Year. Can you guess which?

Yep. Ashes of Creation. Not because it's a bad game. Or a bad start to a game. It's not finished yet, of course, not even close. Even so, it's very playable. Feels as finished (At low levels.) as many MMORPGS I've played. 

It also feels exactly like many MMORPGs I've played. Boy, does it ever! 

I'm well aware that it won't always bee that way. It's going to be Fantasy Eve Online Not In Space, with everything all about alliances and holding or taking territory and all that political stuff. And for all I know it may be a bit like that already, somewhere. Just not in the part of the game I'm seeing.

I'm still effectively in the tutorial although, officially, there doesn't seem to be one. NPCs keep lecturing me, at very great length, on where to go and what to do. One of them took a while teaching me how to craft a backpack yesterday (And the day before. It took a while.) which was useful. (Storage is weird in AoC because crafting mats take up a specific and variable amount of space but other items don't.)

I got sent to a farm to help out and somehow that turned into doing an endless sequence of repeatable missions. I did a lot of those as I inched my way through Level 4. That fast xp I was talking about last time sure dried up fast. 

The whole thing reminds me of Vanguard, in a weird kind of way. The landscape is similar, the NPCs are similar, the crafting stations are similar, the mission boards are similar, the pace is similar... At one point yesterday I literally found myself thinking about logging out and going over to the Vanguard emulator instead because if I was going to be playing Vanguard, I might as well actually play Vanguard.

Except in Vanguard no-one kills you and takes your stuff. Not that anyone's done that to me in AoC. Yet. But all that ponies and princesses stuff I gave out in my First Impressions post about how the PvP isn't as non-consensual as the rumors have it and how your PvP flag is off unless you turn it on? Well, it's true and it's not.

Here's how it actually works. You have a PvP flag, yes. It's off by default, yes. Does it stop people ganking you? No. All it does is give them a penalty for killing someone who wasn't flagged for PvP. You're still going to be dead afterwards. And as far as I can read it, they'll still have your stuff, or some of it.

Which still doesn't put me off playing. I've got nearly six hours in AoC now and I haven't seen any PvP whatsoever. Very much the reverse, in fact. There are people everywhere but they're all minding their own business, the exceptions being a couple of times when I was very low health in a fight with a tough bandit or a bunch of goblins and someone threw me a couple of drive-by heals. Oh, and someone accidentally trained a bear onto me but stopped to help kill it and heal me up after.

People around have been very friendly in action if not in words. No-one's actually spoken to me. I said "Thank you" for the heals but they were gone by then. Global chat, though, that's a different story. 

The good news is the gold spam seems to have vanished completely. Didn't see a single spammer yesterday, whereas the day before it was never-ending. The bad news is that without all that spam filling the chat window I can hear what the real players are saying.

It's nothing terrible but it's quite disheartening. It's what you get in every MMORPG that sets out a stall to be the Next Big Thing or, even worse, the Next Old Thing. Everyone's been there and done that and wants you to know about it.

There was one of those moments that happen in every MMORPG, quite often, when everyone in chat starts telling you how long they've been playing and how old they are. And old is the word, alright. Someone summed it up when they chipped in with "I'm 38 and you guys are making me feel young." 

Things have changed some, though. In the same five minutes, I heard one person come out with the traditional "Why don't you go back to WoW?" in response to some trivial suggestion that AoC might be a tad slow, only to be followed a few minutes later by someone else proclaiming, in an unrelated conversation about how much fun they were having, "This is the first good new MMO that's come out since WoW!" 

I don't really know how to parse that. I do know, though, that I won't be going hard on AoC for a few reasons, not least of which is the terrible trouble I have logging in to the damn game. Once I get in, it plays smoothly enough but it just hangs on a black screen for five or even ten minutes before I get there. 

Whether that has anything to do with the number of people playing or the DDOS attacks Intrepid say there have been, I don't know. If it's player numbers, there's no queue and all the servers are showing as Low, though, so I doubt it's that.

Anyway, I'll be giving Ashes a few more sessions, I expect. I like what I've seen and if I was in the market for a serious, old-school MMORPG that I could devote many, many hours of my life to, it would certainly be high on the list. But I'm not and it's silly to pretend I am.

All of which brings me to the game I almost certainly will be playing into the New Year and beyond, just like I do every year: EQII. I'm ticking along very nicely there with both the Adventure and Tradeskill questlines and having a really good time. 

I was going to write a few paragraphs about that, too, but this post is plenty long enough already so I'll save it for another time. After all, the game isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.