Something Of The Night

Joar of MMO Casual has a post up about tracking gaming hours. As I was saying only the other day, it's not a thing I've ever done, or not with any precision or intent, at least. I've always been happy enough with a rough estimate. 

It used to be very easy, back when I was working something close to full time. I could add up evenings and weekends and come to something pretty close. Playing mostly one MMORPG at any given time made it easier to keep track, too.

Sidebar: I've actually not worked fully full-time for most of my life. I did two or three years of full-time work in the mid '80s, then maybe five years in the 90s and perhaps as many again in the twenty-aughts going into the teens. I did a longish stint of four days a week after that, all the way through until I got sick in 2019. That came close to being full time but it doesn't count if you think of a working week as a minimum of 35 hours across five days. Since the pandemic I've never done more than three days a week and now it's just two, which I count as being semi-retired. 

Mostly, though, I've done all I could to avoid working full time. One of my life goals that I set myself, when I was still at school, was to work as little as possible and think I've made a fair go of it. And in about six weeks I won't be working at all, which was always the dream.

The less structured my days become, the harder it gets to be certain exactly what I've been doing. The days blur a little and run together, especially across a long, extended period of sunny, hot, dry weather as  we've enjoyed this summer. So it did come as a bit of a shock to find I'd been playing a lot less than I thought.

I know a lot of people worry about how much time they're spending on games but I'm somewhat the opposite these days. I worry I'm not playing enough. I quite often don't even think of logging in to a game until quite late in the day and then, when I do, I often find myself feeling like I've been playing for long enough after what I can now see from the record is likely to be less than half an hour. That's incredibly lightweight. Barely even counts as casual gaming!

But then, I've never been one for really long sessions. Even when I was in the deep snows of my EverQuest obsession, it would have been rare for me to play for more than three hours at a stretch before taking a break. I'd never have needed GeForce Now's six-hour sessions, which would have seemed disturbingly generous to me even then.

Less than half an hour a day, though... that's disturbing. That suggests a drifting away. With the prospect of gaining two more free days in October, it seems like a poor time of life to be shedding interests and hobbies. 

 

So, after I wrote that post, I gave myself a good talking to about not playing enough video games and I'm pleased to say it's had an immediate effect. The very next day I buckled down and finished the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness. That took me just over two hours (The whole thing took just over four.) There will, no doubt, be a post about that soon enough. It was very good.

That was in the afternoon. By evening, I was ready for more. But not more NTE. As I've said before, my main issue with the gacha games I've been playing is that the story is too good. Too intense. Too involving. Too emotionally demanding. 

Whenever I play through a section of the story in one of these games, I feel very much as though I just watched a particularly immersive and powerful movie. I need time to process what I've just experienced and I need a break before I do it again. Obviously, the six-week cadence allows for recovery time more than adequately but equally obviously, the NTE story session put what might otherwise have been my first choice, Wuthering Waves, right off the table, as far as a same-day follow-up went.

But for that, Wuthering Waves would have been my preference because I really want to see that Edgerunners content. I'm almost up to it as a skip-forward but overall I'm way behind in the main storyline. I'd guess there's something like fifteen to twenty hours of narrative I need to catch up on. At the rate I'm able to handle it, that's going to take me a few weeks, even if I push my own limitations as far as they'll stretch and of course more story keeps coming all the time.  

There's another limitation, too. One that's only started to affect me relatively recently and only since the games I play began to rely much more on fast mouse action for combat than the stately tab-target of the MMORPGs I played for so long. 

It's not that the fights are hard. I'm very happy that combat in Neverness To Everness remains mostly unchallenging. Iused to say I'd prefer there was none at all but that's an exaggeration. I quite like there being some fighting. It breaks up the very frequent and very lengthy cut scenes and does quite a lot to add to the feeling of personal involvement that makes playing games a different experience from watching movies. If it was all cut scenes then there really would be no difference at all.

Hard fights, though, and especially fights that have to be repeated because they were too hard to beat in one attempt, have the exact opposite effect. I blame the terrible, abrasive, attritional, repetitive, wholly unwarranted boss fights in Guild Wars 2 for my eventual disenchantment with that game. Well, that and the story being consistently so very bad, something that made the interminable fights you had to go through to see it seem like a sadistic joke.

Neither NTE nor Wuthering Waves currently suffers from that kind of hubris. The stories are great and the fights are fun. There are very few "trash"  fights and when they do pop up they're barely an inconvenience. The set-piece boss fights, which are also well-spaced, are exciting, explosive, visually stunning and, crucially, short. 

Best of all, they're tuned to my extremely limited capabilities. I'm not a complete duffer. I do a little better than pure button-mashing but not much. And yet, I can't remember the last time I lost a boss fight in a story segment of either NTE or WW. They're that well-judged.

Not infrequently, as the player you don't even need to do all the work yourself. It's quite common for the fight to switch to a cut scene, when you've reduced the boss's health to, say, thirty per cent. Then you get to sit back and watch your character execute a series of stunning, balletic moves to bring the baddie down.

I really love that. It's so much better than doing it all myself and yet, because I've done the prep for it, it still feels satisfying. It also gives my wrist a chance to recover.

That's the real problem with combat in NTE and WW. I'm in my late sixties. My hands and wrists aren't really up to the kind of physical punishment they're getting from hammering the mouse buttons non-stop for minutes at a time in frenetic bursts across a couple of hours. After that last session in the Fogden, I was really feeling it.

So, for both physical and emotional reasons, an evening session in Wuthering Waves that same day was out. But those aren't the only two games I could have played. I have a raft of unplayed games on Steam, many of which are available to play on GeForce Now. 

Let's see. Earlier this year I was playing Road 96 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Both of those are on GFN. I started afresh in Palworld when it launched officially a few weeks back. I bought Brok the Investigator, Kathy Rain 2 and Mutant Year Zero this year, with the intent of playing them immediately, and I haven't started any of them. 

Going back further, I have unfinished games of My Time At Sandrock and Sable waiting to be picked back up. I was even playing The First Descendant for a while. All of those are on GeForce Now. Plenty of choice then. So what did I play?

New World. Or should I say New World Aeternum. Let's not forget the rebranding because that was so successful. Sure. Why not go back to a dead game walking? That makes sense.

But it worked. On Thursday evening I played New World for an hour and eighteen minutes, meaning I played video games for almost three and a half hours in one day. And then I played New World for another fifty-five minutes yesterday and we didn't even have the internet until lunch time.  

Operation success, I guess, or so far at least. Now I just have to keep it up. And in that regard, I have to say New World is helping quite a lot. I want to go play it right now...

It's always been such a comfortable game. I've always been able just to log in and potter around and find things are getting done in a satisfying fashion without me really needing to plan anything. 

Everything gives xp of some kind so you're always making progress. Nothing's very difficult unless you want it to be. You can spend a whole session not fighting anything and come away feeling you've been well entertained. And there's always something interesting to look at. It reminds me a lot of Black Desert Online in that respect. 

(Hmm. I wonder if Black Desert's on Ge Force Now? I wouldn't mind playing some of that again and it might make a good alternative when New World goes away next year.)

 

I'm not that much of a goal-oriented player but I do like to have some vague plan in the background, just for the sake of structure. Last time I played New World, back in December, I was working on mount progression. From memory, I had to stop because the next part was in Nighthaven and you have to be Level 65 even to go there. 

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that there's double XP across the board. I'm guessing that's a permanent addition until the sunset. Since I hadn't played for months, I also had full rested XP, which, combined with that server bonus, put a x4 modifier on xp gain. That seemed like a gimme for getting to 65 so off I went.

First off, I went to Brimstone Sands which, at 63, seemed like it was level-appropriate. It was, but it was also a bit more like hard work than I was keen to get involved with, so I looked on the map for somewhere a little softer and came up with Great Cleave. 

I don't remember a lot about Great Cleave and my suspicion is that that's because there didn't used to be a lot there to remember. As I was later to discover with Edengrove, quite a bit of content seems to have been added to New World since I played regularly. Both zones seem to have a lot more going on than I remember. I had no trouble picking up a slew of new quests, ones I didn't remember seeing before. 

I roamed around the snowy mountains of Great Cleave, following quest markers, picking off the required mobs or opening the necessary chests as I came across them. The questing was fun, even if the quests themselves weren't. 

I'd forgotten that every quest in New World is fully voiced. That's a place Amazon could have saved some money. The quality of the voice acting is, to put it politely, variable. As, for that matter, is the quality of the writing. Some, I read and listened to with pleasure. Others, I had to skip through as fast as possible. And I hardly ever skip quest dialog. It has to be pretty bad to make me feel bad for whoever had to read the words out loud. A couple of these were that bad.

The best of the bunch by a long way was a multi-part quest involving a woman who wanted me to find some bits and pieces for her so she could put them together to make a poppet that she thought might then turn into a real child. If this wasn't Aeternum I'd have assumed she was deranged but in that cursed place you can never be sure. Reality is malleable there. 

The quest ended with nothing having happened but when my character expressed disappointment that no child appeared, the woman said it was too early to tell if it had worked and we'd just have to wait and see, which I thought was an excellent conclusion. The quest may or may not continue at some point, possibly with the spawn of some kind of devil-child but it'll work for me whether it does or it doesn't.

A few quests and a lot of random slaughter along the way took me through 63 to 64 pretty handily. I logged out on Thursday evening half way through the level and the next evening I dinged 65. All quite painless and indeed quite enjoyable. New World is a weirdly cosy game for something that's probably situated somewhere in the horror genre.

Since the whole point of the exercise was to get to Nighthaven, before logging out for the night, I got on my horse and followed the twisty, winding, confusing sand-trails across Brimstone Sands to the unlikely border with the cold, dark forest next door. From there I cantered down the better-kept roads of the Mittel-European province to the main settlement, where I camped for the night.

I'm quite looking forward to getting back to find out what the story is there. And to carry on with whatever it was I was doing with those mounts back before Christmas. There are another five levels to the cap so I might time it so I only play while I have rested xp. The game has another six months or so to run so there's no hurry. I'd like to have a character at the cap when it goes.

Why? I don't know. So I've done it?  So it feels complete? Closure? 

No, not really. Mostly just to have a vague direction to be heading, I guess. I suppose I do need some kind of goal to keep me moving in the right direction after all. Otherwise I'm likely just to wander off and find something else to do instead.

As with all these returns to games I used to play, it's bound to be fleeting but that doesn't make any of those brief visits less than worthwhile. If nothing more, it's worth spending a little time with old friends who you know won't be around much longer.

Okay, that went a little darker than I was expecting. I'm just saying New World was always a fun diversion and that's not going to stop until the servers go down. 

And it doesn't really feel like a dead game yet. There were plenty of people playing when I was on. A steady hum of conversation in general chat. People passing on the roads and doing things in the settlements. The Steam Charts have numbers holding steady at an average of around five hundred concurrent all year. There are MMORPGs that have been running twice, three times as long as New World that would be delighted with those numbers. It's a shame it has to go.

How long I'll keep playing while it's still around is anyone's guess. History suggests not much more than a week or two. But that should be enough to get me to 70. 

After that, I'll probably be done.