Abandoning live service gaming (mostly)
Growing up I spent an ungodly amount of time in various mmorpg’s and arpg’s.
In my adult life I was an avid player of Path of Exile and World of Warcraft, to name the specific offenders responsible for this post.
This week the new WoW expansion Midnight launched, and by all accounts, it’s content is resonating with me. The environments and scale are so cool to see as somebody who was there from the start.
But not even 2 hours into starting my journey, I felt my eyelids getting heavy and dozing off. I was not having fun.
The spectacle of it all would have been fantastic, I thought, if it wasn’t a boring mmorpg that I have played for 20+ years.
I want to be in the universe of Warcraft, but not in an mmorpg. Not anymore.
Every expansion it’s the same thing. Gear resets, level to max with a badly written story in the background and then gear up for raiding until every few months after that gear resets again.
The last couple of years I limited myself to only playing during expansion launches and the first raid, because the repetitiveness of the gear resets was getting too much.
But after playing so many different single player games the past two years (I was largely a multiplayer only type of person, so a lot of this is new to me), I can’t help but be bored being back in WoW.
This same week PoE is launching a new league/expansion. And while the content looks great, going through the campaign for the hundredth time fills me with dread.
I would love to play the new endgame, but I don’t want to drag myself through the campaign again for 10-15 hours. I can complete it much faster, but that would require me to put in effort and actually care, which I don’t anymore.
One positive thing that came out of this is that I started appreciating other mmorpg’s much more with horizontal progression systems such as Guild Wars 2 and Old School Runescape. Whatever you unlock in those games stays relevant forever, no matter how much content releases when taking a long break.
Pure grindy games are also fine with me, as long as my effort doesn’t get thrown in the bin every expansion.
In the future, when I feel like playing a new mmo, I’d like to try out Project Gorgon or Black Desert (I don’t like the combat, would be specific for the life skills). I also hope more single player focused arpg’s get released such as Grim Dawn and Titan Quest.
All this to say that I think I finally reached my breaking point for repetitiveness for the sake of repetitiveness. It’s a freeing feeling, really.
Time to play more (different) games.
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