Grand Experiment Archives - Page 2 of 199

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

September 2, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.

Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.

Games Played 2021 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2021 by Belghast

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played since 2012

Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points.

The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time.

Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.

Top Games Played of 2021

The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again.

A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.

New World – 11 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
Outriders – 6 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
Destiny 2 – 4 Months

This is a year where I played an excessive amount of New World. While the game only launched in September I was pretty active in alpha/beta testing all the way through from February onwards when I got into the permanent testing group. I also had a massive resurgence of Final Fantasy XIV this year starting in June and continuing on through the release of Endwalker in early December. Outriders was a pretty significant game for me as well with it taking up four months in a row and then my recent revisiting in November and December. In January of the year I got deeply involved with Elder Scrolls Online again and spent several months hanging out with friends there and leveling some of my very first alts in the game.

If we compare this year to last year… you are going to see a few games that are conspicuously missing. The year of 2021 was a year without Blizzard games almost entirely. This started as me simply being disillusioned with Shadowlands and being unhappy with the way that expansion rolled out. By January of 2021 I had entirely bounced off of that game. Then when the news about the awful working conditions and allegations of abuse hit, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with that company. This put an immediate halt to my reoccurring Diablo 3 plans and lead me to ignore the launch of Diablo 2 Resurrection. So when you take away a game that I played 12 months in 2020 and another that I played 9 months… the entire picture starts to look significantly different.

Top 15 of All Time

Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.

World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
Rift – 47 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
Minecraft – 17 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
Everquest II – 14 Months
New World – 14 Months

Something I have never really done previously but decided to this year, was to create another chart that shows every game that I have played over 6 months in bar chart form. Here is what that looks like.

For the most part the top six have held their places relative to each other for another year. World of Warcraft continues to hold onto that top spot, but having lost 12 months of play time… it is suffering. Destiny is also suffering a bit only having gained 4 months total as compared to Final Fantasy XIV with its 7 months of new play time. Diablo 3 only got 2 months worth of play time before I shut the door on all Blizzard games so it is going to suffer a bit in the future. Elder Scrolls continues to see regular revisits from me, but Rift is largely an artifact of a past era and now is standing there as a testament to what might have been. There is a significant drop down to Pokemon Go and MTG Arena, neither of which saw much play last year but still hold strong.

What surprised me was that Guild Wars 2 is gaining traction, and I figure with the new expansion on its way I will spend some more time playing that. Minecraft gained a few months which honestly I always thought it deserved to be higher on the list given how emotionally important the game is to me. The real surprise is New World and how much I have spent playing it through all of the testing phases and now after launch. I really hope that game can make the necessary changes in order to be something that I want to revisit over time. I fully expect to stop playing it once the holiday event is over and I stop getting free easy expertise increases.

Longest Streaks

Most Number of Months Played Sequentially

This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.

Another Year of Gaming

This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion.

I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions.

If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward.

If you are even more curious, you can check out the raw list of data that I have shared freely for years. I am still not certain why I started doing this, but it does make for an interesting tradition at the end of each year.

Games Played 2018 Edition

December 30, 2022December 27, 2018 by Belghast

Over the years I have developed two habits that help me keep track of what games I am playing in a given month. The first is that I take a lot of screenshots and archive them on network attached storage so that I can reach out and get one for this blog when I need it. The second is that since April of 2013 I have been blogging at a minimum every weekday… and for the first three years and some change… every single day. This gives me a pretty good record to know what I happened to be playing in a given stretch of time. Years ago I used to use the Raptr gaming service to track what games I happened to be playing, but as that got sold and my game time fragmented between multiple console platforms as well… it became harder for me to get a high level view of what I happened to be doing at a given period of time. As such I crawled back through my screenshots and my blog posts and started piecing together a map of what games I played in a given month. Now this is not necessarily tracking the length of time played… but instead that I played a given game during a specific month.

This is going to look like nonsense to my viewers but this image represents the top 25 games played since May of 2012… that I had either written or screenshot proof that I was playing at the time. Essentially I question the reliability of this record any further back than April of 2013, but I decided to extend it out as far as I could just for sake of tracking patterns. There are years when I play an awful lot of games… and then there are years when I don’t play many at all. This year for example I played seventy two different games throughout the year and eight of them I played for more than five months. On the other side of that coin 32 of the games that I played were singletons… where they were only played in a single month. Now some of these were new games that failed to gain traction like State of Decay 2 that I had been looking forward to greatly… and others are games like Horizon Zero Dawn where I booted it back up to return briefly to a game that I had played an awful lot more in the previous year. If you are curious enough to dig into the madness you can see the full google sheet that I maintain here. The biggest trend you will notice is that I am one of those people that revisits old territory quite often, especially when it comes to booting up an older MMO and spending a weekend or two exploring it again.

The problem with this concept is that it is really hard to keep track of a nice clean “Top 25” list as there are ultimately a lot of games that end up being tied for the same number of months. As such for this specific year if we set the benchmark at three months played… because there were thirteen games that spanned two months sorta skewing the results a bit. For games that I played three or more months however we end up with a list of twenty three games. So as a result lets run them down. One thing that I have done since last year is combined time played in Destiny 1 with time played in Destiny 2 since there was effectively a clean cut-over there with no real overlap.

Destiny/Destiny 2 – 12 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 12 Months
Pokemon Go – 12 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
World of Warcraft – 10 Months
Magic the Gathering Arena – 9 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – 5 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 4 Months
Neverwinter – 4 Months
Dauntless – 4 Months
Dragalia Lost – 4 Months
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr – 4 Months
Fallout 4 – 3 Months
Minecraft – 3 Months
The Division – 3 Months
No Man’s Sky – 3 Months
Assassin’s Creed Origins – 3 Months
Path of Exile – 3 Months
Warframe – 3 Months
Fallout 76 – 3 Months
God of War – 3 Months
Hollow Knight – 3 Months

So if we look at just 2017 against 2018 there are some interesting things at work here. Firstly mobile games played way more of a presence in my gaming diet than they have ever before with Pokemon go effectively being played at least once a month since it released in July of 2017 for a grand total of 18 months of it being on my radar. Dragalia Lost similarly has been played every single month since release, and in many cases almost every night before I fall asleep to at a minimum do the dailies. Another thing that happened this year was that Final Fantasy XIV seemingly feel completely off my radar with playing it only 4 months instead of the previous years 7 months. Destiny looks a little bit weird because there were two months of overlap between the games so 2017 shows it as “14” months because I didn’t have a great way of accounting for that… but during the last two years there has not been a month that I did not play the Destiny franchise and in truth that reaches all the way back to September of 2016 in contiguous play. Elder Scrolls Online held way more of a presence this year as being another one of those games that I played at least once a month all year long going up from 2 months the previous year. The real story of the year however is Monster Hunter World that sort of came out from nowhere and then was the game that I probably played the most throughout the entire year, and also inspired me to latch onto Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate when it released in August. Similar to Destiny 2 this is a game that I started on the Playstation 4 and then moved to PC when the staggered release for it happened… so my time accounts for leveling essentially twice.

This year also made a bunch of changes in the months played all time list, but considering how entrenched World of Warcraft is it is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone it until I just completely quit cold turkey. Thankfully I can create a nice clean top 15 list here so lets review the “All Time” list.

World of Warcraft – 57 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 46 Months
Destiny/Destiny 2 – 45 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 38 Months
Diablo 3 – 29 Months
Pokemon Go – 20 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Minecraft – 10 Months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 Months

This list is going to continue to shift over time, but with the selling of Trion Worlds to Gamigo… I have a feeling that ArcheAge and Rift are frozen in time and will likely not be gaining any more months played. Similarly Wildstar has officially shuttered and it is equally frozen on the list and will eventually work its way out of the top. Monster Hunter World and Pokemon Go are both climbing significantly and I feel like there is a good chance Destiny franchise will climb into the second place at some point in the future as I am playing it way more regularly than I am Final Fantasy XIV. Elder Scrolls Online is going to seize the third spot early next year as well. Diablo 3 is sort of the little engine that could and it will probably always be on the list, but the sporadic nature in which I play that game keeps it from really gaining ground. Fallout 4 is the one that sort of shocked me… but I guess I keep returning to it much the same way as I did Fallout 3 or New Vegas before. If you are curious you can see last years list on the Games Played 2017 Edition post.

This is largely a thing that I do for myself, but I guess the question is… does anyone find it interesting? What games did you play the most often this year and why? I would love to hear your answers in the comments.

Games Played 2017 Edition

December 30, 2022December 29, 2017 by Belghast

Year End Review

One of the weird things that I do is that I attempt to keep track of the games I have played during a given calendar year. I started this madness I believe in 2015 and then have slowly been back populating that list based on a few methods. Essentially I am tracking things on a month by month basis and if I have written about a game or taken screenshots of a game… I log it as having been played during that month. The end result is this weird history of the games I have played over the course of a given calendar year. Seeing as this is the last “weekday” that I will be making a post until the beginning of 2018… I figured it was the perfect time to break out my post talking about the various things I played this year. Without further stalling… here is the data.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

During the course of the year I played a grand total of 41 different games, which is from 57 last year and 67 the year before that. Basically the key difference is that I mostly played MMOs which tend to hold my attention for larger periods of time than burning through a bunch of single player titles. Lets take a swath of the top ten titles and look at them a little closer.

World of Warcraft – 10 months
Destiny – 8 months
Diablo 3 – 7 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 months
Horizon Zero Dawn – 7 months
Destiny 2 – 6 months
Pokemon Go – 6 months
Fallout 4 – 5 months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 months
Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 4 months

At first glance the clear king is World of Warcraft with 10 months of play, but if you look back at past years this tends to be the one game that I am almost always at least playing a few days a month. However you notice that I largely took a complete break from the game in March and April and I feel like it is largely due to a few games coming out around the same time… Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel like the true winner is Destiny and Destiny 2 because if you include those as one game… then I played them every month of the year with some overlap between of two months when I was technically playing both. Granted I am including the time I spent playing various betas of the game but still… I feel like this was the year of Destiny for me personally. I spent significantly less time playing Final Fantasy XIV as I played rabidly during the launch of Stormblood and sorta bounced off otherwise. Another anomaly this year is that Rift did not make the top 10, and similarly odd is how much of a return Pokemon Go has had…. but I largely chock this up to getting a new phone that handles it better. The weirdest part about this years top ten list is that it includes several single player titles: Fallout 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All three of these are games that I keep being able to return to and play again and again in short bursts.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

Multi-Year View

Now if we expand out even further… here is the list of everything I have played since 2012. Things get a little spottier the further you go back. Essentially I have back populated this last by going through all of my old blog posts and jotting down which games I talked about playing. Additionally I have scanned all of the screenshots that I happen to have and divided them up by the month the file was created as an attempt to create a somewhat accurate picture of what I had been playing. Generally speaking if I am playing a game I am taking screenshots because I always need images for my blog. I may or may not have almost 30,000 screenshots sitting on network attached storage… and a stack of every hard drive from every machine I have owned waiting for a day when I feel like going spelunking for more screenshots. I am not even sure why I started down this path but now that I am on it… it has become another obsession of mine. Basically from here on we are going to largely talk about the top fifteen games I have played since 2012.

World of Warcraft – 47 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 42 months
Rift – 37 months
Destiny – 27 months (including D2 31 months)
Elder Scrolls Online – 26 months
Diablo 3 – 23 months
ArcheAge – 13 months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 months
Wildstar – 13 months
Everquest II – 11 months
Fallout 4 – 10 months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 months
Trove – 9 months
Pokemon Go – 8 months
The Secret World – 8 months

First interesting pattern is that there is only one non-mmo on this list and that is Fallout 4. I am not entirely certain why I keep returning to that game but there are so many nights I will fire it up on the laptop while doing other things and just roam around. Once again Rift has fallen a bit in the rankings as this time last year it was tied with Final Fantasy XIV for the second place slot. Destiny slides up into number three eclipsing Elder Scrolls Online, especially if you include Destiny 2 playtime which I denoted in quotes. Guild Wars 2 and my resurgence into that game caused it to leapfrog Wildstar a bit, and then the tail end of the list is either new because I expanded things out to top 15 or in a similar position. There are some games on this list that are likely to eventually fall out of the ranking. I am not really playing Everquest II anymore in part because the management since the swap to Daybreak has just been pitiful. Its a torn community and just not the environment I remember loving. Trove may or may not see me returning to it, because I have a friend who is super into that game right now… but also playing on the PS4 and not PC which makes the return to play with him more unlikely. Additionally that game has changed so much since I last played it that I would almost need to start fresh to really get back into it. Similarly I am not sure how much more time I will be devoting to ArcheAge because I just don’t find the game nearly as compelling as I once did. As I leveled in the game it felt like the things I wanted to be doing narrowed rather than broadened given that I have no interest in PVP nonsense. I left shortly before they split the servers into veteran and new player experiences, and I am not even sure what the game looks like right now.

Looking Forward

As far as the calendar year of 2018… I am not really sure what I will be playing. It is a forgone conclusion that I will be playing World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. In spite of me not really liking the more PVP centric focus, I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it at launch. I predict that I will be playing some more SWTOR in the near future because the release of a Star Wars movie always brings out the nostalgia for all things Star Wars. On top of that with Disney pulling the license for Marvel Heroes… I want to make sure I experience the story content in SWTOR just in case they for some reason decide to do the same thing they did with SWG. I know at some point I will make a return to Final Fantasy XIV and more than likely when they patch in the next step of the Palace of the Dead. As far as new games go… there really isn’t much on the horizon that really interests me. I am not enthralled by Crowfall or Camelot Unchained, because they seem to be creating games that don’t really stoke my interests.

Brad McQuaid will likely bring us some sort of version of Pantheon: Rise and Repeat as I heard someone call it the other day (I believe Wilhelm but not 100% sure). I played Everquest, and Vanguard… and Pantheon seems like more of the same just yet another slightly higher fidelity version of the same game Brad has kept trying to create since the 90s. I don’t have near as much nostalgia as some do for the “you must have a group with you at all times and death must be frustrating and painful” genre. Ashes of Creation looks mildly interesting… but what I have seen of the community tells me it is going to be a game I am not going to enjoy much in the same way that I didn’t enjoy ArcheAge at launch. Monster Hunter World is definitely something I am looking forward to giving a shot, in spite of the fact that I am horrible at Monster Hunter games. Anthem also seems really interesting, but the gameplay footage we have seen reminded me a bit too much of the promises Division made but never quite delivered on. In truth in the 2018 calendar year… I expect to keep playing a lot of the same games I played during the past several years because those MMOs just keep getting better with age.