Last night I spent my evening trying to catch up on Destiny and quite honestly failing miserably at doing so. The Dawning has been a complete failure for me in actually getting it finished. Over the Christmas break I fell into a giant Witcher shaped hole that I have yet to pull myself out of. The game that suffered most because of this is Destiny 2 and for the most part I am okay with this. What it ultimately means is that I never finished unlocking the sparrow because I didn’t deliver 200 packages, Again I am mostly okay with this because I have been trying really hard to play what I want when I want rather than forcing myself down some tube towards specific chase content.
A lot of my actions over the last several years have been governed by FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Games have factored themselves in a way as to tweak your anxiety centers and make you feel like you need to do a certain thing within a certain time frame or you are in some way failing. This is all to drive up the concurrency numbers so that it feels like the game is alive and well. As a result so much content is doled out in limited time bundles that require significant commitment in order to successfully gain whatever carrot happens to be dangling from the stick. The problem here is that when everyone is doing this thing it means that you are always going to feel somehow like you are failing leading to a pretty miserable gaming experience.
I’ve never been the sort of player who only plays one game, and it feels like so much of the design of modern online games is focused towards trying to make players only play the one game. As a result for the last few years I have sat back feeling unsatisfied with my gaming, knowing that while I was playing game A I was missing out on something in B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. The Dawning for example was the only holiday event that I participated in during the 2019 extended holiday season. Pretty much every game had one going on, but I decided to nope out of all of them for my own sanity. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy Holidays in games, it is just that I am tired of being forced to consume content on someone else’s schedule.
There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of returning to a game and having a massive stack full of content to enjoy. When I return to SWTOR or FFXIV I tend to do so with enough of a lag between visits that I have a few weeks worth of catching up waiting for me. Nothing feels worse however than finding out that you missed out on something cool because the devs decided it was only going to be available during a brief window. I would personally so much rather see development time spent towards evergreen content that is always going to be there and available to the players rather than limited time flash in the pan gimmick content. Much of why I have never quite returned to Anthem for example is that they keep setting up limited time events and doing nothing to broaden the total game experience as a whole.
The one thing that I do appreciate about Destiny is that while I never seem to complete any of the content during a specific season, they seem to give me more wiggle room about this. Generally speaking if you get one of the big set piece quests for a season, you can then chew away on completing it over however long that it takes. For example during the Season of the Drifter they introduced a Gambit themed Heavy Machinegun called 21% Delirium which involved a ton of grinding to get. The final step of which I achieved last night by getting the “Notorious Hustle” triumph. I had been on the Envoys and Primevals defeated step for what felt like several seasons, because you have to be the person who scored the final damage on a target in order to get credit.
I am now the proud owner of another HMG, this time dealing Arc Damage… which I believe is not something I had in a legendary package. Traditionally if I needed an Arc Damage Machinegun I rocked Thunderlord taking up my Exotic weapon slot. All it all it seems like a pretty solid weapon, but I also have not had much time to spend with it as I mostly did Gambit and Crucible last night. The funny thing about the entire process is that I did in fact log in to see how far I was from completing the Dawning event, and when I saw that I still needed like some 60 packages I realized it was not going to happen. There is a part of my brain that is screaming, but I am desperately trying to deaden it as I figure out how to play on my own terms again.
2020 feels like a significant year because I am trying to do a bunch of things that I want to do. So far the reading every night thing is going extremely well, apart from the fact that several nights I have stayed up reading way later than I had intended to. I’ve finished one book and am 27% through the second book which is about par for the course for how fast I read. The Bel Folks Stuff thing is also going really well as shockingly most everyone I have talked to about it has accepted. Still in the process of reaching out to people, but like I only have had one no and one maybe for very valid reasons. Pretty much everyone has just been on board with this nonsense and I am kinda floored by it.
On the gaming front however I am still very much adapting to trying to do what I want to do and stop chasing that forever game. It is going to take some time, because I spent a decade letting my anxiety over missing out on something cool dictate my gaming schedule.
I despised the Dawning event. And the grind… the absolutely batshit crazy grind for that sparrow THAT ISN’T EVEN INTERESTING LOOKING was too much for me. I got to the point where I unlocked the last stage and saw how many more packages I’d need to deliver, and noped the fuck out of there. Hell, barely touched D2 since, to tell the truth. I finished the season level cap, and I’ve no interest in much else at the moment… or I need a break.
Tend to need a break when a game forces me to grind like this.
All the best, Bel!
WoW killed any desire I might’ve had to participate in time-limited events pretty early on with the myriad of seasonal events they put out it. They were, almost without exception, grindy rather than skill based and just in general… Not all that fun.
Not to say there weren’t individual rewards I didn’t chase — because I did. (Woo, headless horseman’s mount!)
But going after all the meta achievements? screws up face No thank-you.
Ever since, rightly or wrongly, I’ve tended to lump all limited events into the same bucket. The positive side effect though being that I haven’t had the anxiety you mention around missing them when otherwise… Well, I may well have done. And with the number of games I play, like you, there would’ve been an intense amount of FOMO with no possible way to keep up with it all.
MHW events were the ones I was likely most interested in — but even then I haven’t ever prioritised them or jumped back to the game for them. Even though some of them seemed actually legitimately fun. I’ve still never done Kulve Torath (sp?) for example, so hopefully it rolls around again while I’m playing this time!