Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had an excellent weekend. Ours was a bit of a weird one, combined with the fact that we are dealing with an early heatwave. This morning it was over 80 degrees at 5:30 when I first woke up. That is entirely too hot for human beings, and that has been a trend the last few years of getting our heat spikes considerably earlier than normal. One of the side projects I have been doing over the last few days is editing our old episodes to package them up into a YouTube format. One of the things you maybe need to know about me is that I have every single episode we have ever recorded, as well as a number of side projects sitting on network-attached storage. That means I can crack open the original files, apply some tweaks to them and then paste them into something resembling a more modern structure before exporting and creating a video out of it.
One of the strangest things about going back and listening to myself from eight years ago is generally how much happier I sound. Like it might not be noticeable to anyone else, but for me it is jarring. Truth be told I am happy enough but I am not really experiencing much joy in my life at the moment. I mean on some level 2014 seems like a simpler time, when things were not quite as fraught as they are today. In 2014 we had yet to deal with GamerGate or the fallout that caused so many voices to be silenced and blogs to be shuttered as a result of folks “noping” out of gaming. We had yet to deal with the great unmasking brought on by the Trumpian area, and folks with fringe beliefs felt completely justified to bring them up in every public forum. The episodes that I have been listening to are from April of 2014, and at that point, Eric Garner had not been murdered and the sequence of events that lead to mass protests around the country regarding Police brutality had not been started.
On the gaming front, Sony Online Entertainment had not been sold yet, and as a result Landmark and Everquest Next were still things we were looking forward to. I was still looking forward to the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift, and they had yet to be sold to Gamigo. We were in the middle of Mists of Pandaria and anxiously awaiting the announcement of the next expansion that would be the Warlords of Draenor. So that means we had yet to live through the great drop-off of players in World of Warcraft and the back-to-back stinkers that were Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. I personally was in the middle of being extremely happy about the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and looking forward to the launch of Destiny which happened in September of that year.
I was still regularly hanging out with friends on a nightly basis and was even streaming pretty regularly. This is prior to the westward migration of a good chunk of my friend group, which has put a two-hour gap between us making it very hard to organize things. I am generally going to sleep as they are coming online. I miss doing things with people and my great recharge moment had been Diablo 3 for the longest time. This is also before we found out how generally fucked up the situation with Blizzard was and their employees, which ultimately made me not want to touch anything published by them. This was also a time before the Pandemic and me not leaving the house all week long other than a trip to pick up donuts from a drive-through on Saturday and Sunday. As much as I enjoy working from home,I do have to admit that it only furthers the self-imposed isolation that I find myself in.
It also feels like the big moments of synergy that bring everyone together in one place… are getting fewer and further between. Even the most recent launch of Endwalker felt like a deeply fractured experience, as I rarely happened to overlap timewise with other people. I think during the entirety of that expansion leveling process I ran a single dungeon with a friend. I can’t blame my present isolation on anyone but myself to be honest. I could go out and make new friend groups that are more compatible with my timezone, but that just feels so freaking hard. When you have had a regular group that just happened effortlessly… it is so damned hard to put the effort to find that again elsewhere. I know I have people that I can reach out to, and do things with… but none of the groups that I am in the orbit of seeming quite the same. I mean… it is hard to replace a group that I have recorded almost four hundred podcast episodes, and the natural rapport we all have.
In the current malaise that I find myself in… last night I caved. I have been avoiding all Blizzard products, or at least until the release of Diablo Immortal. I used that as an experiment so that I would be able to talk about its gross monetization scheme from personal experience. Instead, all that it really did was make me miss Diablo 3 even more. This game is such an emotional experience for me, and I had last played it in April of 2021… and then found myself missing it almost every day since then. I’ve scoured so many other games looking for methadone for this game and never quite finding anything that really fits in the same way. I found myself crawling into a bubble that was the seasonal game in Diablo 3, and pretty much completely forgetting everything else existed. I didn’t even partake of the nightly Tequatl ritual in Guild Wars 2.
I love Diablo and I think that is why the whole Diablo Immortal fiasco has been so crushing. I spent so many years anxiously waiting for news on Diablo 4, and yesterday also brought us a brand new trailer as part of the Microsoft show… which I will talk about at a later time. I think the announcement, the longing, and this realization that I used to be a happier person is ultimately what lead me to spend my night leveling a seasonal character. I feel like I failed on some level because I had been trying to avoid anything Blizzard related for so long. However, I also think that this self-imposed activism didn’t really make me happy… instead just made me miserable.
I am not happy with the state of the world right now. I am not happy with the state of my isolation. I am not sure what I can really do about either, but depriving myself of things that were bringing me joy doesn’t make it better either. I use video games as an escape from the world, and since 2014… more and more of the world has seeped into that experience. Twitter used to be my happy place where I talked about games with other excited gamers… but now I flinch preparing myself for more news of the next shooting, or next corporate malfeasance. I am tired and hollow… and on some level, I wish I could pop back to 2014 when I seemed to be so much happier. I know that is not a thing that can ever happen, and I also have no clue how to claw back some of that joy. Last night, however… playing Diablo 3 again for the first time in over a year brought me some measure of that joy back.
Oh I feel this so much. Even just looking back on things in the past two years makes me realise my own malaise was building up for a long time.
Im glad you found your way back to Diablo. I tried the boycot as well but I still have friends who work there, and I just love their games.
Gotta do what makes you happy! Because happiness seems so bloody hard to find hese days 😬
I thought we were going to play magic? Where you at? 😉 We can cure some of your isolation! We have the tools, we have the technology!
Good for you.
I’m definitely of the opinion that certain lines have to be drawn (and Diablo Immortal is one of those cases for me), but at the end of the day you need to do whatever makes you happy. Being steadfast in your beliefs when it actually makes you miserable isn’t something I’d ever advise anyone to do.