Why I Now Main ARPGs

I’ve been kicking around this topic for a while now, and it seems like a good one to close out what has been a fairly busy week. This blog got its start originally as not only a World of Warcraft blog but more specifically a World of Warcraft Warrior Raid Tanking blog. From 2000 until around 2015 this blog was largely dominated by an endless cavalcade of MMORPGs. They were truly my primary gaming outlet and any time a new one queued up I was there with the rest of my friends grinding out a new batch of characters and classes. It was a love affair that started with Everquest and just kept continuing each time a new latest and greatest game was on the horizon. In part, I was enamored with the concept of playing with so many other people and most of my long-term friends stem from one or more of these games. Hell the entirety of the podcast I have been recording for over a decade, are folks that I met through Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Tam and Kodra date back to my early days raiding with Late Night Raiders, and Thalen was a member of a competing raid that occasionally subbed in for assorted content. Ashgar is someone that Tam and Kodra met when they left Argent Dawn and was someone I was ultimately introduced to when I talked them back to the server for Cataclysm. Ammo I knew her mom first, but also stems originally from World of Warcraft on Argent Dawn. Grace/Ace is someone I met on Twitter but roped into our nonsense in Final Fantasy XIV and ultimately became someone that I am close enough to that I consider my sibling. The entire reason why I got on Twitter in the first place back in 2009… was to have a better way of communicating with other bloggers and more specifically the Blog Azeroth folks. I am uncertain I ever would have been attracted to the platform were it not for the rich MMORPG gaming community that I found there.

The problem is that as my life changed, and the bulk of my active gaming group shifted two timezones away… I found myself in a position where I was drawn to MMORPGs but largely ended up never playing with anyone else. I reached the point in my life where I could no longer stomach the late nights of staying up until 1 am and then getting back up at 5:30 am to start the next day. I needed to take better care of myself and also started getting more real-world responsibilities that required it. Around 2013 I shifted from being a worker bee, to a team lead, and eventually to an official supervisor. Then in 2017, I made another big shift to Management. All of this… brought a dislike for actually having any modicum of responsibility in my downtime. So I went from being a Guild Leader and occasional Raid Leader first… to trying to stay in the background and take on as little responsibility as possible.

I loved raiding in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and spent a lot of time leading raids over the years. However, I reached a point where I was no longer willing to give up multiple evenings of my time for the express purpose of progression. From 2004 until around 2012 I was devoting at least three nights every single week to raiding, and pushing everything else to the side. Once I stopped raiding… it became harder to work it back into my schedule. I made attempts to raid seriously again during Warlords of Draenor and Legion… and over in Final Fantasy XIV during A Realm Reborn and Heavensward but all were relatively short-lived. Legion I made it through a few tiers of content and Heavensward we never really made it past the Extreme Primals before I faded into the background. I would always get to the point where I was dreading raid night, because of the loss of freedom it posed.

In spite of not really having active groups on demand like I used to during most of my World of Warcraft days, I still actively pugged. My class of choice has always been some form of a Tank, which meant that I needed to take on a lot of responsibility in dungeon runs. I am not sure if the groups got more aggressively toxic… or if I just became less tolerant of other human beings, but over the years I found myself not wanting to run dungeons with other random players anymore. I built up this mental block to the responsibility of leading a dungeon, and I’ve found it extremely hard to get past it. While I still like the concept of tanking dungeons I just never do it… not unless I have at least one friend along with me. As my time tables shifted out of the range of most of my friends… it just meant that I didn’t run group content anymore.

I am legitimately not sure how it started, but in 2015 I got pulled into running Seasonal content in Diablo III with my friend Grace/Ace. I had always been a fan of the Diablo-like ARPG genre and often played them in my downtime from raiding or other MMORPG shenanigans. I fell in love with Diablo in college and obsessed over the game and then followed the long sequence of games that came after it from Dungeon Siege to Sacred to Titanquest to more modern games like Grim Dawn and Wolcen. Running Diablo III Seasons with Grace gave me all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… all the fun of rushing through the objectives and trying to build a powerful character as fast as you could… all condensed within a few weeks. Then I could walk away, do other things, and know that in three or four months we could do it all again.

More than that ARPGs gave me all of the complexity and loot chase that I craved, but the ability to take all of it at my own pace. I could play rich and mechanically interesting characters and did not need other players to accomplish any goals that I set out for myself. Sure it was fun as hell to play with friends whenever our paths happened to cross… but I never found myself in a holding pattern needing more people to make something happen. That was always the worst part about playing MMORPGs… was the waiting around for something to happen. In the early days of World of Warcraft, I had fostered this arcane tapestry of social channels that I relied upon to be able to form groups… but even then having access to all of those people and so many different relationships… it would still sometimes take upwards of an hour to get things started.

Playing MMORPGs in a post-dungeon finder economy meant that most people were not actively creating groups. Those who did exist in the group finder were divorced from any personal connection and often had a wealth of toxic behavior associated with them. It just became easier for me to be off doing my own thing and having a less rewarding gameplay experience… than to subject myself to having to deal with other people. Even when the groups went smoothly and everyone was kind… the imagined specter of potentially being called out for missing a cooldown or not mashing my buttons hard enough or in the correct order was enough to keep me from ever trying most nights. Occasionally I would get brave and put myself out there… and those were often the times that I ran into the worst possible individuals.

For years Final Fantasy XIV was the exception to the growing toxicity of gaming communities. It was downright wholesome in comparison and there were so many moments like above where someone needed to AFK and all of the players just chilled out and chatted while waiting. However with the downfall of World of Warcraft and the mass migration of players to XIV… with it has seemed to come a lot more of those cultural norms. Now I have friends talking about struggling to find a static raid group that does not require you to use tools that violate the terms of service. I’ve absolutely seen a lot more talk of damage numbers and open calling out of folks who are not performing up to some imagined bar in the few groups I have exposed myself to. All of this just makes it that much harder to get over my growing mental block to putting myself out there.

If I were the type of player who could happily subsist on casual “Stardew Valley” style gameplay, I could probably still find fulfilling gameplay in MMORPGs. I am not that player. I love loot and quite honestly the only reason why I started raiding in the first place back in World of Warcraft is that I wanted access to shiny purple items. Sure raiding with other people is its own kind of rewarding, and sure it feels great to finally take down a boss… but it feels much better to get that item you have been trying to get for months. Legitimately I probably had more fun in World of Warcraft raids by soloing them years after the fact… than I ever did actually doing them legitimately. I liked collecting things and I absolutely loved collecting appearances. That sort of mindset was not always conducive to a need-based or points-based raiding economy.

Do you know what causes endless mountains of loot to climb? Action ARPGs absolutely do, so much so that we set up complicated loot filter systems in order to show us only the “best” items, and even then… nonsense like this occasionally happens. So it was a few months back that I realized that a lot of my shift from MMORPGs as my core focus to ARPGs is that it largely scratches all of the itches for me. I can play with friends and have a heck of a lot of fun when our schedules happen to align, but the rest of the time I have endless progression and complexity buried behind a constant dopamine hit of loot acquisition. I get all the things that I love about MMORPGs but none of the obstacles standing in my way.

More than that I get to feel like I am part of a larger community and get to help others in their own progression. I get so deep in the weeds at times when I am writing about ARPGs, but I feel like someone out there is benefitting from the nonsense I am doing. Then there is the whole concept of guilds and shared stashes that let me legitimately help my friends who happen to be playing along with me. Games like Last Epoch and the resonance system allow me to share items that I have collecting dust in my massive treasure trove… even if I was not playing with a friend at the time it dropped. Bel League in Path of Exile was a heck of a lot of fun, and while it seems like most of the AggroChat crew is over that game… there will be times in the future when I can share things through the Guild Stash with other players who are active in the game at that time. If nothing else my blog and my constant ramblings serve as a locus of information for anyone who might want to get into these sorts of games.

That is not to say that I don’t still play MMORPGs, but when I do so I go into them knowing that I am likely never going to actively group with another player. I think this is why I have had a bit of a renaissance with Guild Wars 2 because it is a game that lets me do large-scale raid-like events in the open world… without ever having to organize or manage other players. I had a heck of a lot of fun recently playing through the Dragonflight story, and doing some of the World Quests in World of Warcraft but also reached a point where I felt like I had experienced enough of that game. At some point prior to the release of Dawntrail this summer I will pop back into Final Fantasy XIV and complete all of the content I have missed and then happily play through the new expansion, but also know that once the credits roll I am probably out again.

For the foreseeable future, I am very likely to be devoted almost entirely to ARPGs, because they scratch the right itches for me and fit my usage patterns. I’ve had similar phases with Monster Hunter World or whatever the latest Looter Shooter happens to be because they operate in similar patterns. I had several weeks of joy when Enshrouded launched into early access because it gave me a lot of the same dopamine hits. I don’t think it is that any of the MMORPGs have changed… and more that my patterns of play have changed. I’ve just finally reached a point where I am ready to accept it and stop trying to push myself to do things that I no longer find as comfortable as I once did.

Anyways! I had been kicking around this topic for a while now and like I said at the start… it seemed like a decent way to close out the week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you all on Monday for a recap of whatever the hell I end up doing this weekend.