Belghast

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused • avatar by @Ammosart@gamepad.club He/Him

Dailyquestification of Games

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I had a bit of a revelation over the weekend, and now I understand a little better some of my motivations. I hate daily quests, and I understand WHY I hate them, but first I guess we should probably talk a bit about the daily quest construct as a whole. If you are one of my readers that has not played a ton of MMORPGs, then maybe you have escaped the sirens call of them. Essentially they started their life as an optional method of creating repeatable quest turn-ins and have become widely signified as having a blue exclamation icon to signify that status. The very first repeatable quests I ever experienced were in Everquest, as I turned copious amounts of bone chips to the dude in the Kaladim Paladin guild.

World of Warcraft however had a more formal questing infrastructure and as a result they had to make a specific version of questing in order to support the repeatable nature. I am honestly not exactly certain when I first encountered them, but I know for certain that by the time we reached Silithis they were the backbone of the quests leading up to the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. At that point they served a very distinct purpose and were pretty straight forward in nature allowing you to gain favor with a faction for repeatedly turning in the same items over and over. They were more construct than feature at that point and served as a means to an end.

With Burning Crusade a number of optional faction grinds were put in place, and with them a series of limited daily quests were introduced. Each faction would give you a number of quests each day with additional options opening up as you increased your standing. The first of these that I participated in was Ogri’la, which required a flying mount so absolutely nothing you even saw prior to dinging the level cap in that expansion. These were time wasters more than anything, and if you decide to completely skip a week it didn’t feel terribly bad because it didn’t feel like you were really missing anything other than some incremental progress.

The problem is that as we have moved further from that original mission of simply facilitating multiple turn-ins they have spread more and more from something that felt like optional content, to something that is absolutely a requirement in order to function within the game. Now exists a tapestry of daily quests, world quests and weekly objectives that all feel like they need to be observed for fear of your character falling terribly behind the curve. In Shadowlands for example there are a number of things that can only be obtained while a certain World Quest is up, which only serves to add a fear of missing out on potential rewards by not logging in every single day.

This unfortunately isn’t a World of Warcraft problem, but a larger MMORPG problem. Every game has some version of this infrastructure of giving you limited rewards for logging in each day and doing some things… all in an attempt to make you appear to be “active”. This becomes important because in the free to play economy… no one reports subscription numbers at investor calls anymore. They instead report on MAU or Monthly Active Users, and if they can keep you logging in it gives the appearance of the game having a healthy ecosystem. However none of this is really compelling content and I’ve reached a point where I find it harder and harder to swallow as such.

In general I do pretty well with completing dailies for maybe a week at a time, but eventually I find I lack the desire to log in. I’ve reached this point with so many games now that I started to wonder why exactly I reject this construct so much. Now comes the realization part. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my day to day existence, and my life is basically a series of repeated rituals at this point. I am the primary caretaker in my household and when I get up I start running through a list of little daily activates that are required to make sure the household is running smoothly. Everything in my life has been ritualized in order to make sure it happens and to also try and make it as efficient as humanly possible so I can move on to more enjoyable things.

So for example this morning my list of rituals looked a little something like this:

  • get up and turn off the alarm clock
  • check email for any critical alerts overnight
  • turn on the morning news so wife can wake up slowly while listening to it
  • hop in the shower
  • get dressed
  • make sure wife is actually waking up
  • prepare Kenzie’s insulin shot and coax her into letting me give it to her
  • give the cats wet food and a little dry food
  • gather and take out the trash
  • feed the outdoor cats
  • sit down and consume caffeine while writing a blog post

There is a similar evening sequence of events that plays out in order pretty much every night, and if anything gets out of order there is a high chance of forgetting to do something. My life is so ritualized that daily quests don’t feel like an escape. They feel like converting what is supposed to be enjoyable relaxation and exploration time… into doing more “Wizard Chores” as my friend Grace calls them. I said before that I can seem to do them for about a week, and that seems to be the point at which I begin to realize exactly what I am doing. Then I start to wonder… why exactly am I logging in? I mean I don’t find the daily quest construct enjoyable in the least, and it is only out of that fear of missing out on something that I start doing them in the first place. Eventually I realize that I am probably better off finding something I actually do enjoy instead.

The problem however is that as more titles have shifted to the “Games as a Service” model, with it comes a “dailyquestification” of content. I mean I get it from the development standpoint. If you can create content that is largely just a ticking of boxes, make it repeatable and it has a positive hit on the MAU… then it absolutely makes sense. As a player however I look out upon a sea of task lists that are really no more enjoyable than doing the laundry. My daily rituals in the real world I have to do in order to maintain a quality of life that I have come to expect. In the game world… I can just log the hell out and go find something else to play instead. Unfortunately my buffer of willingness to deal with these systems has been full for quite some time.

That said I am still just as susceptible to them as anyone. For a period of time I can forget what exactly I am doing as I chase making gear numbers go up. However I always end up back where I started in realizing that I am just doing busy work, and that busy work isn’t fun. I hit Shadowlands hard and heavy for a few weeks until I realized that I wasn’t actually enjoying myself, and now have not logged in since before Christmas. I feel bad that I have not been logging in, but I am actually enjoying myself playing other games so I am mostly ignoring that guilt. I am not sure what the answer is to make repeating content more enjoyable. It isn’t like games have the budgets or hours to create fresh content every week for us to consume like the locusts that we are.

I am wondering if I am just outgrowing MMORPGs in general. Diablo 3 is a grind I do over and over, but it is a self paced grind that allows me to commit as much time as I want to it when I want to… and then bugger the fuck off and forget it exists when I don’t. I crave more experiences like that, but those seem to be fewer and further between. Being artificially gated when I am having one of my periods where I want to binge a game… also feels horrible and will similarly inspire me to bounce. I think maybe the real answer is to break down the lie that is Monthly Active Users… because if you are just logging in to clear your mailbox are you really active? That is a discussion for another day, but I think I now better understand why I hate daily quests.

Games of the Year 2020

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Good Morning Friends! Seeing as this is the first non-aggrochat-syndication post of 2021 for this blog, I though it was a good time to look back on the previous year of gaming. More specifically MY previous year of gaming and talk about some of my favorite experiences. This isn’t a strict top X list, but the order is more or less sorted in a good to phenomenal manner. Lets get started!

The Touryst

This is a curious little game that originally released on the Nintendo Switch, which is sort of a puzzle platformer for lack of a better category. You are a tourist and you have come to visit this island get away, but it turns out there are mysteries to be solved along the way. You end up travelling across multiple islands and unlocking the secret of the temple contained on each. There really isn’t true combat in the game, apart from occasionally hopping on the top of things to stun them. Extremely charming game and also a really interesting technology supporting it. The load times and rendering prowess is a good show piece for the Switch.

Atom RPG

This game plays like you remember the original Fallout playing. Like going back and playing those first two Fallout games is a bit of a challenge at this point, because they end up feeling more than a little kludgy. Atom RPG is Fallout… but if you had set the game in post-apocalyptic Soviet era Russia. There are so many things interesting about this game, namely it gives you a window into the world that was the USSR before the break up and the alternate reality of what might have happened in the event of nuclear war. There is a sequel out that I have yet to play, but eventually I am sure I will.

Streets of Rage 4

I’ve always been a big fan of beat-em-ups and while I was originally super partial to Final Fight, the Sega competitor Streets of Rage left it in the dust with the release of the second outing in that series. Streets of Rage 4 is a project that lovingly recreates the feel of playing a 90s era fighting game, but with modern era graphical design. The artwork is gorgeous, but if you so choose you can downgrade everything into a pixel based equivalent of the original art style. Exceptionally good game, and also plays extremely well on the Nintendo Switch.

Animal Crossing: New Horizon

I had never really played an Animal Crossing game prior to the release of New Horizon, and this game dominated my headspace in a time when I was desperately needing some pleasant escape. This landed right as the pandemic was ramping up, and I even named my island Pandemia because it was my plan to get through the worst of it. Sadly at that point we had no clue how “worst” things were going to get, and as a result I eventually stopped playing the game and have not returned when it reached a point of being a little too “daily quest” for my tastes. I greatly appreciate it filling a role that I desperately needed at a specific time.

Phantasy Star Online 2

While I had gone through some complete nonsense that allowed me to create a Japanese account, I never really spent a lot of time playing it. So when PSO2 released in earnest for North America this year, I grabbed hold with both hands and enjoyed the hell out of it for about a month. I have no clue why exactly I faded away from the game, but I hope to return at some point because it is a fun mix of mindless shooting and loot collection. Additionally it has one of the best gacha systems out there which releases cosmetics at a pretty regular cadence, all of which are also capable of being resold by players. RoboBel probably misses me.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I love Horizon Zero Dawn. It was my game of the year in 2017 when it was originally released, however this year we finally got the PC port and it was so enjoyable for me to revisit this game. Playing HZD with a Mouse and Keyboard is so much better than playing with a clunky old controller. The game finally can be played in the way I hoped it would someday, and it looked amazing with glorious PC 4k graphics. I have written so much over the years about this title and all of those words still stand. One of the best gaming experiences I have ever had and the added precision of the mouse just makes everything better.

Jedi Fallen Order

I realize I just talked quite a bit about this game last week, so probably not much new to say. I played this originally when it first released at the tail end of 2019, but bounced pretty hard when I realized a point where I was uncertain what the game was asking of them. Throughout the entirety of 2020 I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to restart this game and play it instead with a mouse and keyboard. That finally happened over the Christmas break and I sailed through the experience smoothly and this is probably the finest Star Wars game out there. I mean I would even put it up there with KOTOR in the amount that I enjoyed the world building contained within. Very different type of game mind you, but still extremely enjoyable.

Hades

I am not certain that Supergiant can create a bad game. Like… they created a sportsball game and managed to even make me interested enough to play it and enjoy if nothing else the story. Hades is Supergiant taking on the Rogue-Lite genre and crushing it. Not only does the game feel fluid and responsive but it weaves an interesting tale being told a tiny bit at a time as you repeatedly die and start all over again in your attempt to escape the underworld. The interactions you have with the cast of characters aligned to help you in your journey is what makes the entire experience so enjoyable. You don’t mind the deaths because you know it is likely going to unlock at least one interesting tidbit of story along the way.

Death Stranding

If Animal Crossing was the game I thought would get me through the pandemic… Death Stranding was the game that actually helped me come to terms with it. First off you have to understand this is the first Kojima game I have ever played, so I was not quite certain what to expect going into it. I had tried playing Metal Gear games, but my hatred of Stealth Mechanics ended up causing me to bounce almost instantly from them. Death Stranding is set in a world where the eponymous event made it extremely dangerous to live around other human beings. As a result the society is fractured and your mission is to travel across the entirety of the United States (or a very condensed version of it) and link up these disparate islands of humanity so that they can all communicate freely again. It hit home the way we are all isolated in our own homes and leaning super hard on the internet and technologies like Zoom to stay connected in this time when it is similarly dangerous to be around other human beings. The emotional conclusions of the game hit me in the gut like a sledgehammer and I still feel the impact of it today.

Genshin Impact

Every so often a game comes along that transcends the normal gaming experiences and almost becomes a phenomena over night. This happened with Pokemon Go, and to a slightly lesser extent it happened with Genshin Impact. For awhile this game was the thing that everyone was playing and talking about and it all happened for good reason. Genshin has some of the best action roleplaying gameplay out there, but it also comes with a lot of negatives given that this is firmly a Gacha game. You hit some pretty hard walls that can only be solved by time or money spent. While the game gives you serious opportunity to win free character pulls… it also has lead some folks to spend literal tens of thousands of dollars on this game chasing specific characters. If you find yourself susceptible to gambling mechanics… maybe check out Immortals Fenyx Rising instead because it ends up being a very similar experience.

Ghost of Tsushima

While I am seemingly nowhere near beating this game, it has been something I have chewed on for the better part of this year. If I were to create a simple description of this game it would be “exquisitely crafted”. This is a game that lives up to the highest forms of development and everything is polished to a mirror shine. The interactions with combat and the world both feel fluid and interesting, and the story that is being told ducks in and out of the main story and side quests effortlessly adding up to one of the more interesting open world designs I have experienced. My favorite thing about the game is the stand off system, allowing me to stroll into an enemy camp and challenge them to send out their strongest to fight me in a duel. What I like the least are the few missions that force you to play the game from a stealth perspective, which are thankfully only really associated with a single NPC. Now that I have my PS5 I have been back playing the game in earnest and loving every moment of it.

Cyberpunk 2077

If I were going to pick a game of the year for this blog, it would ultimately be Cyberpunk 2077. I realize that this is a deeply controversial game for so many different reasons, but it was also the most fun I have had playing a game all year long. The level of intricacy in world building and storytelling… is unfortunately matched at times by things simply being unfinished. This game likely needed another year to cook before release in order to finish out the systems that were very obviously only stubbed in in order to make the every shifting release window. I’m technically on my second play through now as I am approaching the game from a different origin and already seeing quite a few changes. I hope they keep releasing updates to where this game can at some point be the absolute masterpiece that is The Witcher 3. There is just so much going on here that I worry will be missed for all of the major issues the game has going on. This is a game deserving of your time… if you can play it on a platform where it runs well like the PC. Until that is true for all platforms… maybe give it a pass and pick it up once the discounts start happening.

Games I Missed

I know there are a bunch of games that I for whatever reason never got around to playing. Spiderman and Miles Morales for example… did not play yet but hope to in 2021. You might notice that Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft is missing from the list, and while I enjoyed my initial play through I don’t like it enough to hold it up there as one of the best experiences of the year. There are other games that I wanted to talk about like New World, but have not been officially released so it seemed weird putting an Alpha on the list.

What were some of your games of the year? Drop me a line below or of course feel free to contest my opinions.

AggroChat #328 – That Killer App

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start the show with discussion about Mechwarrior 5 and the multiplayer sessions that have been happening among AggroChat folks.  We also talk a bit about the extremely confusing world of intellectual property when it comes to this game.  From there we revisit the topic of why forcing a stealth mission is a bad idea when you are not expecting it.  Grace talks about a short game she discovered called Space Court where you preside over a Court in Space.  Tam talks about getting the Valve Index and finally maybe finding the killer app in the form of Half-Life Alyx.  From there we dive into a discussion about the games that we have missed during 2020 and didn’t have time to play, which segues into a discussion about Bel giving Dragon Age Inquisition another shot and how maybe Kodra would like the games that are not the first one.

Topics Discussed:

  • Mechwarrior 5: Multiplayer
  • Why Forced Stealth Missions are Bad
    • Revisiting the Topic
  • Space Court
  • VR and the Valve Index
  • Half-Life: Alyx
  • Games we Missed Playing this Year
  • Trying Dragon Age Inquisition Again

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Games Played 2020 Edition

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This was one hell of a weird year, I think for pretty much everyone involved. Traditionally on the last day of the year (or as close as I can actually manage to it) I have had this tradition since 2015 of attempting to talk about the games that I played during the last year. I am not entirely certain why I started doing this thing, but if you have been around for awhile you will recognize this sort of post. I do this thing where I keep track of what games I played during what months of the year. I think in part this has been my way of keeping track of when exactly I played something now that tools that I used to use such as Raptr no longer really exist, or at least I am not really using them.

The challenge as well is that so many games are spread out across so many different platforms. I consume content from Steam, GOG, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Online or Xbox Game Pass. So instead of relying on a single source of information… I started keeping track of things in spreadsheet form and then collecting what games I actually touched during a given month based on what I had been talking about on my blog and what games I was taking screenshots of from my massive archive of past screenshots. The end is a compiled list of games that I chart in spreadsheet form… which is by no means as complete as tracking hours (which would be impossible) but does give me an idea of what my year looked like.

The Top 10 of 2020

Top 10 Most Played Games of 2020

The rules of this experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me the number of months in a given year I actually played a specific game. There are always going to be a number of “Forever Games” that eat up a lot of my time, but throughout the year I ended up spending at least some time in seventy different games. Here is the list of games that I played the most months during the year of 2020.

  • Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played all 12 Months
  • Destiny 2 – PC – Played 10 Months
  • World of Warcraft – PC – Played 9 Months
  • Ghost of Tsushima – PS4/PS5 – Played 6 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Played 5 Months
  • Phantasy Star Online – PC/Xbox One – Played 5 Months
  • Genshin Impact – PC/Android – Played 4 Months
  • Hades – PC/Switch – Played 4 Months
  • New World – PC – Played 3 Months
  • The Division 2 – PC – Played 3 Months
Comparing Top 10 from 2019 to 2020

Another thing that I find interesting is comparing my top ten list from the previous year. First up it is zero shock that I am still playing a lot of Diablo 3. This game is comfort food for me and especially with the option of playing it on the Switch I spend a lot of time just tinkering around in it between seasons. My ultimate wish is still that I can just play my PC characters on the switch. Completely gone is Dragalia Lost and honestly… I have yet to replace it with a Mobile Phone game. Also gone is MTG Arena which I weirdly just sort of stopped playing out of the blue. Destiny 2 I probably played less, but I poked at it pretty often and World of Warcraft came back with the pandemic and my need to play something that I could ultimately shut my mind off while playing.

I played significantly less Final Fantasy XIV and for whatever reason I am finding it harder and harder to attach to that game. WoW Classic, Bloodstained, ESO, Anthem and Pokemon Go all ranked high in 2019 but are all completely absent. Replacing them would be Genshin Impact and PSO2 which I spent quite a bit of dedicated time playing… but have sort of petered out in both cases. Hades is another bedtime gaming experience that I continue to poke at… and while I spent a lot of months playing Ghost of Tsushima I never really was able to play for a very long time due to my lack of stamina when playing with a controller. Division 2 and New World both surprised me because I did not realize I had played for as many months as I ultimately did.

The Top 15 Of All Time

Top Games by Month Since Beginning Tracking

Another thing that I like doing is keeping track of the total number of months I have spent playing a game since starting this. I have data reaching back to 2012 and that gives me an eight year view of my gaming habits and trends. Since that image above is way too small to reasonably read, going to once again break it out into a text list.

  • World of Warcraft – 69 Total Months
  • Destiny / Destiny 2 – 65 Total Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 60 Total Months
  • Diablo 3 – 53 Total Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 45 Total Months
  • Rift – 39 Total Months
  • Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
  • MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
  • Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
  • Monster Hunter World – 16 Total Months
  • Guild Wars 2 – 15 Total Months
  • Division 1 and 2 – 15 Total Months
  • Minecraft – 14 Total Months
  • ArcheAge – 13 Total Months
  • Fallout 4 – 13 Total Months
  • Wildstar – 13 Total Months

As you can see from the list… this is mostly consumed by what I earlier referred to as “Forever Games” There are a good number of MMORPG/Live Service as well as some evergreen games like Fallout 4 and Minecraft. Diablo 3 and Elder Scrolls Online swapped spots in the list, which makes sense because I did not really spend much time in ESO this past year. Given my continued disinterest in FFXIV, Diablo may be able to lap that game by this time next year. Rift continues to hold solid even though I am not playing it because that 39 month seems like a hard plateau to cross with new games. Weirdly from that point down all of the games remained the same… because they are not games I was actively playing nor has anything else had the staying power to really compete with them.

Longest Streaks

While working on this post, I had a random conversation with my friend Tam about this process and that I was going through pulling together this post. To this he posed the interesting question of which game has the longest streak of unbroken months. I didn’t have an answer to this at all, which lead me to quickly compile a list of the longest streak for all of the games on the above list. It was around this time that I realized that if I did a longest streaks list… I would end up with a completely different top 15. Several of those games are played in short bursts over a large period of time which add up to a big number in the end. The end result is a bit surprising.

  • Destiny – 33 Months in a Row
  • Diablo 3 – 28 Months in a Row
  • MTG Arena – 23 Months in a Row
  • Pokemon Go – 23 Months in a Row
  • Rift – 22 Months in a Row
  • World of Warcraft – 21 Months in a Row
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 20 Months in a Row
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 20 Months in a Row
  • Dragalia Lost – 16 Months in a Row
  • Monster Hunter World – 15 Months in a Row
  • World of Warcraft: Classic – 7 Months in a Row
  • Anthem – 6 Months in a Row
  • ArcheAge – 6 Months in a Row
  • Bloodstained Ritual of the Night – 6 Months in a Row
  • Ghost of Tsushima – 6 Months in a Row

Other Interesting Data

In 2018 I played 70 unique games, which fell to only 48 in 2019. However with 2020 I returned to 70 games which means I seemed to be extremely restless as it comes to gaming. In 2019 I played 19 games that I considered to be “singletons”, or games that I only played for a single month and then walked away from usually meaning I bounced. During 2020 I played 44 of these Singletons so I wound up bouncing around quite a bit. I would like to play more single player narrative adventures, because I seem to really enjoy them when I allow myself to play them. However I still find myself being drawn back into the usual titles that I find familiar and comforting, which was something that I needed quite a bit during this year of Pandemic.

If you are curious about past gaming trends since starting this experiment, you can find my posts going back to 2015.

If you are terribly curious, you can even check out my raw list of data that I share freely. I am not exactly sure why I started this tradition, but I do find it interesting to reflect back each year on the past years games and the trends that occurred.