Was tidying up after another protracted, but enjoyable EVE CCG session last night, staring at my unusually dormant PC and had one of those brutally frank examinations of self, realising that I seem to have drifted out of Everquest 2 again. Normally this is my cue to start ranting and railing at game design, grinding, monotony and the nature of fun, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's actually EQ2's fault this time.
At a purely mechanical level, it remains a good solid game - well, I think so anyway. Various refinements over the years have made it less of a chore than it's ever been, and the Echoes of Faydwer expansion has added a lot of new and interesting stuff to the world. Add to that the Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky, two expansions I've not seen much of either, and there's more than enough content there to keep me happy for some months to come.
The guild I'm in is okay - run by Grown Ups who care about fun. It's all going a bit raid-centric these days, but not in the obsessive fascist way you read about. The interest in there, so the trips get organised, and to be honest, current game-design doesn't provide an awful lot for 12+ players to do together apart from raid, and indeed, it's hard to see what other kinds of game-mechanic based activities a whole guild could reasonably go and do. Team PvP perhaps, which isn't to everyone's taste. Still, the novelty of organised raiding definitely starts to fade the third or fourth time you've done the same instance.
(Interesting Design Tangent: 20-man MMORPG Activities that don't involve an instance and the necessity to learn Dragon Choreography, in exchange for a 1/20 chance at an item you can use? What else could we be doing together?)
And yet, I think I've logged in perhaps once, for an hour, in the last two weeks, mostly, I think down to pure lack of time. Always a hazard when you lead an online life like mine, trying to hold down four online 'jobs' at once - inevitably your commitment to any one game suffers at the expense of variety. I've got Tuesday N00b Club in Guild Wars, the Thursday Night EVE CCG games, a sudden Second Life Business to attend to, (with next Clever Invention underway), Planetside Self-Flagellation Quotas to meet, and of course, a Real Life to keep an eye on, all of which gives me a pretty busy week. Never mind the fact that all these card game nights, and copious juicy goings on at CCP, and in EVE Online itself is making me all broody to have another go at that again, and I expect there will be a Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Open Beta at some point, which I'll want a look at.
Something has to give, and sadly, it's going to have to be Everquest 2. It's certainly not goodbye, but au revior, and I'm starting to realise the foresight with which I rather flippantly entitled the games I'm not playing as 'Dormant Monsters', to the right, rather than 'Dead Monsters'. The more I flit from title to title, the more I understand that they are not born, live for a time and die. Rather, they get captured by the 'star' of my obsession, and orbit like comets, nearer and further away. All very pretentious, but there's very few Dormant Monsters I know I'll never play again, and it makes a nice change to hang one up in a state of contented good humour, rather than storming out in a blistering hissy-fit.
Anyway, see you again soon, EQ2 and Guild - back soonish...