[This is part of a series of posts which started here: My Love-Hate Feelings For MMOs – Part I. If you didn’t start there, you probably want to.]
Battle for Azeroth
As I said in the last post on this topic, I had played all the way through the Legion expansion – including all of the raids, at least at LFR difficulty – and was looking forward to the next one – Battle for Azeroth!
I must admit, though, that while I definitely remember enjoying playing the game, I don’t remember much about the expansion itself. I even needed to go read the details of “What’s Changed” and the details of the expansion to even remind myself that I did, indeed, play this expansion.
Burn-Out
By the time I had played through the expansion, I was starting to feel very burnt out. I was largely back to playing on my own and doing Looking-For-Group or Looking-For-Raid approaches to dungeons and raids, and, again – the idea of an “MMO” is right there in the acronym. I was not really having a full-on “Multiplayer” experience. I was, instead, pretty much a solo player in this massive world.
Additionally, since I had powered through with my Blood Elf Paladin and fully leveled her up, I was not particularly inclined to do it all over again with a brand new character, starting at Level 1. I think I may have half-heartedly started another character or two (again, solely on the Horde side), but even then, I, realistically, was simply growing bored of only playing through the same stuff I’d already seen, simply learning a new “rotation” of actions to take.
I had continued largely just sort of … “puttering around” … simply maintaining myself and whatever else I “should” be doing on a regular basis to maintain my character – as well as doing regular Auction House checks to keep lots of gold in my character’s wallet.
About the time I had come to the understanding I was treating the game more as a boring “job” than as something I was actively enjoying doing, I had mostly given up on continuing to play.
Shadowlands Coming
And then came the announcement of the next expansion, Shadowlands. Aside from generally feeling that my “side” (Horde) had been seriously “done dirty” by all of what had been done with Sylvanas, I was waiting to be re-enthused about the game.
Which was when I heard more of the details of the expansion. First off, the prized Level 120 character I had spent months and months building up was suddenly going to be “squished” back to Level 50. Then there was, as I noted above, a clear intent to represent Sylvanas as just being flat-out evil.
Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!
Stormbringer (the sword), Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer (the novel)
This was, for me, the last straw. It was now very clear how, from a story-telling perspective, Blizzard was no longer willing to stick with the “historical” presentation of the Horde as “We’re not evil; we’re just misunderstood.”
So, I let my subscription lapse and, once again, “retired” from playing Warcraft.
What Next?
Over the next … while? … I wasn’t really playing anything online. At some point, I upgraded the PC I was playing on (largely as a result of one of my sons having some older components from his computer – and since they were still more advanced than what I had in the Shoebox, that was fine for me).
This upgrade also involved converting the Shoebox to a full-fledged “regular” PC tower case, and it moved downstairs to where my “official” home-office lives. This also required getting a separate monitor. [My office had been home to my regular Linux PC as well a a Mac Mini. Those two computers shared a keyboard / mouse and a monitor with the help of a KVM switch. I didn’t feel like getting a much-upgraded KVM switch just so I could add yet another computer to the mix.]
I somehow (don’t remember exactly how) “stumbled upon” a couple of space-themed games which I played for a bit. These were Elite Dangerous and then No Man’s Sky. Both were fun and I had become invested enough (for a while) in the game-play of Elite that I also purchased what’s known as a HOTAS (Hands-On Throttle And Stick). Think of this as a set of “flight controls” that can be connected to a PC to simulate most of a cockpit of a regular flying vehicle.
I don’t recall exactly when I stopped playing either of those games, but it was because, while fun – and even quite pretty with the graphics card I had – the actions became increasingly repetitive and there wasn’t much to do other than “more of the same”, and chasing another ship which I didn’t necessarily even have any interest in flying. Or, for No Man’s Sky, simply building more “stuff”, and base-building hasn’t ever really held my interest.
Any Other Games?
Following that, I vaguely recall “dabbling” with both Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online. However. even downloading and starting them was done purely because they were free-to-play (well, free-to-download / own) and with limited gameplay available.
I say “dabbling” because there wasn’t much in them to really grab my interest and keep me involved and playing them. Also, I wound up with the same sort of behavior pattern I’d had before of simply playing on my own.
The End of an Era – Again
And, thus, I, once again, wound up with not playing any sort of MMOs. Sure, I had (and still have) some small games I play by myself on my PC, but that’s about it.
I don’t have any more games to discuss (in terms of my own experiences with them, certainly), but I will have a closing “chapter” to this series with some final thoughts, observations and reflections.
To be continued…
