With work and all, my gaming pastimes have been fairly limited these days.
In Second Life my divestiture is complete and I am down to three regions from the twenty three I had at peak last year. Currently I have two rental homesteads I run for a friend and “Diablo Canyon”, a post-apocalyptic setting I built for a role-play group.
Diablo Canyon is probably my most detailed build to date…
Unfortunately I do not really play there. I tried, but the setting is far too first person shooter and RP is a byproduct of RNG-based firefights. It is neat to watch though – I just wish there was more story to it all as I have a devil of a time figuring out why people are shooting at each other… The old RP regions generated reams and reams of character story for me to read. This one generates transaction receipts, statistical changes to rule systems, and equipment updates on character sheets.
It is very popular though, so there is that. 😉
Videogame-wise I have been poking around at “Skyforge” as time permits. Skyforge is very interesting as it is, well, strange… It is a sci-fi / fantasy setting similar to Marvel’s interpretation of Asgard, where the gods are gods because they are, for the most part, immortal – but their god-like powers are manifest through their super-advanced technology.
In Skyforge you play the role of a newly discovered immortal – a by-product of a battle amongst the mortals that led to your death and subsequent waking up in the capital city of the gods.
The game is, essentially, your hero’s journey – your evolution from a nobody to a full-fledged god of this universe. You do this by way of the completion of Herculean ‘labors’ in defense of the mortal realms, gaining believers in your divinity, and facilitating the building of temples and such in your name. The more ‘true believers’ you acquire, the more powerful you become.
So it is at once an MMO, where you are out in the world fending off alien invasions and defeating the mysterious efforts of various groups of other immortals bent on being contrary. But it is also a management simulator at the divine level, where you are attempting to build a religion in your name…
And all of this is to fuel your ascension to true godhood, along what is possibly the most convoluted and detailed character progression system I have ever seen…
Like I said, strange, but anything that can have an MMO veteran like myself head-scratching and unsure of what they are supposed to do next is a good thing, as it is certainly not formulaic. 🙂
Ultimately though, the reason for playing Skyforge is that it is a lobby-based game, meaning the world is highly instanced. This sort of design allows for a very rapid login to gameplay mechanic, and the ‘adventure’ happens in compartmentalized bits and pieces… Meaning I can log in, instantly get into some sort of adventure that has relevance, and in fifteen minutes to an hour accomplish something that feels like I am progressing.
This is contrary to the common MMO where it may take longer than the above total play session just to get to where the fun is.
The down-side to Skyforge is it can be kind of repetitive – as heavily instanced games tend to be. But given my limited daily play-time, I am okay with doing the same ‘zone’ again every few days as I’ve not been in the game for fifteen hours straight at any one time.
So there’s the state of the game, as it were. 😉