Many Welps

I’ve seen this question floating around a few blogs as of late or variations of it. I believe the original question was what game could you play for the rest of this year. That’s for about 4 months. But I think the harder question would be what game could I commit to and play for a year.

I haven’t played a game for more than a couple months in a very long time. The last time I was heavily invested in a game was Guild Wars in 2007 and before that, it was Runescape in 2005. Since then I’ve flitted between games trying to find the next one that I could latch on too.

I think I’ve been playing Trove for around 4 months straight now. Which if you told me that I would be doing that last year I would not have believed it. But even now, my interest in Trove has been waining the only reason I continue to play it on my own is to listen to podcasts.

So what game could I play for a year if I had to pick one today?  I just can’t imagine playing the same story-based, single-player, game over and over for a year. Unless it was a very large one with a lot of content or replay value like a Bethesda Game. So I would need to play something with an online component or something that gets new content over the course of the year. Of course, nowadays this isn’t limited to online games as single-player games do often get content drops after launch too.  The other option is a game with endless progression a la Diablo 3. Maybe something procedurally generated or a PVP centric game where other players are your new content.

But if you told me right now to pick a game that I would play for the rest of 2020 today I’d pick Elite Dangerous. Elite is a game that I’ve been away from for a while but each time I go back I find myself getting lost in it. You could say Elite is an inch deep and a mile wide but the systems and activities that are there I find very enjoyable. The game is always improving, adding and refining systems, it’s almost like a new game after every major update.

Every now and then this seems like it would be a great project to write about. Only playing one game for an entire year. But then the rational side of me kicks in and I realize there’s no way that would be fun for me or that I would have the discipline to actually do it.