I remember back 10 years ago when someone asked me what my ‘game of choice’ was I would have answered EverQuest, easily. I barely ever dabbled in another game, and before that I was playing a MUD called Redemption with a bunch of friends from high school. It was rare I ever had more then one game on my plate. Oh how times have changed, and it’s certainly not just for me that things have changed. These days if you ask someone what MMO they play you’re likely to get a handful of answers. Ask them what MMOs they have played in the past, and the list can get longer the Santa’s naughty and nice list. Right now I’m actively playing EverQuest2, Vanguard, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Aion as ‘main’ games (the ones I spend the most time in, not always for pleasure), and then there are a lot of smaller games that I dabble in for whatever reason. With the incredible selection of games that are available these days, HOW do you choose what to play? How do you make room for more? How do you fit console games in there?
Is scheduling involved? Is it just whatever mood you happen to be in? There are plenty of MMORPGs out there to keep me busy forever, but some times I just want to sit back and play Fable 2 on the XBox, even though lately those times are rare.
I love being able to experience a large number of games simply because it reinforces what I like and don’t like about each and every game. I know exactly what sort of gamer I am and what appeals to me. I also love exploring content that’s always fresh, and learning about someone else’ passion. On the down side it is also a very expensive and time consuming hobby, and you have to draw the line some where. How do you decide what to play?
EQ2 was a LOT of fun this weekend. Wpus and I decided to make little alts and play those instead of the plethora of other characters we already have. We ran around Neriak and managed to level to 15, before making our way to the guild hall in South Freeport. Upon entering I saw a new gift that Calreth left there for us – the guild hall trophy of the headless horseman. I wish the trophy had a little blood or gore along with it, but it stands in our main entrance and balances out the other trophies we have. Thank you Calreth for that gift!
Speaking of which, Torrent Knights on the Antonia Bayle server is slowly making its way to level 50. I’ve been thinking of upgrading to a T2 hall, but I’ll need to do some farming first and earn some status. With new characters on the rise this is easier to do, as we both have a lot of Heritage Quests to complete. We’ll be level locking at 20 to gain achievements and alternate advancement for a few months or how ever long our attention stays. I’m looking forward to it. At level 20 there’s a lot of content that can be explored and completed, and it puts us in range for a few dungeons and instances as well. I had adept3 combat arts created last night which should help make things easier.
I hope everyone else had a fantastic weekend, no matter where you found yourself. Happy gaming!
While I consider EQ2 to be my main game, I haven’t really logged in to it much in the past few month. With GU53 and the aaxp slider I have logged in some of my lower level toons and racked up a handful of aa points for them, but I haven’t logged in any of my 80’s in a while. Now that I think about it, that means I’ve got a master sitting at a research assistant that I need to redeem that’s been sitting there for at least a week now. Oops!
Biggest thing for me is that I can’t reliably know I can play on any given evening, plus with DDO going F2P and several friends with irl budgetary concerns hopping over there as a result, I’ve been playing that more lately. I also play EVE and try to devote at least 2 play sessions a week to that, so that also takes me away from EQ2. Beyond that, my EQ2 guild is a very small group of IRL friends and most of them barely play anymore either, what with full time work and school and kids, etc, so…. I’m more or less all PUG all the time when I play, and since I want shards, but barely seem to be able to get 2-4 in a play session and I need a lot of them to get a full T2 kit, and…. it feels grindy anymore, and I don’t want to have to spend 3 months running the solo shard quest to kit out my jewelry or whatever.
Odd that, since in EVE I’m willing to turn on a 2 month long skill burn and let it go and think nothing of it. Of course, I don’t have to log in every day to do that in EVE. . . . Perhaps that’s the difference?
Anyway… I mostly choose what to play based on where my friends are, and for right now that’s DDO, so that’s where I am too. for a few more weeks anyway. We’ll see after that.
I only play EQ2 at the moment, although in the past I have played DDO, SWG, LoTRo, AoC, Guild Wars, and WoW. Having stuck with EQ2 from the day it went live it now feels like a comfortable old shoe, I’m not saying that it is still not fun to play, but it has become part of my life, some people may read a book for an hour every night before going to bed – whilst I choose to log in.
Because I work 60+ hours a week I don’t get to join in with raiding or even group a whole lot, so I tend to 2-box a lot. I’m definatley going to take a little time away from EQ2 to play Dragon Age Origins, but other than that I look forward to the next expansion, the upgrade of EQ2 from shader 1.0 to 3.0, and my new computer when I get around to buying the parts and putting it together.
I still belong to the first group – I only play EQ2. I have dabbled in LOTRO and DDO in the past – but not played past the trial.
For me it is all about my friends and guildmates – they keep me logging in to EQ2 most days and have done for over 2 and a half years now :)
When I play is largely dependent on my honey-do list and whether my son is napping or asleep for the night. What I play is based on my mood. I tend to go through streaks where I play one game obsessively for days, weeks, or rarely months. I have found that finding a good group of people to play with extends the obsessive phase a bit. I lucked into two good guilds, one in DAoC and one in CoH that got me to play for quite a bit longer than I would’ve otherwise.
For me, it’s A) whichever game I can play with friends (RL or OL), or B) whichever game is new, or has the least amount of playtime. Unfortunately, “A” rarely happens because I still have a hard to time finding decent people to play with, and my RL friends aren’t into MMOs like I am. It’s usually “B” for me, then :D