This past Sunday, DBqHams, one of my co-hosts on the Enough 2 Keep Going weekly video games podcast, talked about his return to Destiny 2. In many ways, I was jealous. I keep a short list of games that I have every intention of getting back to, including GAAS games. And inevitably, I am unable to do so. Constantly following the glitz of the shiny new thing that is constantly dropping in the gaming industry, I am easily distracted and these things present an active impediment to getting back to every title in the backlog I want to. It is doubly painful for GAAS games, because those are things that require an up-front time investment to reacclimatize to. Remember your build, your gear, much less the in-game mechanics. And then strike out on a worthwhile vector that returns some rewards for that grind and the ever-present allure of the next character progression or loot drop.
I bought The Final Shape. And have yet to make any meaningful progress to getting to it. I said I would start a new build. That I would play through all of the chronological content that was available. I especially wanted to do another run through The Witch Queen campaign. And so, in the course of chewing through this huge on-ramp I’d created for myself, of course, I was distracted yet again by the constant deluge of new releases. And so it sits in my backlog.
Listening to him, through several rounds of Q&A from yours truly, because I desperately wanted to know why he went back, I was both convinced and deterred. He is the same as me; has The Final Shape campaign and hasn’t played it.
His response, was, in some ways alluring. What brought him back was the exquisite gunplay of Destiny 2. A yen I admit I also have and also defines what took me back to playing the Halo Infinite campaign. But it also made me think about all of the baggage I mentioned before. Because while I too love the gunplay, I do not think I could unbuckle myself from my OCD enough to go back just for that. I would want to jump in ten-toes deep. And now that I am back to playing story stuff, I just don’t know if I have the heart to get back into any hard-core GAAS games.
We’ll have to see.
Rounding Off Infinity 