Breaking up is hard to do

I've been caught with lipstick on my collar, I must admit that I've been seeing other games than World of Warcraft. :) It's not quite the divorce yet, but the passion of our earlier relationship definitely has gone. Breaking up with a game I played for a long time is always hard, and makes me a bit sad.

Yesterday I logged on all of my characters to count how much time I had /played with them. All characters on the European servers together have over 51 days of /played time. Add another estimated 10 days for the US server I played on earlier, and I end up with a total time of 1,500 hours spent in the World of Warcraft, about 30 hours per week. That is a looooooong time to be playing a game.

Given that most single-player games offer less than 100 hours of gameplay, replacing a game that took 30 hours per week is hard. But I still have a stack of unplayed games around, and I got Civ4, X3, Black & White 2, and UFO:Aftershock ordered from Amazon. All of which are sequels, which tells you something about the gaming industry of today. On the other hand, I don't mind games that are sequels or use brands like Zelda, Final Fantasy, or Mario, as long as they are markedly different and improved over their predecessors. I don't play sports games, but even if I did, I wouldn't buy a new version with just some updated player data every year. But with games like Final Fantasy every sequel has a markedly different gameplay than the previous game. And even if the gameplay of a sequel remains the same, I'd rather play the modern version of Pirates! than the original one, whose blocky pixel graphics are far too outdated by now.

While I have ideas how World of Warcraft could be even better, and I'm not always supporting all the decisions Blizzard did on that game, the 1,500 hours I played WoW show very well that I consider it one of the best games around. Maybe even *the* best game in existance. But MMORPGs, like books, films, and other sorts of entertainment, have a limited amount of content. And while World of Warcraft, unlike a book or a film, is still continually adding content, this addition isn't quite as fast as my consumption when I play 30 hours per week. So I'd rather take it slow, cut my WoW hours way down, and just level my alts using their rest xp bonuses.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link