I finished Dragon Quest XI. That is to say I finished the main story and killed the boss; I didn't continue in the "post-game" content to level up to 99. It took me 60 hours to reach the end, and I was level 57, and that was enough for me. Somehow it was important to me to finish this, although there are a lot of aspects of the game I dislike: The crafting system that is based on you searching every shelf for recipe books, the combat system in which you have half a dozen spells to counter status ailments, but then the boss hits you with half a dozen status ailments that there are no counter spells available for, the very linear story. But getting to the end boss gave me some sense of closure, of having finished this successfully. So, what next?

I am still playing World of Tanks. But I do think I will play this less intensively in 2020 than I did in 2019. Apart from the constant intrinsic "get better" goal, there are only so many extrinsic goals available in any game; and in World of Tanks I feel that I reached most of the goals I was actually interested in. That is mostly due to the failure of the game to attract many new players. It leads to the tier X "end game" filled with veterans that have every advantage you can earn in the game, and know every trick in the book. Having a life, I just can't compete at that level, which means that getting tank tech trees up above tier 8 isn't all that interesting.

So my idea for 2020 is to play more different games. And I have a huge amount of choice there, between my large library of unplayed Steam games, and services like the Xbox game pass for PC. One thing I realized is that I need to be less ambivalent about games: Either I need to stick with them and play them, or I need to uninstall them. I just uninstalled Assassin's Creed: Origin, because I played it a bit (until the end of Siwa, the first large zone), and then decided to play something else and come back to it later. Bad idea! If a game has a combat system that is based on a large number of complicated button combinations on the gamepad, which you learn by playing through the early part of the game where they are explained, you can't really make a long pause without unlearning all that. And then there is no way to get back into the game without starting over, as there is no way to play through the controls tutorial again otherwise.

I think my next game will be Phoenix Point. I only played that for a few hours before getting distracted, so its not a problem to restart and relearn.