24: No-lifing games
Welcome to the triumphant return of the j76 Gaming Podcast! The highly anticipated episode 24 is here!
It’s been a wild ride here in 2021 but it’s starting to settle down. Just in time for holiday chaos lol. The very short version of a long story is that I changed jobs (same company though), moved across country from Texas to Michigan, and bought a house. I had planned to get back in action in September but moving into my house and the immediate renovations took longer than expected. But hey, better late than never! So coming to you from the new j76 Studio here in East Lansing, MI, I hope that you enjoy episode 24 of the podcast.
We have all sorts of fun things from the Game Awards. Which I don’t love award shows, but they do give us lots to talk about from all the reveals. So we’ll cover some of the big ones that get me excited and that ties indirectly into the main topic this episode; No-lifing games. Why do we have so many games that require an exhaustive amount of time to really get into them?
Game News
Matrix Awakens - Unreal Engine 5 demo: YouTube
Hellblade 2 Senua’s Saga - Gameplay - YouTube
Star Wars Eclipse: Star Wars Eclipse
Dragon Age 4: Electronic Arts
Star Ocean - The Divine Force: Square Enix
Dead Space Remake: YouTube
PC Game Pass (rename): Xbox
Final Fantasy XIV - Endwalker Server Issues: Final Fantasy XIV
Console News
Not much to talk about right now. Still hard to find, but more and more retailers are getting what seems to be steady restocks. Too bad they’re behind pay walls and subscription services.
However, maybe we’ll get some help fighting Scalpers. Lol we’ll see how this works out.
Law to ban scalper bots - Forbes
Hardware News
AMD 5800x - Overlooked affordable and powerful CPU - Toms Hardware
Nvidia 3090TI - Digital Trends
Nvidia 2060 with 12GB relaunch - Wccftech
Game Updates and DLC
Final Fantasy XIV - Endwalker - Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XI - Master Levels - Square Enix
Returnal - RUMOR - Twitter
Assassins Creed Vahalla - RUMOR - Push Square
Cities Skylines - Airports DLC - YouTube
Cyberpunk 2077 - Roadmap Updated - Twitter
Kingdoms of Amalur - Fatesworn DLC - YouTube
Upcoming Game Releases
Final Fantasy VII Remake (PC) - December 16th - Epic Games
Monster Hunter Rise (PC) - January 12th - Steam
God of War (PC) - January 14th - Steam
Pokemon Legends: Arceus (Switch) - January 28th - Nintendo
Main Topic: No-lifing games
We live in an environment where we have more games available than ever before. Forgetting for a second all of the games from all years past, we get multiple major releases a month now. Which sounds like a great thing. Well until you have to pay for all those games if you want them of course. What really gets me going though, is the time commitment.
If you go to Urban Dictionary, the definition of ‘no-lifing’ is as follows:
No-lifing: to attempt to master a difficult videogame/puzzle/craft to perfection in a matter of days by sitting on your ass for hours on end as if (or because) you have no life.
That’s not entirely accurate though is it? The games themselves come out and actively try to get us to only play that one game forever. While it’s still our choice not to play nonstop, the deck is stacked against us. The games are built that way.
Remember when games would come out, you would play it, then you would move on to the next game? It could be a weekend, a week, a month, but that game was done and it was time to go. I kind of miss those days. Right now, my list of completed games is embarrassingly short. Who has the time to finish a game? By the time you play one game for a week, there are two more released already. Starring longingly at my game collection, both digital and physical, is my new pastime.
What got me really thinking about this is Diablo 2 Resurrected. It is notoriously disrespectful of the gamers time. I have spent well over200 hours on the game since the launch in Sept. Which is a very conservative guestimate of time, since the game does not have a ‘time played’ feature…thankfully I think. We’re talking 3+ hours a day (up to like 8 hours) during the week, many more on weekends, and multiply times 10 weeks or so it’s been out. My holy grail sorceress is only at about 50% of the way done. That’s only half of the items in the game and I don’t have even some of the very basic sorceress gear. And what is the cost of all this? Well, for one thing, I’ve been working on this episode of the podcast for 4 weeks now and I’m finally getting it out. Each week went by and I would grind D2R and say, I’ll do the podcast tomorrow.
That is just one example of a game though. What about MMOs? Since we have some a hot topic of Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker release. I’ve been trying to play FFXIV again, but coming back to the world is so overwhelming that I get frustrated. Not cause the game is hard to get back into, but it’s time consuming to get back into. Then consider my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy XI. Talk about time consuming. Been playing that game for 19 years.
Other games that you could mention would be stuff like Destiny or Division or Diablo 3 or any game that just adds content without doing a new release of the game. Destiny 2 is a full time job just to do the weekly stuff. I miss Destiny 2, but sheesh I don’t have that kind of time. Well not when all my other favorite games are full time jobs also.
I think really what needs to happen is better time management. Force myself to put a game down. Force myself to play other games. And sadly let go of the dreams of being ‘that guy’ on the internet that got the crazy good item or completed some ridiculous task. Most importantly, remember that games are supposed to be fun and not jobs. Weird.