I'm writing this on the brink of a momentous occasion in my
life. No, I haven't finished Look How Big I Drew This Dog. No, I didn't get published somewhere
noteworthy, that isn't edited by a friend.
No, I'm not suddenly in the grips of a deeply significant new love that
renders all the colors of my life in glorious new fidelity. I'm arriving at a far more meaningful moment
in my life, a moment that's long been coming.
I'm approaching the death of the daily quest in my life.
I was getting close to it before, when Neverwinter, my current daily quest vector and constant obstacle to
productivity, let me more or less cap out my progress within its structures by
gating them with prohibitively large time and social effort requirements: in
order to move past a certain point in Neverwinter,
gear wise, I'd now have to either join a guild, or spend hours grinding
"epic heroic encounters" in the most recent expansion, neither of
which are especially appealing prospects to me.
I don't play Neverwinter for
the other players. In fact, I find
almost all of them entirely distasteful, when they're not acting as obstacles
to me enjoying the game outright.
But then Neverwinter
did something tricky. It incentivized me
leveling up a character to the maximum level again. SWTOR
did this too, did it really well, but Neverwinter
was squirrely about it, making me mess around with their end-game content with
not one but two characters if I wanted to get an item that, while not great, is
certainly pretty good. Since it let me
engage with the part of Neverwinter I
liked (moving through dungeons, fighting enemies in little actiony battles,
getting loot, leveling up and assigning skill points) I was psyched. There's a certain charm to running characters
through the early-to-mid game frameworks of MMOs, wherein every encounter is scaled
to make you feel like a burgeoning badass.
But then the late-game sets in, and the game spikes in challenge and
time commitment. Progress slows. In the case of Neverwinter, the conventional progress system falls away and
becomes replaced by a series of precariously nested menus, each of which
contains a series of unique currencies, all of which are earned in different
locations at different paces. There's
something cruel about this, about the loss of the "ding" feature, and
about the way that Neverwinter,
through its insidious currency system, endeavors to keep players playing their
craft game to earn virtual money which is ostensibly worth real money.
But Neverwinter
broke its own economy with a series of ill-conceived sales. There's currently a week long waiting list to
purchase real-world-money currency with Neverwinter-game
currency, which adds another timer to an already startlingly slow paced set of
late-game progress sliders. Even as I
unlock new and interesting assets, even as I race through sections of the game
that once stalled me out with my new character, I find myself rolling my eyes
at the tawdry daily quests that ask me to re-tread the same ground again and
again for modest gains.
But here's the thing: I used to love the shit out of daily
quests. I used to call them Star Wars chores. I'd do them with friends, quickly and easily,
and then move on with my day. I'd
usually try to do them once a week, and even then, I'd make decent progress
(though, it's fair to say, this followed a month of intense daily-questing to
get the things I wanted out of the process).
But the Star Wars daily quests
were pretty modest affairs, and their rewards were transparent. Save up this many space-bucks over a few
weeks to get this incredible implant for your Jedi Sentinel or Sith
Marauder. Save up this many Black Hole
commendations over a few months and you can earn tier 2 gear without the tedium
of a drop. Pretty sweet, all things
considered.
Neverwinter made
the mistake of turning their daily quests into central content, blowing them up
and asking players to invest large chunks of time in them. They figured out that this formula wasn't the
greatest in their most recent daily quest expansion, wherein they replaced the
notion of two to three hour dungeons (the thing that Neverwinter does worst is both constructing and allowing players to
form parties for these dungeons, but I digress) with a ten to fifteen minute
mini-dungeon encounter, called a Skirmish.
It's actually kind of a brilliant move, but even that means that
finishing up daily content is a matter of multiple hours, spread across two
characters, while I try to play other games and do other things. All I want to do is find some sweet ass
swords and daggers! What's the deal, Neverwinter?
There's an upside. In
a sense, I never got tired of Star Wars:
The Old Republic. It remains on the
edge of my awareness, an object that I consider and, likewise, consider
returning to. Neverwinter has crushed my love of it with its daily quests. Writing this, I realize I'll be back in to it
to check out its upcoming expansion, and that I'll continue logging in, both to
finish up weekly and daily quests and to occasionally see if the market has
reached reasonable levels anew, but I know that when I finish up the bulk of these
quests, it's unlikely I'll be coming back to Neverwinter any time soon.
It's not that the game hasn't been fun. I've sunk nearly 500 hours into Neverwinter to date, an absurd amount
considering I spent all of zero dollars on it.
But the late game content has occupied nearly 200 of those gameplay
hours, and the bulk of that gameplay has been made up of the same several
actions, repeated ad infini. I've got a
high tolerance for that, obviously, but as time ekes on and my purchases from
Steam's summer sale begin to chafe within my video game crisper, I realize
something: that Neverwinter sold me
on a beautiful lie, that of endless progress, and that my only real option is
to break free. To shatter the chains of
daily quests and say, once and for all: man, Neverwinter used to be fun, but now it feels like a third job.
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