The Folly of Man

From a time when physical media still seemed preferable.

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I realise that I start almost everything I write with some equivalent of “I don’t know where to start”.  I should probably just delete the first paragraph of everything I write.  I’m not going to do that now, because not only do I not know where to start, but I don’t even know why I’m writing this.  I think I just need someone to bear witness to what I’ve done.

 

Jesus.  Now you have to picture yourself tied to wheelchair in front of a projector.

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475 hours.  Do you see?

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About a month prior to writing this I finished what I decided was going to be my greatest endeavour.  None of that curing cancer or volunteering for charity muck here.  Not doing anything positive, or just bringing some light into the world.  Oh, no.  Not me.  I was going to completely dominate all the console versions of Diablo 3!  That’s Diablo 3 on Xbox 360 and PS3, and Reaper of Souls (or the Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition) on Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One and PS4.  DOMINATE!

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503 hours.  Do you see?

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Well.  Not DOMINATE dominate.  Almost immediately it felt like a manifesto of compromise.  Firstly, I had considered doing all the in-game challenges but then I looked at them.  Even I have limits.  Not only are some excruciatingly specific and nitpicky, I also know from experience that they are fairly glitchy not to mention there is an entire section of challenges set aside for co-op.  What kind of loser would do something like this with friends?  

Someone WITH friends I would imagine.  

Anyway, I dumped the challenges idea early on, which also allowed me to leave the PC version off my list.  It’s not that I don’t like the PC version, it just doesn’t feel as immediate or responsive as the console versions.  It looks amazing, but the great graphics and ability to properly aim spells don’t negate the click-to-move, lack of dodge and (admittedly infrequent) hitches due to always being online.  So no PC version.  Phew.

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241 hours.  Do you see?

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Secondly, you could never stretch the truth to the degree that you can say that the Diablo games have a difficult achievement/trophy list.  About the hardest achievement is to get a Hardcore character to level 70, but playing as a Monk way down on Expert difficulty makes even this achievement a matter of grinding rather than an actual challenge.  

Want to shave some time off the whole process?  You can, of course, transfer your characters from Diablo 3 to Reaper of Souls, so my Xbox 360 save with a full complement of level 60 characters and a level 30 Hardcore character acted as my base for Reaper of Souls on Xbox 360, Xbox One and Playstation 4.  In the end, all I had to do that was time consuming was a complete Playstation 3 playthrough including that insane “5 million gold picked up” Trophy.

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1300 hours.  Do you see?

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Thirdly, it wasn’t as if I was putting a time limit on anything.  You might see all these fancy speedrunners doing things all quick and impressively.  Ha!  I barely strive for the dizzying heights of  mediocrity!  I had already finished Diablo 3 on Xbox 360 and Reaper of Souls on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One on launch, then Reaper of Souls on Playstation 4 the following year.  Nearly 4 years can’t be counted as any kind of time limit.  

And so it came to be that my grand adventure boiled down to – “I will play two old Playstation 3 games!”

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475 hours.  Do you see?

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So, with my parameters set generously wide, I steamed forward with my “challenge”.  After two days, the relief I felt when my old phat PS3 was turned off for the day was amazing.  You have never truly known silence until you have turned off the gushing roar of an old PS3 after 4 hours.  What had previously been a joke became reality, I bought a newer PS3 just to play Diablo and it was fantastic.

With renewed vigour, I played on.  All I could imagine was glory.  

How many people had tackled this exact journey?

How many had fallen by the wayside?

I blasted through all the trophies until boredom set in during the fatal “Pick up 5 million gold” Trophy.  Now, Diablo 3 boredom is a very different kind of boredom to normal boredom.  It’s not that I ever want to stop, it’s just that I need something else to do.  I had exhausted my podcast collection, the TV was being used for Diablo and my poor wife had temporarily lost her husband.  So I bought a monitor.  We could watch Star Trek “together” as I muddled through my obsession.

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301 hours.  Do you see?

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As The Next Generation became Deep Space Nine, Diablo 3 became Reaper of Souls and my eyes were opened.  It was like a brick wall.

This is pointless.

Who will ever care?

One day you will be dead and this was it, was it?

What is wrong with you?

To limit my compulsive behaviour, I interspersed my Diablo 3 sessions with Skyrim.  That was a great idea!  Rather than obsessively chasing gold, I would obsessively collect every item in Skyrim!  Foolproof!

It was with a lighter heart that I hit Reaper of Souls.  It came and went and the hollowness of that platinum trophy was palpable.  It plinked up, I teleported back to town and was dashed by a wave of existential emptiness.  These characters were dead.  I would never play them again.  691 hours and they weren’t even my mains.  Not only that, but that time could have been spent on gearing my PS4 characters.  That was it done.  Over.  Did anything good come of this?

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Then why did you write lies about me?

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No, not really, unless you count an awareness of how truly pointless my chosen hobby is.  Oh, and I (as a fully grown adult man) now have what I unironically began calling my “Battle bridge”, a little table that holds my gaming monitor and laptop.

I even made a little table of cost to my life this has had to try to put it into perspective.

Game	Platform	Hours Played	Cost
Diablo III	X360	475	£39.99
Diablo III	PS3	503	£13.99
Reaper of Souls	X360	380	£39.99
Reaper of Souls	PS3	390	£24.98
Reaper of Souls	XONE	241	£39.99
Reaper of Souls	PS4	1300	£33.98
Reaper of Souls	PC	50	£35.98
		3339	£228.90
		Playstation 3	£30.00
		Monitor	£90.00
	Days	139.13	£348.90

So, I found out that I spent nearly £350 on (or as a direct consequence of) Diablo 3, as well as VOLUNTARILY giving the game nearly 140 DAYS of my life.  I didn’t really know where to go from here.

I went back and played a little with my PS4 mains for a while, but became frustrated with constantly pressing the “Share” button thinking it was “Select”, as I had used the DualShock 4 on my PS3.  I gave up and decided only to return when the Necromancer pack comes out.

All that remained was to find something to play while watching Voyager.  So rather than play another sprawling, grinding Blizzard RPG…  Oh, wait…

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If you’ve never seen Red Dragon, these captions will have been lost on you.

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Never mind.

 

What is Fun?

Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more.

The stats of either a cheat, or a man with to much time on his hands.

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What is fun?  I’m very much struggling with this question after extended sessions on No Man’s Sky.  About twenty hours in, I simply stopped shooting at the 38th giant gold formation I’d started strip mining and just downed tools.

It was my epiphany moment, that moment of clarity when your brain just says, “I’m doing the thing so I can do the thing more later.”  In this case, I was collecting gold so I could sell the gold so I could buy a bigger ship to collect more gold.  And that was it.  My connection to the game just shut down.

I felt like I’d spent twenty hours piss-arsing around a few star systems for no reason.  Well, in that case, I thought, time to go off and do something more fun.  It’s nearly two weeks until Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, so what do I turn to?

 I know!  Diablo 3.  I love Diablo 3!  I’ve put in well over 600 hours across multiple versions on Xbox 360, PC, Xbox One and PS4, getting all the achievements and trophies in all the console versions.  I love the game’s simplicity at face value, and depth if want to mess around with character builds.

That being said, I finished the game a while ago and have spent the last 200 hours playing Adventure Mode trying to get all the best gear for my characters, leveling up gems to make them incrementally better and gaining paragon points to infinitesmally improve my guys.  The reason behind this?  So I can play the game on harder difficulties to get marginally better gear.  Oh, wait…

I’m doing the thing so I can do the thing more later.

So that leads me to the question – what is fun?  Perhaps more relevantly – am I having fun?  Am I enjoying myself?  The answer to all three questions is, “I don’t know.”   It’s strange to think that I don’t know if I’m enjoying what I’m doing.  It made me apply the the question, “is this fun?” to other games I’ve put a lot of time into.

Now, I don’t mean to necessarily apply this to narrative heavy games, although “narrative heavy” is very much a relative term in gaming.  Most games, even with the most rudimentary story give me some sort of enjoyment.  Like, let’s say… Hunted: The Demon’s Forge – a decent enough game teetering on mediocre with some fun co-op, but the most generic of generic stories.   I had a great time playing it in co-op, but I also played it through on my own in order to learn the story.  So I don’t mean that.  Even the slightest bit of investment can be enough for me.

Another motivation for me is the acquisition of Achievements or Trophies.  They are something I find highly enjoyable and have seen me play some games I would never have touched otherwise.  I can easily see that this isn’t fun.  Not by a damn sight.  I have driven myself to horrendous fits of frustration just for that cheerful little plink that leaves you with a feeling of stark relief rather than a sense of fun.

There are also games with decent mechanics, like Metal Gear Solid 5.  An absolute disaster of a narrative, but phenomenal gameplay.  Narrative, compulsion and satisfying mechanics are things that you can easily qualify as fun and will keep me playing.  The games I’m wondering about are the games I find myself playing for extended periods.  The time eaters.

Borderlands springs to mind, another game I put 300 hours into, and think back on fondly.  Yet, when I really think about it, what I remember the most was the horrendous grind.  I put even more time into Borderlands 2 despite really, really disliking it.  I played around 600 hours, continuing the game well after getting all the achievements.  I kept at Borderlands 2 until I had every character at maximum level, and it felt like a grind, made all the worse by the grating characters in the game.  I don’t know why I did it.  However, even I dropped the Pre-Sequel the second I got all the achievements after about 50 hours.

Inversely, there have been games where I’ve felt a bit sad when I earned all the achievements, like Sacred 2.  I really enjoyed the game, yet when I didn’t have the pull of achievements, my interest petered out.  So, maybe fun for me is a sense of progress, of getting a little reward for what I’m doing, like a trained dog.

Is that fun?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

When it comes down to it, the difference between a game like No Man’s Sky and Diablo 3 is that the designers at Blizzard are so well versed in capturing the right sights, sounds and sensations for their games that as far you can tell, you are having fun, even when all you are doing is doing the thing so you can do the thing more later.  It’s an amazing, masterful illusion, one that ultimately blinds you to the grind.

The genius is – I don’t care.  It has me.  I can never imagine getting bored of Diablo 3.  I often fantasise about another expansion pack, or DLC characters that I would throw money at like the fat fool I am.  Even worse, I’m actively planning on getting a quieter Playstation 3 so I can play through both versions on that as well, without the 747 taking off sound of my old phat deafening me.

So, that would seem to be my question answered.  Depressingly it seems that, for me at least, “fun” is being a trained consumer.

Oh, well.