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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   3759 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 16, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Is it a good game? Not really, it's a waste of time. I frequently have sat, playing on my phone, for 20 minutes waiting for a crafting meter to fill while I cook 160 soups or what-have-you. Vendors have limited funds, so you spend time each season selling your goods, only to become rich quickly and easily. If you're OCD like me, constantly trying to manage where your stuff is versus where your villages put it is aggravating. The game is quite easy, the only real challenge is optimising your day to be the most efficient. The main gameplay loop in that sense is the list of to-do tasks: "first, I'll cook as many of these as I can. Then I must repair my buildings. Oh look, the hunters need new knives, which means I need to go mining - I can stop at the town and sell on the way. I need to harvest before end of season, don't forget, which means I won't have time for this quest".

Yet the game is compelling; I've yet to put it down, with my plans of what to do next in the game frequently being my top thought.

I find the combination of simple, tedious and compelling to be far more worrisome than e.g. infinitely complex, aggravating and compelling.

E.g. as an underemployed adult I spent maybe 6k hours playing Ark: Survival, but at the very least I had to learn to get along with people, improved my English tremendously and learned to "not do it again".

I had read bad things about MMORPGs- people wasting their time on them. "It's not an RPG, it's an FPS and looks cool. Try it out".

Turns out, even if a game is inadvertently designed to be absolutely repulsive to almost everyone (think Valheim, except you are getting randomly invaded by other human players 24x7), it can still be immensely interesting once you find your people in there and start playing as a team.

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