I've said a couple times that there is a something, maybe even a physical something, wrong with the part of my brain that would ordinarily collect a crisp basilisk urethra in an MMOs. It just won't let me do it. The particular cadence of its repetitive activity activates the same part of the brain that the burner of a hot stove might - it says hey! Idiot! Stop doing this.

So no, I haven't played New World, I don't even know if I could truly observe it as a phenomenon. Eventually, and this might not be fair but it's true, I came to see them as activities where I collected imaginary garbage. I came to see myself as a kind of fantasy garbage man. And then at the end I have a collection of illusory artifacts I rent from them until I don't want to anymore and the whole thing evaporates.  I understand that it's got towns and factional PVP and, like, taxes and stuff.  I can't do it.

These days, a game has to be different every time I play it, or it has to have a cool story. You don't typically get these two things together, but Hades would be a good example how it could be done and work well. I just want it to be interesting the whole time. A game can earn some ritualized, obsessive behavior from me by executing one of the other two things well, but that just can't be the offer on the ground floor anymore.  I don't want to feel those kinds of ways - those "This feels like a job" ways - when I'm theoretically supposed to be enjoying myself. It has to feel like play.

On Twitch, it looks very much like New World is running shit - it's been two thirds of my recommended streams since launch, so it seems like they have figured discovery out, as long as it's for their own stuff.

(CW)TB out.