Finding an All-The-Time Game

Recently Belghast posted on giving up the chase for the ‘Forever Game’. It didn’t really occur to me at the time of Bel’s post, but it has occurred to me since with my return to Monster Hunter: World. While the ‘Forever Game’ may as well be a mythical unicorn, every once in a while… When we’re lucky… An ‘all-the-time’ game can come along.

A game so compelling and interesting to us personally that it consumes all available game-playing time. There is no longer any room for anything else amidst our feverish desire for more. Mooooore. Maybe this happens more often for other gamers less prone to constant game-shifting like I am, but I would say for me this happens perhaps once every three or so months. Other months I will still often have a game with hours-played far outstripping the nearest competitor — but it’s just… different somehow.

When a game can resonate with such ferocity, I do start getting some crazy ideas though. For Asheron’s Call I thought I might end up creating a whole set of guides on getting started with it in 2019. I had even gone so far as to create a draft of the introductory segment. With Anthem earlier last year, it was similar. Warframe? … Well OK, more guides. I thought explaining some skill interactions on certain Warframes I liked like Saryn could be fun. Yeah — my crazy ideas for games that take over my gaming time to this extent are usually guide-centric.

Not this time though! … *cough*

OK I might also have considered some guides for Monster Hunter World: Iceborne.

But I also had other ideas. For example, I wondered whether it might be a good idea to try 100% the achievements for Monster Hunter World and Iceborne.

I hadn’t even looked at what the achievements were and yet I was getting pretty gung-ho about committing myself to it. I’m taking a look now and the thought of actually trying this out is terrifying.

There are still a good number of achievements which no-one have obtained. I mean sure — it’s only 4 days since Iceborne even came out on PC. Still… Some people be crazy. It is known.

On a complete side note for a moment: It’s interesting to me to look at the Global Achievement stats for games and see how many people reached the ‘finish’ point of the game. e.g., for Monster Hunter: World, the main story ended with the achievement ‘The Sapphire Star’. A whopping 45.7% of players got here.

Honestly, I’m surprised by that. Monster Hunter is not a terribly easy game. I would have thought the completion rate much lower than that. If I’d been asked to guess, I would’ve put it around 20%. 25% tops.

Not only that, but the achievement ‘Temper Temper’ for killing your first tempered monster (a difficulty over and above ‘normal’ High Rank monsters) is at 42.5%.

Anyway. Back on course. This is all to say I’m incredibly engrossed by Monster Hunter World’s new expansion — Iceborne. I’m still not ready to give it a ‘review’ as such, or even much in the way of detailed impressions. Asmiroth though has outlined his initial thoughts in bullet-form.

All I’ll add to that for now is that it is incredibly rare for something to grab me this hard. Red Dead Redemption 2 and (more sadly) A Plague Tale: Innocence, for the time being at least, are completely to the side. I’m in no particular rush for RDR2, it’ll keep. But I quite enjoyed the other games I was coming across part of my story game kick. Not that I wasn’t also enjoying RDR2 I’ll hasten to add — just that I knew this one would take some time and be one I’d dip in and out of over time already.

Anywho, my train of thought is fading into a haze of desire to jump back to the hunt. Work kicked back to life for me this week, so I still haven’t hunted a monster yet today. *twitch*

I did out of interest take a look into my ManicTime reporting for last year though. I only started capturing data in this tool at the beginning of March last year — so January and February data aren’t included, but I only exceeded 70 hours played for three games in 2019.

I don’t know yet for sure that Iceborne will land at these sorts of counts. Entirely possible it will burn bright and short. But I strongly suspect it will at least make it this far.

I’m not quite willing to commit to hundred-percenting the achievements… But nor am I willing to yet rule it out.

We’ll see. ;)