Taemien
9
I dunno about that last sentence about long time hardcore fans, but I can only speak for myself. I’ve been around since the early access days myself, and I think I got maybe 800 hours played before I exhausted everything (multiple times) that was available. The game was ‘beat’ and ‘completed’ for me. And around this point I would have easily stopped playing and moved on to newer things.
But another friend of mine wanted to get into it, and I decided to play with them because… sure I’ve beaten the game, but games are always better with friends. This time I was exposed to more server types than simply default setting PVP as well as user generated content.
That kept my attention for a while, and around this time we started seeing some changes to how the endgame worked, thralls got useful and were now farmable outside of crafters, and then a bit later we got Isle of Siptah. I had taken short breaks here and there, but always had something to come back to in Conan.
Ever since Age of Sorcery its been interesting to play with some hard dedication and then take a break towards the end of a chapter and come back when it releases. There’s a pretty decent cycle of play and break that I’ve had with Conan that has kept the game very fresh for me.
Now this is where things can only be spoken from my point of view. As I do play on and off. I don’t play every chapter for 100% of the several weeks it is out. I have a rotation of games I go between and occasionally try a new one.
I can imagine that those who have played every day for the last 5 years are fatigued by the changes. But I’ve said this over the years, the issue isn’t really the changes, the issue is the fatigue itself. Unless you’re a speedrunner who literally streams as their career, sticking with a single game for years is the single best way to hate your favorite game. And we see this quite a bit.
It takes forever to break that mindset too. Its very easy to say… ok I’ll take a month off… then come back and be like… I hate it. Well yeah you wanted to come back to the game you left, not to the game that is (bugs and unforeseen consequences aside). But the game you left will get quickly stale and old.