Revisiting "A Tale in the Desert"
Way back when rocks were experimental (on internet scales), I played an MMO called A Tale in the Desert with my late wife.
It's very odd for an MMO. It's about building society and crafting. No combat. Not even any real violence beyond some animal slaughter (which just makes the cow disappear and you get leather in your inventory). Very small player base. Something around 1000 people max when we played.
Like a very old-school MUD, the game periodically resets. Each reset is the end of one telling and the beginning of another, and the game administrators tweak a lot of parameters and change some systems around between each telling to make each one unique.
I believe I played during Tellings 4-6. It was many years of playing and I did enjoy myself. However, it is also a game that can easily become a second job. My late wife focused just on producing linen, a basic item but one with enough steps that most people found it a chore to make in quantity. She'd take linen orders and trade them for other things she wanted.
I, however, wanted to do all the things and it became an incredibly complex chore to accomplish what I wanted to do. There are some achievements I'm proud of, but it was way too much work.
Eventually, we both got tired of the chores and stopped playing when the next telling came around. A couple of days ago, I thought about it again and saw it was still running. They're up to Telling 11 now and deep into it by the year count.
I fired up the client, made a new character (my old one being long gone), and started doing the tutorial island again. New interface, a few graphical improvements (it's still a rather crude game), but I didn't get very far into it.
As soon as I started juggling all of the basic tasks you need to do to get off the island, I started getting that feeling of "this is work" again. I knew where this road would lead if I kept going. Even if I joined a guild and had the help of others, I knew there would be times I'd want to jump on just to hit the right timing of getting the most of some resource or another. It would consume my life again.
So, I stopped. I already have enough tasks to do in real life. I don't need to burden myself with virtual ones. Most games these days feel like another job to me. Any game that gets longer than 8 hours, or even 4, gets this feeling started in me.
I'm an older gamer. Like, NES-era older gamer. I'm probably about halfway through my life if I'm lucky to live long. It's not that I lack the time to play, but I would have to give up so many things I do in real life to commit to the game in the way I'd prefer. I'm not like my late wife, who preferred to do one thing happily (for hours). The completionist bug would hit and I'd lose myself in it.
This is incredibly ironic to me since my game genre of choice when I was younger was JRPGs, where your minimum was 20 hours and usually more like 80+ if you were a completionist.
No shade intended upon ATITD here. I've changed, and it's not for me anymore. If you like MMOs but hate the combat and competition, adore crafting, and don't mind taking the time to learn a strange UI that isn't explained very well, it's a recommendation from me. You'll know by the end of the tutorial island whether you'll enjoy it or bounce off.