Geekier Than Thou

I admit to being somewhat boggled at the speed and pace of MMO bloggers through singleplayer games.

Alright, so it doesn't help that I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an early adopter of latest singleplayer PC games. I probably won't have even bought the game by the time they complete it and finish critiquing and dissecting it under a design microscope.

Still. They seem to race through these singleplayer games in a couple days. It seems to take me a week or more to paddle my way through an FPS, even if I liked it.

Heck, I took the major part of a 3 day weekend to crank through Bioshock - and before that a couple more days wading around in the intro levels. We're talking near morning to night play with stops for food and bathroom, is about it. That's probably 6 days to chug through 20-30 hours of gameplay.

I can't imagine if I'd only spend 2-3 hours a night like I do for MMOs. Bioshock would have taken forever.

And then Freefall comes along, borrows Bioshock, and within the space of a couple days, goes, whoof, played it.

*jaw drops*

(Still guilty of not completing Doom 3. Still putting in a couple hours each night for Crysis. Took me 2-3 weeks to finish FEAR, and Cry of Duty 4, neat as it was and addictive, took a week at least.)

I'm starting to think that I'm missing some part of the equation here.

Now, of course I'm not so crass to accuse everyone faster than me of liberally using cheat codes or walkthroughs (and it's their prerogrative if they do, and I probably suck, that's why I'm so slow)...but I do wonder.

Maybe they skip through battles (stealth and running fast for the win), maybe they ignore side quests whereas I go haring after every rabbit trail I see, maybe they just plow in guns blazing and shoot a lot straighter while I feel the compulsion to turn every FPS with a cloak/instant kill or sniper rifle into a Predator-esque ranged/melee hunt.

So sue me. I evidently have godlike/assassin wannabe issues.

Or maybe I just navigate really slowly and put in a lot of breaks between singleplayer sessions. Heck, even Portal took me the better part of 3 days to chug through, and I can't blame any gun skills.

Boggles me, though.

Especially when I see that their online avatars are lower level than me.

I grok it when there's some blogger (like Keen and Graev) who just have a helluva lot more time to play than me (ah, the college years *sighs*) so they crank through a ton of singleplayer games and are mid-30s in Warhammer.

That's cool. My Marauder is 28. They just have more time, so obviously they are more hardcore and go faster.

But slower leveling online and fast speed through offline games? Boggles me a bit. It's not like they're doing both simultaneously - then yes, maybe the focus is more on the offline game, so they'll progress faster through that.

This is snail's pace through an online game and like greased lightning through an offline game. Hrm. What the heck do they do online? Sit and chat? :P

Maybe the habit of skipping past battles works well for FPS games where there's a surfeit of enemies, but grinding mobs = more xp in an MMO. Perhaps that's where the disparity lies.

Or perhaps I have a focus on immersion and action/activity over progress and achievement.

It could be that I do a lot in any game - spend a long time hunting mobs, puttering with different activities and side quests and crafting, just plain fighting - but tend to veer off following the main storyline with a one-track mind.

So by a yardstick of story or percentage completion of game progress, I suck. Not there yet cos I'm off doing other things.

But with an xp yardstick that offers rewards for doing practically anything viable in game like WAR, it gets reflected in my level - even if I actually haven't done the main story quest everyone else has, cos I've been off chasing fairy dust unlocks or hot RvR action.

That could explain why my completion rate for any kind of game is abyssmal. I buy 'em. I try 'em. I play 'em for a while and have fun. Then my interest kind of peters out before reaching the end, unless there's a serious story that I /need/ to know the ending of.