Let's talk about how dead this place is. (Off-Topic)

by cheapLEY , Saturday, January 11, 2025, 19:13 (10 days ago) @ Coaxkez

I've been mulling this over for a bit. I've tried to write something multiple times since you posted this thread, but I can't seem to find the words to convey anything meaningful.

I loved Destiny . . . until I didn't. I was angry at it for a while, for failing to live up to whatever hypothetical expectations I had. I still find myself wishing it had been different, somehow, but I couldn't tell you how. Some of the most fun content I've ever experienced in gaming was in Destiny. The raids, and especially the dungeons are just top-tier gaming. As a gameplay experience, nothing really comes close in the same way. The game just got to where it asked for too much extraneous stuff in order for me to fully enjoy those raids and dungeons. That extraneous stuff wavered from pretty fun to mind-numbingly tedious depending on the season and my mood. At the end of the day, it just became not worth it--it was eating more of my free time than I was willing to spend on it when there are just so many other amazing games begging for my attention, and so much other non-gaming stuff in my life competing for the little free time I had. I've reached the point where I look back on Destiny fondly, but I don't miss it being a part of my life. Destiny turned out to be an amazing game that's also really difficult for me to just engage with on my own terms. Partly because the game just won't freaking let you, but also because it turns out I'm just really susceptible to all the hooks it tries to use to keep me playing constantly. So I had to decide to just keep playing and ignoring other things I wanted to do, or quit entirely.

Which naturally just leads to DBO becoming less relevant. I still check this place daily, but without actively playing the game, there's not much for me to weigh in on in the rare instance people are actually here talking about it. This place still feels like my home on the internet, though, and I'll always appreciate the relationships I formed here, even though only a handful of them really transcended the playing Destiny together part of it.

And then this year happened and I stopped playing games pretty much altogether. I think I've played three games that actually released this year--Balatro, Helldivers II, and Stellar Blade (which I still haven't completed). Now that I'm back in a place with good internet access and more free time, I still find myself gravitating towards things other than games more often than not. And when I do fire something up, it's been Morrowind of all things over the last few months, which is fine, because that game is genuinely incredible, even after 22 years.

I think I played no small part in some people choosing not to hang around here, and I feel bad about that. I sort of naively never understood before, but being really disconnected from the wider world this last year has brought me around to Claude's perspective. I can see now how the constant bitching about Destiny wasn't fun to read every day, even if, at least from my perspective, it was never just negativity for its own sake and was mostly meaningful discussion. We are inundated with negativity basically constantly on the modern internet, and it sucks, and I regret bringing it here. There's lots of stuff to be genuinely pissed off about in the world and in life, but damn, video games isn't one of them, and it took me far too long to really internalize that. Life is too fucking short to be pissed off about having to play ten hours a week of a video game to keep up to par for the few bits of it I actually enjoyed.