It's the journey, not the destination: Really?

Yep, its all about the journey for me

I like the journey... right up to the moment that journey ceases to be any fun. (That is to say, the point at which continuing becomes a repetative, stressful, and often frustrating grind-fest.) At that point, I just want "the journey" to be over and done with so I can move on to something more entertaining, and maybe actually ENJOY playing that character for a change instead of feeling obligated to run it through a well-nigh-endless series of PUGs, speed runs and raid-fails, which I don't find the least bit fun.

So far the Devs have done a really great job of turning the entire "end game system" into exactly the kind of journey I'd rather avoid completely or get over with as quickly as possible. It's been about as much fun for me as dancing on a fire ant nest, and shows no sign of improvement.

So, yeah... While I agree that the journey CAN certainly be fun, it can also be a serious drag.

I have just over 3,600 hours of playtime logged on my main. He's been level 50 since July of 2006.

Building him was fun, but playing him at his full capability is more fun.

If the journey is boring, dull and brimmed to the hilt with insipid platitudes, then I have to focus on the destination out of sheer frustrated boredom. Sorry, but that's how all this incarnate stuff is reading for me.

Where's the Moon Base? Outerspace? Atlantis? Magick Powers ala Arcanaville's most excellent expositional commentary scattered here and there all over the forums? Where are the 'giant' powers? water powers? cosmic powers? metamorph powers? and really giant robots?

Instead, we have a tired, old chestnut: evil-counterpart dimensional invasion and drama-queen fixation on Greek Mythology. Where are all the Norse Gods, the Japanese Gods...etc?

And all the costume ideas we've begged for over the years? Yes, Awesome, really Sexy-Jay and Team have come thru with cool stuffs, but I'm still waiting for a revamp on those pathetic original tails and still waiting for a magick pack that allows for non-techno effects for powers and pets.

Give me all this, finally after 7 years! jeeze. Then we can talk about the dull, insipid platitudes of I20.

Cal

And, btw, here's the lyric I think you were quoting:

"Out Of The Cradle"

It's not a place
It's a yearning
It's not a race
It's a journey

It's not an act
It's an attraction
It's not a style
It's an action

It's a dream for the waking
It's a flower touched by flame
It's a gift for the giving
It's a power with a hundred names

Surge of energy, spark of inspiration
The breath of love is electricity
Maybe time is a bird in flight
Endlessly mocking
Here we come out of the cradle
Endlessly rocking
Endlessly rocking

It's a hand
That rocks the cradle
It's a motion
That swings the sky
It's method on the edge of madness
It's a balance on the edge of a knife
It's a smile on the edge of sadness
It's a dance on the edge of life

Endlessly rocking



Sadly, I20 doesn't express this dynamic to me...

Cal

For some reason this question made me think about the game "Planescape: Torment", where you are asked the question "What can change the nature of a man?" The questioner in that case wasn't looking for a specific answer, but rather that it be the answer the main character believed was true.

So for those who enjoy the journey, its the journey. For those who focus on the destination, its the destination. And for those who like fritos...

It's all about the destination for me. To me, it doesn't feel like my character is growing when I level them up. I create my toons with a specific design. They are the hero I want them to be from the start. They don't slowly fit that. It's only once they're 50 that I can give them a true test run and tweak them to fit the concept I originally envisioned.

City of Heroes has always been that game I would play for a month or two, then quit. This cycle repeated itself every year or so. Never before has this game kept my attention for so long and that's purely due to my enjoyment of the Incarnate system.

So for me, with any MMO, it's about the destination. When I got my Controller the very rare Alpha slot it was the best feeling I've had playing COH, even though I felt it was a bit too easy to do. I'd love to see the later slots be even harder/longer to complete.

For me it's definitely the journey. I got the post-50 blues after Nightshade hit 50. Same again when I got a hero to 50. Both times I wandered off to play other stuff for a while.

• I'm an incurable altholic.
  I take long breaks from CoH every so often, to focus on other games, or real life.
  I rerolled my entire roster when I came back about 6 weeks ago.
  I actually enjoy the low level (1-20) game.

Thanks for all the great responses.

The major thing about a journey is that it must feel like you are moving. If you are moving so slowly that its barely perceptable (e.g. in a traffic jam) then it doesn't feel like a journey. Similarly, you can move as fast as you like, but if the scenery doesn't change, then it doesn't feel like a journey.

I agree, I got my first level shift today. How? Not by looking over the charts and running the TFs I needed to get the quickest components. I ran the TFs that my group ran, which a couple times has been the TF of the week, so I got a couple notices. I was in RWZ and picked up a Gr'ai matter, and after we ran the ITF this week, I noticed I had all the components for the rare slot, and I was missing two for the uncommon slot (and had already equipped the common).

So I crafted what I needed to craft, and I was one short to craft the uncommon component, but I had an extra notice, so I converted that and was able to craft the uncommon and then the rare Alpha boost. It wasn't about the goal, I just had fun every week running a TF with my friends.

I spend exponentially way more time sub-50 than I do on my three 50s. Because I have way, way more sub-50 characters than 50s, and I play whatever I feel like playing at the time.

It definitely is about the journey for me. I do not chase the end game. I don't even have Going Rogue, so I cannot chase the end game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

"It's the journey, not the destination" is a very old concept in City of Heroes, one that hasn't shown up much lately (really, not much since I9) and one which I'm not sure newer players can fully appreciate. It originates from a justification we used to give both to explain the lack of any "end game" to speak of and as an argument against power-levelling back in the days of Wolf Farms and Dreck Farms and Dumpster Diving and the like. In simple terms, it represents the belief that the game is, or at the very least it is asserted that it should be, fun the entire way through, and that players will play the game mostly because they like playing it. Note that at no point is it suggested that a player should never care for levelling up or progress, but merely that said player will never be in a position where the game sucks NOW, but will unsuck 10, 20, 50 levels from now.

This used to be the case, way back when, if for no reason other than because people who mostly or only cared about the destination tended to leave the game after about a month, when they realised they'd wasted their time powerlevelling to 50. In fact, we used to discuss about how those people were wasting their subscriptions and missing the point, as they'd ignored so much content on the way up for the sole purpose of complaining that there was no content at level 50. Considering that there is still practicall no CONTENT at level 50 yet people appear to be content, we may have been missing the point.

To me, a game is, and always will be, about the journey. I enjoyed the fact that City of Heroes could be "completed," because it gave me a certain sense of closure. It told me "Your journey has been completed. A winnar is you. Would you like to do it again?" To me, this has always been the hallmark of a great game - do I want to play it all over again as soon as I'm done? Maybe that's an acquired taste, born of my childhood playing Arcade games which were all fairly short and we played them over and over again a lot, but this is just what I want. I don't really care about the destination, personally, as I have nothing to prove to anyone. Instead, I want a fun experience that doesn't have too many aspects which suck, as I'm going to want to experience it again and again and again.

I'm not a fan of end game in general, for the simple fact that it's purpose-designed to practically never end, and this comes with one (or a combination) of three particular drawbacks. End game content must either be so prohibitively hard that even the best players will take a long time to figure it out and beat it, while the not-so-good players can snack on tough cookies, or it must be so crushingly slow that it takes even the fastest players years to make any headway, leaving the slower players with more work than they have life span left short of the invention of an elixir of youth, or otherwise be so soul-grindingly repetitive as to make a small body of fairly interesting, fairly accessible content last a long time as you do it over and over and over again for years to come. City of Heroes' current end game manages to combine all three to various degrees.

But my problem with end game doesn't come down so much to actual implementation as it does to basic game design philosophy disagreement. End game as a concept is intrinsically about the destination. The end game is often considered to be where the real game starts, as that's where the strongest enemies and the best items are. Naturally, everything before that starts being considered filler, the unwanted obstacle keeping you away from the end game where the real game is. This causes "the game" to become a nuisance, rather than what we all came here to do. And this just isn't fun for me.

On a much smaller scale, I've always favoured the journey over the destination even when doing basic missions. When I run TFs, by far the WORST, most unpleasant thing I can hear a team-mate say is "We can stealth this mission." It could be the worst, dumbest, longest mission in the game, it doesn't matter. Whenever I hear those words, all enthusiasm I might have had for the game evaporates like a snowball in hell. It's just gone. I've been known to say things like "I'd rather add an hour to a TF than stealth even a single mission," and I meant that.

Games produce no real or virtual goods. At the end of the day, we play games because we want to do so, and we play games with no real reward at the end. We play them for fun. As such, we have to enjoy what we are doing while we play them, lest we miss the point. As such, I never really care that I'm going to be "paid" in Oranbegan gold, I don't care that I'll be given the unexpectedly enchanted family heirloom, I don't care that I'll be given the Statesman's ridiculous mask. Because none of that really matters. What I care about is taking on a task that's fun to do. What I care about, personally, is finding more guys to beat up in ever cooler ways.

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Slightly off-topic: Whenever I used to play D&D style computer RPGs, especially things like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, or even more futuristc RPGs like Fallout and Fallout 2, and even in-betweens like Arcanum, I very rarely cared about what the quest-giver NPCs were offering, and for a simple reason. I knew that the treasures I would find in that dungeon I was being sent to clear out, and the loot I would get off the monsters, to say nothing of the experience, would far outweigh any reward the NPC was offering, when they weren't offering plot coupons. It made it very easy, if a bit hypocritical, to refuse rewards out of the goodness of my heart. "No, thank you, old woman. I cannot take your last 100 gold pieces with which you would have bought food for your family. I'm a good person. ... And I also snagged 1000 gold pieces from a chest and this Infinity +1 sword which will sell for 10 000. Which I will most certainly not share with you. Be well!"

In essence, I rarely need the game to pretend to reward me for my adventures, when it is said adventures that I came for in the first place. ESPECIALLY when said adventures are badly designed because it's easier and cheaper to develop rewards than it is to develop content.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.