Choose My Adventure: Don’t call it a comeback

Hello, dear readers. Would you like to tell me what to do for a while?

Choose My Adventure has been absent from the site for a little while due to a combination of factors, but it’s time to get this ball rolling again, and that means I’m in the hot seat once again. Which is pretty familiar, really, since I’ve been doing the feature on and off since the days of That-Site-We-Only-Reference-Obliquely (or “the before times,” if you prefer). It’s a chance to break out of ruts, try new things, and provide a snapshot of a running game in four weeks of playtime. And it’s all on you.

Well, it’s partly on you. Here, come along with me, I’ll explain the premise and then we’ll start in on our first round of making decisions to shape everything moving forward. That’ll be fun, won’t it? I sincerely hope so.

The premise

First and foremost, for those of you not familiar with how this column works (and it has been MIA for a while), it’s like this. At the end of every column, you get a poll, starting with a poll to determine my next gaming destination. Then, you vote on all sorts of entertaining twists and turns, like “should I focus on PvE or PvP” or “should I try some of the crafting” or “is this really the best time to kick sand at the local rulers and ask them what they plan to do about it.” After four weeks, the tour bus starts up again, and we move on to the next destination, which is again determined by a vote.

The pattern, then, is pretty transparent. Everyone has his or her own style, though, and so I wanted to lay out a few of my own rules that at least make the game somewhat more interesting, definitely for me and hopefully for you as well.

No games I’m currently playing. This strikes me as just plain good sense. You should not be voting on whether or not you want me to jump into Final Fantasy XIV for a month; an evaluation of the game from me, even on a new server, is kind of irrelevant. It’s difficult to find games I haven’t played in some capacity, but I can at least not be playing something I know forward and back.

Subscriptions are bought when the option exists. Obviously, not every game has a subscription option, but when there is one, I think it’s part of the experience to buy one for the month I’m playing. While there’s endless amounts of discussion to be milked from whether or not you can play games like Star Wars: The Old Republic or EVE Online without a subscription, the point of this is to see the game as it’s “meant” to be played. Thus, if I can subscribe, I subscribe.

Mostly meaningful choices. I hear there are those of you out there who are big fans of The Secret World, and I am on board with you. However, we’re going to be limiting these polls to stuff that’s… well, more immediately impactful. Leaving aside the fact that MJ already covers the heck out of TSW, that game hasn’t exactly had a big update this year, so I’d be reviewing a bunch of stuff that’s already there.

I like joke polls, and sometimes they matter. No week will feature only joke polls, but I do enjoy them, and sometimes they’re going to have a subtle effect somewhere along the line. Is that all right with everyone?

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All right. Enough preamble, let’s get on with choices.

This round’s choices

We’re keeping our choices this time around to a nice round number. No, not zero. Let’s go over our options.

Black Desert Online is a game that I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in before it launched. Heck, there are still parts about it that disappoint me, like the whole “class limited by gender” thing. That irks me on a personal level for a variety of reasons. At the same time, it’s also a game that managed to attract a lot of players whom I generally see as having pretty good taste, and it falls into a handy category of being a high-profile rlease that’s not really in my usual wheelhouse.

It’s also been doing quite a lot this year, to boot, catching up with the game’s Korean version with a sequence of steady updates. What’s it like? Can it hold up to all the noise surrounding it? Is it actually really cool despite design choices I’m not fond of? Perhaps I’ll find out.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll find out about The Elder Scrolls Online. The franchise as a whole has never grabbed my interest for various reasons, and my beta experience with the game left me pretty cold. But that was back before it launched, and I think pretty much everyone who’s played the game since then will happily tell me that it’s improved significantly since launch. For example, there was that whole “One Tamriel” update that did, you know, rewrite the whole structure of the game.

I’m not happy about the game splitting off its console versions into an entirely separate incarnation, but seeing as how I was always going to be playing the game on PC, that’s an academic objection anyhow. What happens if I give the game another closer look? I don’t know, but I might find out.

Or, last but not least, I might take a look at Riders of Icarus. This game sort of came out of nowhere, at least from my perspective, and I’ve been surprised at how satisfied people seem to be with it. The quality of imported free-to-play games seems to be going up, and RoI has a surprising footprint for something I hadn’t really given much consideration before it launched.

Unlike the other titles, this title provokes no negative critiques upfront; however, that’s partly because I just don’t know enough about the game. For all I know you have to swear that you dislike lizards and cats when you run the installer. That’d be a pretty big problem.

All three of these games are titles that are worth exploring. But only one of them will be my destination over the next several weeks. So tell me, dear readers: Which of these games will I be investigating for the next several weeks? Get your votes in before the poll closes on Saturday (at 2 p.m. EST, specifically), and strap in for an adventure.

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Feel free to leave your feedback or thoughts in the comments, too. Why wait until next week to start the adventure, right?

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Eliot each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures — and you get to decide his fate. Especially if that fate involves lizards and cats.