A few days ago, I spoke with my brother about persistent-world games. Now, I'm not much of a gamer, myself - I play mostly single-player strategy games and turn-based multiplayer strategy games - but he does play some more MMO and RPG experiences. He plays LoL and BG3, as well as a few other games. As such, while I don't trust his judgement more than I would trust the judgement of a piece of rubble - he is my younger brother, after all - I do believe that he has more insight into this issue than I do.
I remember playing Travian, as a youngin. I didn't play it a lot because I was young and dumb, but I vividly remember adoring the concept. Eventually, I transitioned to CoC, but I ended up dropping it too. Now, reading Shadow Slave, I'm reminded of why I liked them so much. The reason is that I love persistent-worlds. I think the idea of a game wherein players conquer pieces of territory and then battle each other on a shared world is really cool and interesting.
Naturally, RPGs - specifically, MMORPGs - are a great way to get at this. You're a king or the leader of a burgeoning village; you're a knight or a renowned warrior settling the wylds; and such.
My little brother, however, thought that persistent-world games simply don't work, if we're playing from the perspective of a single player, though. A town, sure, since you are your own resources, in a way, but as a player it doesn't work. He gave the example of Eve Online, where apparently gameplay is damn near impossible alone, because the world is controlled by a few large guilds.
Frankly, I don't know how true this is.
The point of what I'm saying is that I think it'd be cool to have a game that functions like SAO or SS work. Players as individuals, a wild world to conquer... I don't know. Maybe that's not doable.
Regardless, I probably wouldn't play it.
Now, concept fics. My little brother also spoke about how sometimes fics will be really short, just concepts, pretty much. A hint at what a great idea could be, but never fleshing it out to it's full potential. That's cool, I think. It makes me feel a little better about my own sporadic and vastly unfinished ventures into fiction writing.
I'm writing this after lunch. Lunch was pretty bad, actually... I didn't really enjoy it at all, but it was filling, at least. Maybe the extremely salty thing my grandma made isn't salvageable, after all... Tomorrow, I shall reevaluate the situation.
It's hot today, but not as hot as I'd feared. Still not wearing jeans.
I've been thinking more and more each day about improving my life. I've been calling it skillmaxxing. I mean, there's just so much to learn and so much to improve on! There's so many things I should already know, so many things I want to know, so much I want to have done and so much more that I want to do, and to be able to do. It feels a bit daunting, but it's a long-term project. I wonder how much more I'll know in 5 years time.