Wow, that was a rough day. The reason for me doing a single post after such a long delay is that I played for 14 hours out of the last 24. I had been procrastinating for 3 or 4 days and I knew that if I waited even one more, I'd have exceeded my target goal of a 6-day average per game. Petty and weird, I know, but I'm on a quest here, and I'm taking it very seriously.
Nonetheless, playing the bulk of the game in a single day was probably a mistake. It's not so much that the game was bad or unfun, but rather that I had to force myself to be interested. And that is surprisingly fatiguing, mentally.
I'm not sure why it should be, though. What I did was sit on the couch, cue up some of my favorite shows on Hulu, and play a series of Free Build maps while binge-watching Cutthroat Kitchen and Bob's Burgers. It doesn't make sense that something I could easily do without effort - watch television - should suddenly become an exhausting ordeal just because I happened to be playing an adequate, but not especially compelling castle building video game at the same time.
Part of it could be my divided attention. I never did like splitting my focus between multiple tasks at once. Except I don't think that can be it, because Free Build mode barely required my attention at all. Oh, you definitely have to make certain strategic decisions that will contribute to the growth of your settlement, but unless you find yourself in a spiraling food deficit, there's basically no way you can go wrong. You could just walk away from the PC and things would continue along their current trends indefinitely.
The most likely explanation is that I was playing the game like a city-builder, and it's simply not well optimized for that. So there was never anything particularly bad, but over time, a lot of little frustrations built up. Like the fact that you cannot build anything if one of your people would be underneath it - meaning that in order to expand your infrastructure in a heavily-trafficked area, you've got to hover your cursor over the location and hope that it clears up for the split second you need to click the button. Or the fact that you can't directly control your lumberjacks, which means clearing the land for expansion relies more or less entirely on luck.
Still, I liked the feeling of getting a large settlement up and running. I imagine that once upon a time, having all those hundreds of characters moving back and forth on their regular errands would have crashed my computer, but that's the advantage of playing a game 16 years after it was released. I enjoyed watching my people scurry back and forth, even if their activities were largely pointless. In the end, I don't regret marathoning the bulk of the game in a single day, because I was able to meet my arbitrary, self-imposed benchmark . . .
And isn't that what this blog is all about?
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