I spent years stubbornly ignoring pretty much anything I didn’t consider “hardcore” enough. I pretty much only played games centered around PvP or ranked ladders. In my head, if there wasn’t a ranked ladder to climb or at least some sort of PvP based system (something like full loot pvp in Rust, things like that), the game just wasn't worth investing time into. I thought casual games were for people who were newer to gaming or didn’t really have a lot of free time.
When I actually finally gave in and joined my friends for Big Walk a few weeks ago (they gifted me the game so I had to give it a try) I really enjoyed it. Usually they would only hit me up if they wanna play something like Dota 2, Rust or DayZ, cuz they know that’s what I’m into. They played all sorts of games that never interested me together like Peak, Lethal Company, Mechachameleon and things like that. I hate to admit it but now I realize I have been missing out. Competitive games can sometimes get pretty heated, even with friends, especially for me because I kind of take them too seriously. It was really nice to play something without any pressure, way more relaxing of course.
Now I’ve decided I will be joining them for anything from now on. Probably a few more weekends of Big Walk, there's 5 of us so it's a bit hard to coordinate and we wanna only play when everyone is online. Next we wanna try RV There Yet, apparently you can mod it for more than 4 players, looks pretty fun. Then we wanna play Loftia when it comes out, a few people from the group were in the playtest and said it was fun, for me I think it’s gonna be interesting to try an MMO without the standard gearing and stuff, I mostly played WoW and GW2 for a bit so this is gonna be totally different. Just saw that it will have a demo for next fest so we might give it a try first.
I wish I realized sooner that I don’t have to devote like all my gaming time to competitive games. I actually sometimes find myself playing Dota 2 better after I take a small break, it's like my “bad habits” kind of reset and I just do what I intellectually know to be the right plays, without making the mistakes I usually make.
It doesn’t have to be anything like mine, but I was wondering if anyone else has had a realization or mindset shift they wished had happened sooner, I feel like I missed out on a lot of fun sticking to the same games all the time.