Never Have I Ever

I've been playing Neverwinter the last 4-5 days ever since I hit some serious gaming withdrawal waiting on building a new desktop and discovered it (barely) runs on my shitty old laptop.  But this morning I had a very strange experience this morning where all the tiny nitpick things formed a perfect storm of FUCK THIS to where I might just stop while I'm ahead.

Neverwinter is a very nice game in terms of it's conventional MMO-ness and game mechanics; it's sort of halfway between the Guild Wars 2 fuck-the-trinity thing and...I guess Tera is the most relevant example of the other half--itself halfway between traditional MMO and aren't-we-cool-we-don't-have-tab-targetting actioney gameplay.  The class structure is fine if extremely extremely stereotypical.

It's also a Cryptic game.  A post-Star Trek Online Cryptic game, which very much harps on the spirit of a lot of the conventions and features of that game but dialed up to 11 on the tedious scale.  The game is constantly CONSTANTLY beating you over the head trying to get you to buy zen.  If you want to do ANYTHING cool you gotta have zen to buy shit.  It kind of seems (at least so far) that you either need to shell out or commit to the ridiculous grind of cobbling together astral diamonds (ie dilithium) to exchange.  I didn't bother with it in STO but it seems like it's even worse in Neverwinter.

Crafting resembles the crew stuff from STO and has a nice little web app for managing it without having to log in, and the companion minigame is really cool but you need to shell out zen (or already have a bunch of gold) to get more companions.

I mentioned it ran on my laptop, but it does so if everything is set to minimum and the "resolution scaling" also turned all the way down, which seems to just aggressively blur everything.  Which is fine; playing it on a tiny screen all blurry is uncomfortable but not unmanageable.  But the performance like this is pretty inconsistent.  In outside zones where there's not a lot around it runs fine, but in town it drops frames pretty hard...most of the time.  Sometimes it just works fine for some reason.  Similar problem with the dungeons: sometimes I can run 'em just fine, sometimes it runs so poor as to be nearly unplayable.

So this morning I was running the second dungeon for the second time (after I did it once I discovered I had a daily to do it, so I went to do it again) and the second dungeon is long and really really boring.

And my performance was shitting itself.

And I realized I was fed up with all the zen shenanigans.

And I realized I was sick of trying to play it as a blurry mess.

And I realized I had to listen to podcasts to make the boring questlines go by the night before.

And I realized I wasn't into it enough to look forward to leveling up another 40 times.

And...

So it's weird; I've "aggressively" stopped playing games before but never one I was, for the most part, otherwise enjoying.  I might have to come back to it sometime later but fuck all this zen bullshit.