Playing Keep-Away with My Time

It's coming.

In two days the Xbox One will release. I've been going through periods of excitement and apathy. On one hand, Xbox 360 has hit the ceiling on what it's going to accomplish. At the same time, we don't really know what the X1 will give us outside of prettier games, which ranks pretty low in what I want in a game.

Still, the closeness of the event has me on the verge of giddiness. There will be a healthy stream of game releases to keep me occupied (assuming nothing gets delayed, which never happens anyway!), so I look forward to being done with those dry months where there's nothing good coming out between July and October. The games releasing over the next year will be amazing, and that's saying nothing of the indie games that will release, as well as every other improvement being made to the Xbox interface. Also, Titanfall.

Non-digital gaming also wants my free time. Between my upcoming commissions (stay tuned for an awesome one!), trying to expand our Warmachine group, and my own painting/gaming time, I'm pretty strapped. An intelligent man would look at this and say "I have a lot going on. I shouldn't take on anything else that divides my free time." I say differently.

Last night I was giving my cousin-in-law grief because he just received his second invitation to the beta for Elder Scrolls Online (think Skyrim meets WoW). Between reminiscing about Skyrim and gawking at model conversions I got a notification that I get to take part in the ESO beta. Woohoo!

Or maybe not woohoo. I love MMOs, but the amount of my time wasted travelling between areas drives me nuts. I realize it keeps players from bolting to the end game and running out of things to do, but my time is precious and my more recent trip in to World of Warcraft helped me take a firm stance on games that waste my time with tedium. So ESO, a game that could be amazing or catastrophic, leaves me at an impasse.

On one hand I really want to see what the game is all about, especially since I could "try before I buy." But I simply don't have the free time to put 5-10 hours in to it to really test it out, which means something else will have to give. The only things I can sacrifice is personal painting time, time spent with the Xbox, and sleep. Being a true gamer, sleep is the obvious frontrunner for getting the axe, but don't tell my wife because I hardly get a good night's sleep as it is!

Of course the worst part is that the beta starts Friday, the same day that the Xbox releases! I also have a commission coming up that has me really excited, so I need to finish up my current commissions and then play CoD Ghosts as much as I can before I get that in the mail. I so badly want to dedicate time to the beta, but I know that as soon as I waste 20 minutes running to a town I'm going to flip my computer desk and grab my Xbox controller while the desk is still in midair. I just don't know if it's worth the risk, and the NDA put on the previous beta means that information is pretty scarce. Yet if it's anything like Skyrim, I'll want to get lost wandering around the beautiful environments.

What to do, what to do...


See you tomorrow!

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