Well a certain other thread made me sad so here is a happy thread. What are your hobbies? What is something that interests you? Do you have a job that is your hobby or is it something in your off time? Tell us why you like it!
I guess I have two hobbies. First is game design. I wish to make games, largely from the design angle. How systems work, what makes a game fun, how stats and combat or puzzles work, even things like UI functionality and how it needs to differ per system (console vs PC for example). Chronic anxiety makes it hard to get going but if I could get a dream job it would be designing games. I particularly like concepts like situational awareness. The suppression room in BWL (vanilla WoW) I found intense but also fun, it required constant attention to what was going on. As xpacs came the raids shifted away from this and more to mod awareness and strat awareness, rather than situation awareness. Fights that required mass dispelling or debuffs that required mods to detect are especially bad (but were also in vanilla WoW). I really liked the UI in Crysis (PC). It was really fluid and fast to change suit function. Skyrim's UI is also amazing to navigate, if a little cumbersome to use (on PC).
I also think appealing to fans is far better than fleecing them. Bethesda, Valve, Firaxis are all developers that interact with fans and so have amazing communities. Even Path of Exile has an amazing (if small) community. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, etc either look down on or are even openly hostile to their consumers. Blizzard used to be good, they used to communicate to their fans. Now they seem to always have this tone of talking down to them. Ubisoft has openly called PC gamers pirates lol. Also I will never forgive EA for killing Westwood Studios
Another area I like is the subtle things. Sound and environment. Skyrim is an amazing game but it feels "small". Cities are barely a handful of families. MMO's tend to be really static too. I'd like to make an MMO that had seasonal transitions, like orange leaves in autumn, snow and bare trees in winter, grass and flowers in spring, that sort of thing. MMO's also tend to be shy about changing existing content. I mean if a raid is conquering a zone, perhaps at some time that zone might actually be conquered? MMO's seem deathly afraid of adding limited duration events, but they will casually make old content so obsolete it may as well be gone lol. I think in terms of gameplay Runescape is amazing, even if it gets lots of shit heaped on it. The quests are actually quests!
Might post about my other hobby later. It's
kendo!
