Backlog Barrage
I've been having a (mostly) lovely day playing No Man's Sky NEXT update (posts forthcoming) but after about the 8th or 9th game crash I decided to take a break from my perilous journey to the galactic core and let my head clear of the dizzying amount of crafting formula I had acquired all day to address something.
My backlog, and the fact that I need a break, or a way out, from Destiny 2.
I've decided that Destiny 2's next expansion - Forsaken - is going to be my last for a while. I'm settling for the plain $40 version of the expansion instead of springing for the one with all the bells and whistles - the season pass and all of Cayde's goodies - just doesn't really do anything for me. It's just going to be filler material until Bungie has time to roll out the next story based expansion and I'm taking this as the sign I've been looking for to get out of Destiny 2 and chip away at my backlog. This offering from Bungie combined with the fact that nearly a year later I haven't been able to get a single group together to do Leviathan or either of its Lairs (or is it Layers? at this point I don't think it really matters) even though we're now overpowered and can kill just about anything in there with ease (at least I can when I decide to go in solo to look around and admire the view.) Matty recently suggested I use the Destiny 2 LFG server on Discord, but that idea fills me with as much hope as Voldemort's administration over Hogwarts and enough bile to fill my toilet. After my LFG experiences with the100.io I think I might be better off just sitting it out and chalking this up to a loss.
The drama with my clan and their lack of interest to do anything beyond a few weekly milestones has all but destroyed any interest I have in the game. It just feels like an obligation. At least Matty's managed to get a couple of raid clears with Claire and her group, so now he understands my interest in this part of the content. So there's that at least. Once I'm done with what Forsaken has to offer, that's that. I'm tired of tirelessly (and thanklessly) logging in week after week and grinding my time away to get my share of clan XP completed for the week, only to see that no one else is putting in the work. So I'm going to put my time to better use, and that's to start working on the ridiculous backlog I've created.
I've already taken a few steps toward finishing what I've got. Back in 2010-2011, I started thinking about how I was going to finish all these games, so I did a cursory Google search and came across a couple articles:
How To Beat 400 Games In 4.5 Years
and
How to Finally Beat the Unfinished Games In Your Never-Ending Backlog
Both of those articles led me to a couple sites that would be the tools that I'll need for this mad man's quest. The first site, The Backloggery, I joined back in 2011 and have, for the most part, consistently used it throughout the years to track my collection (both physical and digital) of games and completions/triumphs. I need to get out of my head a little bit though, when it comes to inputting certain games into my backlog. Like, for example, any fighting game or a score chase game. In the case of the fighting game, you can technically pick one person from the roster and complete the story portion of the game to get to the end credits screen and consider it beaten, but can you call it completed? Or can you call it completed once you've beaten the game with every character and unlocked all the unlockables? Same with score chase games like Geometry Wars or Pac-Man Championship Edition. You never really beat it since you're continuously trying to get a higher and higher score, so do you consider it complete when you have all the achievements/trophies or do you mark it as 'null' since it never ends? These are the silly things that keep me awake at night. It wasn't until Matty came along that I really started to pay attention to what I'm playing and how many games I actually finish in a year, thanks to him opening me up to the fact that there are forum threads where people discuss and compare what they've played and finished in a year's time. I love him and all, but this is a bit stressful to try to figure out, haha (love you sweet pea ♥).
The second site, HowLongToBeat, I didn't think too much about until recent idiotic schedule changes at work have left me wondering when I'll have time to do anything outside that miserable cesspool. HowLongToBeat gives players a rough estimate (based on user data) of how long it's going to take to either finish the "main quest" so to speak or to flat out 100% complete the game. Considering there are some meaty games in my backlog, I decided a few weeks ago that now is the time to put the site and its data to use.
So the other day I came up with this:
The key
The first 2 columns, of course, will let me show if a game is simply beaten (as in the main story quest, main objective, all the levels have been cleared, etc). After that I decided to sort of color code the game titles by ecosystem: blue for PlayStation games, red for Nintendo games and green for Xbox games. After No Man's Sky decided to crash on me earlier, I figured I might as well get started. I grabbed the first sheet and, since its the ecosystem I have the fewest games on, started writing down all my Xbox games.
Obviously I forgot to add a column for 100% completion
Writing it out like that makes me feel a lot more confident about actually going through with this. Looking at it like this makes it feel a lot more digestible than the format of my lists on The Backloggery. Although, there was one entry on the list that I found a little funny:
I find it a bit hard to swallow that it only takes 46 hours to simply beat all the games in The Master Chief Collection. That feels a bit low to me. And I'm guessing the 114 hours in Minecraft is starting Survival Mode and going all the way through until you defeat the dragon at The End? I will probably just mark this as a 'null' in my backlog since it doesn't really end. And I have no idea why PUBG has 135 hours, that game doesn't end either!
The only other snafu I ran into while inputting all these into my HowLongToBeat list was Fallout 3:
I'm not sure why we need to separate all the DLC out like that, and, I hope when I get around to inputting PlayStation and Nintendo games that I don't run into this again because that's just a bit too time consuming. I suppose I understand why it's like that since these are all major story based additions. I'm not really sure how I'm going to handle DLC for games now that I think about it. I guess I'll figure it out on a case by case basis. Anyway, looking at just the Xbox games in my backlog, HowLongToBeat claims I'm looking at 51 days of playtime. That's not as bad as I was expecting, but I think it's somehow wrong. My idea of having "finished" a game is seeing an end credit screen similar to the people's requirements from Resetera/NeoGAF threads, so some of these games - specifically the ones that are pure score chase games or that are MMO like - are gonna be disqualified from my list so I might be looking at less time than is listed on HowLongToBeat. I'm also happy that HowLongToBeat has an integrated timer so I don't have to depend on the app on my phone unless I'm out and about with a portable of some kind.
All in all I'm feeling pretty optimistic about this project, and with any luck I'll be able to report that I'm making significant progress.