The second week of lockdown has been an interesting one and not all of it has been good. In the previous post, I mentioned how many players have returned to their old gaming habits with all the free time now available to them but that had some unexpected repercussions on the gaming scene, especially with regard to the online games. But it isn’t all doom and gloom as it has been a lot of fun.
Overloaded Servers
A big issue with this new heavy load of players jumping online is that some services have been overloaded. Xbox Live has had issues recently with party chats not working, outages and disconnects, while Fortnite has seemingly started to lag.
Red Dead Online has left me with more disconnects than usual and it feels like the game is suffering from some de-synch issues which I had never experienced before. I’ve seen gamers from all over complain about slow online services or services just not working. It kind of makes sense as everything is pretty overpopulated right now. Unfortunately, this is just one of those things we are going to have to deal with.
It’s a Trap
This is a bit of a personal issue but lately, it’s been hard to put the controller down. While I am unable to go out and walk around, I am able to explore the frontier in Red Dead Online or the nuclear wastelands of Fallout 76 with my friends, which has been a nice substitute for an actual social life.
This is making it a little harder to stop playing. A decent night’s sleep has gone out of the window and I’m finding myself not wanting to do anything else but play video games. I had to force myself to sit down and write this article which isn’t a good thing, I’d admit. It’s just these virtual worlds take us out of the confinement of our homes for a moment and right now that is something a lot of people are in need of.
It’s not so much the need to play video games but more of a need to go out and be ‘free’ or at least have an illusion of being free to run around outside, which brings me to my next point.
The Perfect Illusion
Video games are proving how incredible they truly are. In such dire times, players are still connected with each other, making new friends and hanging out with old ones. From poker nights in Red Dead Redemption to sulking around in Fortnite, we are interacting with each other and our current predicaments tend to fade away into the background while we game.
How’s your lockdown treating you? Do any of these points resonate with you?
