Swearing Off Icarus Solo Play

 My Steam profile says I've put in 128 hours on Icarus this past year, and the last 10 of that was done completely solo over this last weekend . . . and I'm swearing it off. I never want to play Icarus solo ever again.

Many wolves, boars, and bears died to collect this data

The problem here is that up until a couple weeks ago, I was just jumping in to my buddies' games (one Lessah Ismorah and Mythery). I was happy with this: I was leveling, and I felt like we were all progressing along nicely, but then I found out that because I hadn't done a solo mission or two right up front, my progress in my friends' games was all for naught. None of what we had done was counting for my actual mission progression. 

The first half of the Olympus Mission line in Icarus

So, to explain, there are two mission progression paths in Icarus: Olympus and Styx. We've been playing missions in the Olympus quest line. You land on the planet, you fulfil the objective, and you blast off. Each time you start over, building everything from scratch . . . but with the money you earn, you can craft equipment to take down with you on subsequent missions.

When I discovered that all my hard work wasn't counting for anything on my mission progression, I felt a little . . . angry? Like I had fully been putting in a lot of time on these missions, but not getting any credit . . . simply because I didn't do the first mission on my own. I'm sorry, but that's kind of a bad game design call. 

I appreciate that I can just jump into my friends' games from day one, but there was no warning and no compensation. What it SHOULD have done was either warn me that I needed to do those intro missions or instead retroactively marked those missions I've completed with my friends as complete after I completed the first mission. It could have just caught up and counted all those previous missions as done. Yuck.

Since we decided that we wouldn't be playing much around the holidays as a group, Lessah put it out there that maybe I could use the time to catch up my progression line. That sounded fair, and I've already done most of these missions with them, so it should be a breeze, right?! It wasn't bad too be honest . . . right up until the grindfest known as Agriculture Supply Stockpile.

Beware the 15 day tasks . . . just don't do them solo

Now, Icarus always gives you way more time than you need to get a mission done. A ridiculous amount of time in fact, and because of that I had no qualms taking on a 15 real-time day mission. This was another that I had done with Lessah and Mythery in the past, and as I remembered it, it's just a bunch of running around collecting pumpkins and carrots and stuff . . . no big deal.

Blasting off a billion supplies into space . . .

I got it done, mind you, but I had completely forgotten about collecting and cooking 1000 meats in addition to running around collecting pumpkins and carrots and stuff. By the end of the day yesterday, I was so done with that mission . . . what an incredibly boring grind fest.

And with that, I'm done soloing in this game. I never want to do it again. There are plenty of other games where I don't mind soloing around, but Icarus just isn't captivating enough for me (at least at this point) without my buddies there to talk to. We each kind of excel at doing one or two things, and we do our jobs well. It's fun to play as a group! Solo . . . no thanks. I've got plenty of other games I can play to keep me happy.

Happy Dueling!