Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Goodbye, ZeldaEurope!

I've been writing this blog now since 2008 and I will probably continue to do so, as long as I'm alive and interested in Zelda. Now, for the past four years I've also been writing news, guides and reviews for ZeldaEurope.de, a German Zelda website and community. And this ends now.

There are multiple reasons for this decision. ZeldaEurope was never my site, but it certainly had become my responsibility over the past few years, because I was alone with my tasks for the most part, managing the whole site on my own. I was never happy with the situation and it was a hobby that went wrong, because everything Zelda turned into obligations. I couldn't fully enjoy news about Zelda anymore, because news about Zelda resulted in work. Voluntary work, but work nonetheless. And with the upcoming Legend of Zelda game for Wii U I want to be able to enjoy everything as a normal fan again, without the journalistic treadmills in my back, which I have experienced ever since Skyward Sword.


What does this mean for Hyrule Blog?

It certainly won't be a bad thing, since this blog becomes now my focus for anything Zelda. However, it's not like this blog heavily suffered from my work on ZeldaEurope. The way I handled it was doing two quite separate things on each site. ZeldaEurope is were I processed new information and this blog is where I put my personal experiences, thoughts, opinions and predictions. This worked out quite well for the most part and my activity on ZeldaEurope wasn't really taking that much from Hyrule Blog. The only big exception might be the reviews, which basically moved from this blog (the last one was for Skyward Sword in early 2012) to ZeldaEurope. I hate redundancy, so I usually avoided writing the same thing on both sites just in different languages.

Reviews may or may not come back. I certainly want to write one for Hyrule Warriors: Legends, but with new Zelda games I basically reviewed them here during my daily game diaries, where I then put all those thoughts together in one post for my German review on ZeldaEurope. I was also thinking about doing a feature called "2nd Reviews" here on Hyrule Blog. Like with a 2nd Quest, I would go through the game again and write a new review, where my opinion might have changed over time or due to some DLC updates.

I'll see about that, but one thing is for sure: no obligations. Everything I write on this blog will be here, because I wanted to write it and not because I felt obliged to. I won't start making news posts here - you got sites like ZeldaInformer for this. But I might share thoughts about news more regularly now, since I won't "process" them anymore via ZeldaEurope.

In any case this feels like the right decision. This blog won't ever be as popular as ZeldaEurope and Nintendo's PR agencies probably won't be knocking on my door here, but that's okay, because this is my own site and here I'm free to write what I want to say. I'm still happy about everyone, who's following this blog, and you can be looking forward to more.

4 comments:

Lankelink said...

Glad to read this. It's a pity when a hobby becomes duty, you start to enjoy it a bit less...

What I really like about this blog is that I really enjoy reading about your personal experience, your opinions and wishes about the saga. You even give me the "courage" to try Zelda II and beat it! So just continue loving the saga and posting your experiences when you feel like it.

Marandahir said...

I love reading the thoughts you want to share about the games, so I'm glad you're refocusing to make it all about what you want to do rather than obligations. Work is work and fun is fun, and if work can be fun, that's good, but fun should never have to be work!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your future inputs to the Zelda community.

Theystolehispride said...

When a hobby is no longer enjoyable & you feel obligated to carry on regardless then it's time to revise priorities.

I enjoy this blog though so i hope you carry on with it.

All the best!

TourianTourist said...

Thanks for the support, guys!