My Gaming Year in Review

I started off this year where I had been for the past 4 years: in World of Warcraft. My guild was close to finally killing Illidan Stormrage and moving on to Sunwell Plateau. In between hardcore raiding and mats farming, I was leveling up the 7th or 8th of my 9 level 70's. After killing Illidan and putting Black Temple on farm status, I started to feel an ennui which even tackling the new challenges of Sunwell Plateau couldn't dispel. Around May and after finally leveling the last of my level 70's, I bid my guild goodbye to seek greener gaming pastures elsewhere.

The first stop was Age of Conan, based on the positive experiences I had during the Open Beta. Unfortunately, the experience I had during Open Beta which had a level cap of 20 proved to be the shining moment for this MMO. You know that standard warning for online games where they say: Game Experience May Change During Online Play? That's exactly what happened after level 20 in AoC. It soon became clear that the title was rushed out into production before important MMO mainstays like content and polish were applied. I think I lasted until level 63 before I stopped logging on which took about a month or so.

While I was waiting on Funcom to fix their game, I downloaded the trial for Eve Online. When I found out I was having more fun with the free trial than my subscription to AoC, I knew it was time for a change. In the second week of my 21-day Steam trial, I applied for and was accepted to Eve University. This was around June and Eve consumed my playing time as I strove to learn everything I could about this complex MMO. Started reading and following the various Eve blogs which inspired me to try my hand at this here blogging thing.

Around August, intrigued by the reports of various gaming blogs of the unique features of the upcoming game, Warhammer Online, I decided to pre-order the game which allowed me access to the Open Beta. Before this, I thought I might play this title but wait until a few months had passed in order not to repeat my AoC experience. At literally the last moment, I decided to apply for Casualties of WAR and they were foolish enough to accept my application.

Events after that have been covered already on this blog so I won't go into them again. I do want to mention that I've trialed some more games recently that were on my to-do list. Among them were Vanguard, Everquest II, Lord of the Rings Online, and even Tabula Rasa. Sadly, the title that I was most impressed with turns out to be Tabula Rasa which will unplug for good in a few months. I don't think I can ever get over the art direction in Vanguard and EQII enough to actually enjoy the gameplay offered. In my younger years, I would've jumped at the chance to live in Tolkien's world but now I just yearn for a good game to play and I don't think Middle Earth can really provide that for me. But we'll see as I still have some time left in the free trial.

I can't wait to see what the next year holds for the future of WAR and other MMORPG's.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

I really wanted Age of Conan to be the MMORPG to suck me into Robert E. Howard's pulp fiction world and let me happily spend the next few years in it. I downloaded all the dev videos and was stoked about the plans they had for PVE raiding and PVP mass sieges involving war engines and keeps. Meanwhile, I blithely dismissed news of Warhammer Online as that WoW lookalike that would likely be released sometime in the next decade. I had played WoW already; I didn't want to play it any more. I wanted grit and, yes, I wanted boobies.

It's funny but as I'm having way too much fun in WAR today, I can't help but think that all the activities I imagined I would be engaging in AoC I have actually done already in WAR minus the epic boss raids. And I didn't have to wait until they got around to putting it in or even fixing it in the first place. The stuff just works and it works rather well. Stuff we take for granted in WAR like an auction house, crafting, siege engines, a PVP ranking system and rewards, even stats that make sense. It's been in WAR since the beginning and it's worked as advertised. Granted, some polish can sure be applied but, regardless, something is always better than nothing.

You can't always get what you want. But, if you try sometimes, you get what you need.*

*with apologies to The Rolling Stones

In the Beginning...

Yeah, you could say I’ve played World of Warcraft.

In May of this year, I decided to take an extended break from this game. It was turning into something I really wasn’t enjoying much any more. As you can probably tell from that picture, this had more to do with me and my voracious gaming appetite and not really an indictment against the game itself.

I thought I’d found my next MMO to play in Age of Conan. Trying out the Open Beta and then playing it in Retail for a while, it seemed like a MMO that could hold my long-term interest like WoW had. It had enough similarities with my previous game as well as enough edgy differences to set itself apart. But then, bugs and lack of content put a damper on my play. I found myself logging in less and less waiting for the promised bug fixes and additional content.

I don’t know where I got the idea, probably from the Steam icon on my desktop, but I decided to give Eve Online a trial run.

You have to understand; I’ve been gaming for quite a long time and am old enough to have played and overplayed Elite on my Commodore 64. I still can hear the docking song playing in my mind as if it was just yesterday (Blue Danube Waltz by Strauss). So a MMORPG that was said to have been directly inspired by Elite by its creators sure sounded right up my alley.

I was lucky enough to have found a character creation video on YouTube which claimed to give you the best options for a starting character. Otherwise, I confess I would’ve ended up deleting the character and starting over again once I learned enough about the game to make the correct decisions. The fabled steep learning curve began right at the door and, unlike other games, the decisions you made at the onset could come back to bite you if you made the wrong ones.

Doing the tutorials, I had a strong déjà vu feeling. Either this game was really just like Elite or I had trialed it before and had forgotten all about it. Probably the latter and it could explain why my WoW Paladin’s name was already taken when I tried to use it for Eve.

So this blog will chronicle my journey from Eve Online noobdom, among other things. Hope you all enjoy it as much as I do reading all the other Eve blogs out there.