You Ganked my Carebear!

I can’t stay silent about this any longer, I have to get this out of my system. It’s something that causes quite the rift in many people I know, and evokes very strong reactions just about anywhere the subject comes up. It’s pretty polarizing, and I hesitate to talk about it because I’m used to the responses that I hear, most of them disapproving and some of them extremely disapproving. So here goes…

Every now and again, I still want to play World of Warcraft.

I can’t help it! I love City of Heroes as an MMO, and I keep trying to find other MMOs based in other genres, and WoW is just the best fantasy-based one out there that I’ve seen. I’ve played betas of other games and I do try to stick with them, and most of them just keep looking like online Diablo II clones. I mean it could be argued that all games are basically “red bar/blue bar” these days, but WoW adds a very rich and beautiful visual component that makes it feel more fun. I’m playing the Mythos beta, I tried the Hellgate: London beta, I played the Lord of the Rings Online beta and out of all of them, I still keep thinking about WoW. About the only thing that keeps me from going back are my hatred for the economy and the standard internet playerbase. However some aspects of that have also made their way into City of Heroes which keep making me rethink my membership there. I’ve just been with it for so long that it feels like an old friend.

Some recent strips over at Ctrl+Alt+Del reminded me of the early days of fantasy MMOs, mmmm good ol’ Everquest. The main character can’t handle his MMOs and the story of how he behaved and got hooked on the game is funny, frightening and all too true to life. Sean and I both got it and we kept it under control, mainly due to being on opposite ends of the country, but we did play an awful lot, but we never skipped out on the rest of our lives to keep playing.

I wonder if it’s also that I miss having some element of fantasy gaming around. I tried playing with a tabletop group, but the sessions kept getting more and more crappy, with neither the GM or the players paying much attention to the plot. And I have my offline fantasy-based games, but after you’ve played and beat them, aside from Diablo II, they aren’t much fun anymore. I keep holding out hope for new games that I’m interested in, but they all seem to be war based, and considering the current state of the world, I don’t see how people would find that kind of game entertaining.

Ah well, even though I do still have some pre-paid game cards here, I’m not likely to head back in there again anytime soon because I’m not likely to have any friends willing to do so with me, and that’s what really makes these games fun for me. Not just meeting new people in the game, but going in with a group of friends that play together from time to time and sort of act as a social shield against the internet fuckwads that seem to exist in any online game. Still, I’ll hold onto my fond memories of role playing in the forests and cities, riding gryphons across zones, and traveling by ship through parts of the world, neither of those using cutscenes to do so and every area having more quests than you could shake a stick at and not all of them were fighting the same kind of villain each and every time. I know it has its bad points, but WoW is a fun game. Like many things, it’s fun if you make it fun. If you go into with the attitude it’s going to suck, it probably is… for you.