Musings

Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, as a concept, fascinated me ever since the age old, venerable Ultima Online (though I never played it myself); I only watched a friend playing it for a lil’ bit. Now, the first MMOG I played was, I think, Anarchy Online. I can’t remember for the life of me what I played in it, but I do remember that it, in hindsight, was grindy and not very newbie-friendly at all, but liking it anyway, despite it not running very well on the underpowered computer I had then. I also remember why I picked it up: a random civilian service dude, in a random chat, mentioned that he liked it better than World of Warcraft, a game that’d already been released at that point (so, this was probably in the spring-summer of 2005).

So, enter the fall of 2005 and me entering the life of a computer engineering student (didn’t last) and hearing more and more about Blizzard’s game and how good it supposedly was. In the darkening days of I think what was November 2005, I marched into the Tilt game store in Sello, and bought it. And fell in love with it. I joined a couple of friends, at their urging, on the EU-Arathor server, on the Horde side, leveled my undead rogue to 60, and joined, after some fumblings-about in other guilds, the same guild the aforementioned friends were in, and started with my hardcore raiding days that would last into the next autumn. Massive fun was had, and massive flunking of courses was had as well (burnout din’t help). I fell out with the guild’s leadership over a trivial thing and got booted during a 3-week absence, and started faffing around in the game, doing whatnots and not much until the release of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

Good times were in there as well, after finding more nice people and nice content to play with but ultimately, I ended up quitting WoW for the first time in the summer of what was now 2007, when preparing for a long-distance move and activity in game waning off. So. Enter Guild Wars, that game with the pretty box art and good reviews I had bought a year earlier but not really getting into the first time ’round, became a lot more interesting with it’s no-monthly-fees style of business. And boy, did I get into that one. I powered on through the first campaign, Prophecies, speed-bought Factions and Nightfall and went through them as well, and found a very nice guild of fellow Finns whom I still call friends, despite GW being very much past its prime by now. I didn’t play much of the PVP in Guild Wars, even though it’s by and far the best PVP a MMORPG has seen, to date, but played the PVE bits, over and over on many characters, in both Normal and Hard modes. Eye of the North was fun, too, and began promising great things to come: Guild Wars 2 was announced pretty much then – unfortunately, news of it would not be forthcoming for another three years.

In 2008. Blizzard released the second expansion to WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, which I did not get into immediately, but only after some luring and moaning by good old friends Kinya and deadnyte. I was enjoying Warcraft again and time flew by, until, once again, the need to move from one town to another came in the second half of 2009, and put a halt on playing it again. I still played GW, on and off, but hadn’t much time or patience for MMOs in general.

Around that time, the free-to-play craze was starting to hit MMO developers and publishers, and I began to check out various games, most lacking in polish or content, but have managed to find some gems over the past two years: Allods Online, while getting off to a rocky start with egregious cash-shop pricing and badly designed death penalties, has formed into a pretty nice game. Turbine’s offerings, Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online have both gone free-to-play, and are both also quite nice. Forsaken World is also quite nice, and is definitely a step in the right direction by asian developers. I also tried out Trion Worlds’ new subscription MMO, Rift in its very polished beta stages, and while I liked it quite a lot, I’m not willing to shell out a monthly sub for a game I might not have interest in playing THAT much. In conclusion, I’m sort of bored with the genre now, but I do love the playing-with-friends aspect and huge worlds.

So, on the horizon for me, is Guild Wars 2. Hopefully next year. Hopefully not a huge flop.