I like dancing. Especially this kind of dancing:
Yes, indeed.
You can see it in higher quality here.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
MMORPG history, woes of late, and hope for the future
So I've been playing mmo's for 6-7 years. I consider it to be a staple part of my video gaming budget. I started with Everquest, which I played for probably just a month or two before quitting because I lost my corpse in the forest, and thus, all my stuff. I think I was just too young to realize what was going on. Then my friends and I got together and played Earth and Beyond. It was a space-based games with ships and stuff, played that for about 6 months before quitting for what we thought was going to be planetside. Turned out, another much better game was about to be released: Star Wars Galaxies.
The first year if SWG was pretty much the best game ever. There was no such thing as 'levels,' just 32 profession trees with which to spread your skillpoints around in. Huge, open planets, non-instanced housing, guild halls, player cities, mounts, vehicles, space, kickin' ass. For the first half of that, there were no jedi, and it was good. I think, and others do too, that the addition of jedis kind of ruined the open template system of leveling, by introducing a tree in which one dedicated all of his points and was more powerful. (If you're not familiar with the old swg system, it's kind of complicated, so I won't explain it here) So after that year, SOE came up with this 'brilliant' plan to revamp the combat system with the "Combat Upgrade." So, we quit the game before that happened, which turned out to be a good idea. We then sat idle for a few months before a monster was released: World of Warcraft.
WoW pretty much ate my last two years of high school. Blizzard made a quality game. Recently, though, it's pretty much out of hand and ridiculous. Not to mention it's the first like huge mainstream MMO; everyone has heard of WoW, and most people who don't play MMOs (and a lot who do) laugh at it. Anyway, enough about WoW, it's so lame and dumb.
So I've been spending the last year jumping from game to game, not finding a game I really enjoy. Pirates of the Burning Sea, Tabula Rasa, Eve, Age of Conan, and a return to SWG, all turned out flat. I feel like since the release of WoW, new mmo's just don't seem to live up to the wonder that SWG at launch had. But now, there's hope!
EA bought two other major companies which are creating MMO's. The first, which will be released this fall, is Warhammer Online. I've been following this for over a year (applied for beta last summer, still nothing). This game is separating itself from other recent releases in that it actually has unique gameplay elements such as public quests and a very extensive siege-based pvp system. I will definitely be playing this one, hopefully for a long time, but we'll see.
The second game, which was just announced at E3, is what I'm really looking forward to. There's been rumors floating around for a while about it, and it turns out they are true. Bioware, the creator of KOTOR, is making an old republic timeline Star Wars mmo!! This is great news. What I'm hoping, of course, is that they take what SOE failed with in SWG, and make an amazing star wars mmo that doesn't get dragged down by brainless Sony execs a year into its release. I also think that the old republic is a much more exciting and open-ended time than the galactic civil war of post-deathstar-destruction. Mainly: Mandolorians are still around! Win!
Long post is long. =D
The first year if SWG was pretty much the best game ever. There was no such thing as 'levels,' just 32 profession trees with which to spread your skillpoints around in. Huge, open planets, non-instanced housing, guild halls, player cities, mounts, vehicles, space, kickin' ass. For the first half of that, there were no jedi, and it was good. I think, and others do too, that the addition of jedis kind of ruined the open template system of leveling, by introducing a tree in which one dedicated all of his points and was more powerful. (If you're not familiar with the old swg system, it's kind of complicated, so I won't explain it here) So after that year, SOE came up with this 'brilliant' plan to revamp the combat system with the "Combat Upgrade." So, we quit the game before that happened, which turned out to be a good idea. We then sat idle for a few months before a monster was released: World of Warcraft.
WoW pretty much ate my last two years of high school. Blizzard made a quality game. Recently, though, it's pretty much out of hand and ridiculous. Not to mention it's the first like huge mainstream MMO; everyone has heard of WoW, and most people who don't play MMOs (and a lot who do) laugh at it. Anyway, enough about WoW, it's so lame and dumb.
So I've been spending the last year jumping from game to game, not finding a game I really enjoy. Pirates of the Burning Sea, Tabula Rasa, Eve, Age of Conan, and a return to SWG, all turned out flat. I feel like since the release of WoW, new mmo's just don't seem to live up to the wonder that SWG at launch had. But now, there's hope!
EA bought two other major companies which are creating MMO's. The first, which will be released this fall, is Warhammer Online. I've been following this for over a year (applied for beta last summer, still nothing). This game is separating itself from other recent releases in that it actually has unique gameplay elements such as public quests and a very extensive siege-based pvp system. I will definitely be playing this one, hopefully for a long time, but we'll see.
The second game, which was just announced at E3, is what I'm really looking forward to. There's been rumors floating around for a while about it, and it turns out they are true. Bioware, the creator of KOTOR, is making an old republic timeline Star Wars mmo!! This is great news. What I'm hoping, of course, is that they take what SOE failed with in SWG, and make an amazing star wars mmo that doesn't get dragged down by brainless Sony execs a year into its release. I also think that the old republic is a much more exciting and open-ended time than the galactic civil war of post-deathstar-destruction. Mainly: Mandolorians are still around! Win!
Long post is long. =D
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