Its eating my life. I’ve ground a Tauren Warrior up to L38, ten levels of that are thanks to two dungeon dives lead by the Wanderer butchering everything with his l85 Orc as myself & Mr. E trailed behind frantically trousering loot and trying not to attract any attention. The big things thats struck me is how much more painful this all would have been if I hadn’t had the rest of the gang to a) hand me a pile of gold and b) a stack of big bags on day one. Slot juggling all the loot and bits from mining, fishing and engineering would have been such a pain in the ass without all those bags. Also, I’ve run down my gold stash by about 70gps, the majority of which was blown on a pile of Moss Agates for engineering and a recipe for mudfish so I could actually level my cooking with fishing.

I’m not loving it the same way as I *love* Civilization, Homeworld, Mass Effect, etc but its got me hooked. I’m putting in four hour stretches traipsing about hills punching gorillas to mine iron because thats all I can level on. If someones going to tell me that there are spiderboots that let you climb steep slopes, I’m going to be pissed. Right now once I get to a flying mount then that’ll be it, all these people looking for help can kiss my ass, I’ll be HALOing in to grab their ores and dissappearing. Also; I’m getting to the point of hating the Alliance, ganking bastards. Iron zones tend to be hazardous, but I’ve my engineering up until I need magecloth and mithril materials now, so looks like I’m going to have to start sneaking into high level zones to loot metals again. This was what I was doing at the start in the Stranglethorn Cape – happily with a Kodo you can outrun a pirate on foot no matter what level he is.

I like some of the little quests; I find I wander about off course a lot trying to find my way up hills to that bloody node thats just out of reach. Fishing is another one that drags you off into wierd places, and one i liked was finding Princess Poobah off on Jaguero Isle. I could just see this battered tauren prospector listening to this tauren princess wittering on about needing her shoes back from King Kong down the coast and thinking “if you weren’t standing on that gold lode, no chance”. Also, now that I’ve found theres a point I’m shooting every random critter I can find – beaches and crabs are fairly efficient.

Certainly solves the ‘what will I do til Mass Effect 3′ question.

So as you’ve probably guessed from the opening, my rollercoaster relationship with that online monstrosity, which was riding high about a month ago, is once again hurtling down into “Oh-my-god-I’m-wasting-my-fucking-time”sville for the third time. This time around it comes complete with hourlong “Log on and do nothing” sessions, interspersed with the occasional 5 hour Naxx grind that makes me want to kill myself. So, having lost this fight on points twice before I can see how this is going to play out, and I’m throwing in the towel early this time, before my metaphorical boxer suffers too much brain damage.

But, much like a junkie starting out onto the straight and narrow, I found myself in desperate need of a methadone fix. First up I tried Painkiller.

Painkiller is a weird game. Imagine if Quake and Serious Sam had a love child. This would be the game the child wanted to grow up to be. It’s really fast paced, has tons of spawning enemies, and a hilarious cavalcade of weapons to mow them all down with. It seems Painkiller decided they were tired of the “2nd attack button just doing a similar attack to the 1st one” stuff that every game seems to have these days. You know…you get a rocket launcher. It fires rockets with the left mouse button and lobs grenades with the right one. Painkiller pretty much said “Fuck that,” and combined their grenade launcher with a gun that fires wooden stakes ala Von Goosewing from Count Duckula. Go check out the demo, if only for the arsenal of unbelievably ridiculous (and fun) implements of death. The whole thing is only 3 levels long, and you should play through it in about an hour (less if you’re not the ham fisted R-tard that I am), and the boss fight is pretty damn cool.

However, good and all as it was, I was not prepared to get the full version. And by “get the full version” I mean download it illegally from some torrent site. And that’s the real gauge these days, isn’t it? If I can’t be arsed stealing it, it’s probably not the game for me. Then it occurred to me…maybe the same inexplicable cosmic alignment that occasionally strikes Gabe over on Penny Arcade had affected me as well.

“Maybe that’s what I need, an RPG,” I thought, and set off in search of foul monsters to slay, gold to procure, and an insanely complex plot to ignore.

…to be continued.

The Onion is the best.

I am leaving Wow for the same reason that many are: it’s lost its appeal. I no longer care about new items, and the new challenges feel like the old ones rehashed. The guild situation has not helped, but really that’s secondary to the fact that I just have no interest in raiding. Even the idea of trying to hit a regular spot makes me feel mildly nauseated.

Blizzard have managed to create a product with all the signs of a true classic. Wow expanded the player base of MMORPGs beyond anyone’s best estimates – it brought more new people in faster than anyone else could have managed. The next generation is going to have to do something even more revolutionary.

Anyway, long story short it’s been a blast and time to move on.

/kthxbai

The fact that a player has managed to reach level 70 so fast will not please developers Blizzard, who had hoped to see the Burning Crusade occupy fans for at least a year.

Blizzard isn’t too concerned, I think, as this player must now collect all the attunements required to access the new content. (And the expensive flying mount.) That should keep Gullerbone busy for at least a week…and it’ll be a month before his guild is ready to raid it all.

The measure of an mmorpg from now on is not that it allows many players on, it is that it provides an enhanced experience. Dungeon Runners fails my test because it is not measurably different from Diablo – random dungeons and party based questing for xp and gear.

Wow has these features:

• Persistent World
• Static Questline
• PvP

• Outdoor
• Battleground
• Rewards
• Rank System

• Instance Dungeons
• scripted events

In order to beat Wow, you don’t need all of those features, but you do need to progress the process. Wow is unashamedly mainstream – it claws down many of the preconceptions about the richness of the lore requirement in order to make sense of the setting and it indulges an irreverence* that makes the game singly charming.

Blizzard have also shamelessly dropped content on the player base at a rate of knots – they released the game in a rough beta form and it has been growing in technical maturity as the players advance. It is, by no means, perfect, but it does the job very nicely considering the franky ludicrous load.

So, what is the model for the next Wow-beater? It’s going to need to reflect the coming split in gaming – single player games are an abberation. The only reason for them in the future will be in “sand-box” god-games, like Spore. Even they will eventually become collective, social experiences. Why? because other people are more fun than the machine. Second Life is the (sometimes slightly scary) genesis of the mmorpg sandbox.
Seed has a chance to be the first thing in the next generation for mmorpgs. Sadly, the guiding principle is: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”. The idea of randomised quests is something that can eventually become organic quests – npcs will be able to assess need, and expend resources to get a hero to do something. In the interim, it has to be more than a cosmetic variation.

The Democratic plotline is also compelling – wow is an awfully static place, and the idea of a world that develops with the players’ decisions resonates with possible L5R-like player loyalty.

These design decisions are far from risk free – if the variance is low between the quests, it becomes a more frustrating block to the shared environment. Worse than that, there is the genuine risk that random generation, along with the putative organic extension actually lower the value of the game. The “z0mg downed boss” effect might actually be a reinforcing social attractor, and removing the shared experience might remove the centre of gravity from the game. The evolving plotline has similar risks – Eve Online is harsh to new players, not least because the old hands have sown the place up.

In the end, the winner of the new game generation will be the one that presents the most sugar-coated challenge/reward ratio (that’s the real secret of WoW – it’s easy with high apparent returns). For the rest of us to win, however, we can only hope that there is a path to an even more immersive, social environment.