Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows”, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy. ...
I’ve come to realize, over the years, that I really suck at MMOs. Easily distracted and easily bored, the sort of long-term, intense concentration that is the mark of the truly successful grinder is impossible for me. I can’t be the only one; the newer crop of MMOs seem made for people with short attention spans. World of Warcraft’s “Looking for Dungeon” tool lets you defeat the ultimate evils of Azeroth half an hour at a time. EQ2’s newest mission maps reward you if you can finish the entire instance before the necromancer is done buffing her pet. ...
Guy just keeps popping up everywhere, don’t he? I am playing Runes of Magic now because, hey, WoW is coming out with a new expansion that I probably won’t play, so why not reminisce about good times in WoW by playing some other game? Runes of Magic only allowed me to pick from two races, Elf and Human. I thought they had some short folk in the character concept art, but I guess those were just meant to be children. It’d be kind of cool, by the way, to start of as a child in an MMO (optionally, anyway), and play children’s games of crafting, socialization, war and magic while slowly aging and learning more of the wider world and your place in it. ...
There’s plenty of MMOs that promise to get you right in the action, but few of them really deliver. You have to zone out of the city, have to go hunting, have to buy provisions, have to find your quest area… and that’s fine. But why make life complicated? Sometimes you just want to put a coin in the coin slot and slaughter stuff wholesale. But, with other people. ...
When you kill a wolf in, say, Lord of the Rings Online, it just kind of fades away. When you kill a wolf in Dragonica Online, THAT happens. That wolf isn’t going to be just fading away. They’ll be picking bits of wolf out of the trees for the next year. Dragonica Online is an arcade-y, 2D MMO along the same lines as Maple Story and Pi Story (no relation). You travel along from screen to screen and encounter merchants, monsters, other players, special glowing portals to missions, and you do your best to help those NPCs you come across with the problems that threaten to bring light to their dark, meaningless lives. ...