So everyone is getting upon the CO bandwagon, from Biobreak through to Hudson, and all the paraphernalia in-between but of course it’s only a flavour of the month sort of thing. Give it till October and poor ol’ Aion will be in the firing lines, games simply can’t do the players justice. Which is true, because as we know developers are like presidents or prime ministers, unable to fix the ‘easy’ solutions presented to them, where as we, at home, are more than capable of doing such things. Afterall, we’ve seen someone else do it and quite frankly that means it can and should be like -so-. It can’t be that hard to work out how one company has done it after all.
CO isn’t amazing.
It has flaws and it has problems, as much as your next kid on the block or old nanny reminiscing, because games can’t be perfect, no matter what genre or age they are. When something went wrong in the DOS days it was more often than not something attributed to the game having a personality or particular flavour to it, which now instead it’s a vile, disgusting, bug ridden corpse.
Bugs are bad.
And WoW is good. Which is really where things get spoiled and the milk curdles.
I was in GAME recently, chatting away to a rather shit salesmen who was telling me that reviews this and reviews that had denoted the copy of Elven Legacy within my hands wasn’t very good and in fact I would be better placing my hard earned cash within his till for another game instead. He then came out with an interesting point… World of Warcraft had actually hurt their market, because the game was ‘so good’ and so well liked, with people sticking with it for so long, that many other games had simply not took off properly, shelf life had shortened and just generally the want to purchase more games had dropped since WoW really launched big. Obviously we see that as bloggers, players and readers of gaming news, we understand what WoW does and means and also we use it as a comparison to almost fucking everything. Political agenda, work related incident, social connection? I bet I could find a WoW ‘thing’ on each of them.
So anyway I attempted to disagree with him on Legacy because quite frankly reviews aren’t the be all and end all, but by which he started insisted of informing me about particular bloggers talking about it. The same people who use WoW as the be all and end all, see where I’m going with this? Even if you be hating against the beast that is, there’s still an expectation, a consideration for, a desire for a replicar that even if it doesn’t fit will have aspects, parts, moments of WoW. There’s an insistance.
Still, I say insisted like it’s a bad thing I suppose. I mean I work as a salesperson in my store, with very much the idea of listening, questionning, obtaining the correct ‘need’ and trying to fulfil that, and informing people upon what you know is often a requirement, but there’s a line and sometimes you have to simply accept that is truly what they wish for. Or at least leave them to their own grand delusions.
My need wasn’t the latest game, it was Legacy, because I wanted it. A tactical RPish game with strategy involved? Yes please. I couldn’t frankly give a shit if it was disgustingly bad, it’s turn based and allows me to plan ahead my moves. It’s my bread n’ butter of the gaming world. My insistance for what is or must be within a game includes a good working UI, a wide choice of skills/races/classes, a smooth running game, etc. etc. but my level of expectation and acceptable is fairly high for everything, except for our Massively Multiplayer friends, upon which it’s fairly low in comparison. I like what they ‘are’. Bulky, obtrusive and fairly demanding machines that give little in return for what you put it.
Sort of like a St. Bernard.
As it turns out Legacy was alright up to a certain point, with both good and bad points, but hadn’t been correctly thought out in areas, restricting it somewhat from becoming a pretty decent game, but alas, I enjoyed the fifteen odd hours I pumped into the game which fulfilled the cash I had put down for it.
I think that’s where I might differ from people? Possibly.
I turn my money into hours spent on the game. If i’m not enjoying it, I won’t put many hours into it. In fact some games I’ve bought for £30 (around the $60-70 dollar mark for you yankees) and put two hours into them before never touching them again. Thus a game that costs me £30 and takes 30 hours of my life, is worth around a pound an hour. That makes it an average game for me. One that costs me £30 but takes 60 hours of my life? Around 50p. A game of brilliance that one because you’ll struggle to find a cheaper hobby. There are very few games that I’ve put more hours into than 60 but those ones are the gems of my gaming life. I believe there’s four, off the top of my head.
So MMOs have a tendancy to fill up the time to money ratio fairly quickly, allowing me to feel I’m getting the most for my money and more so, I enjoy different aspects of what they are. Cause they’re big ol’ beasts with a variety of different options available to them.
This is where I come to CO by the way.
CO has the things I want/need/desire/enjoy.
Sod the things I don’t like or have problems will, they will be fixed eventually. It comes down to is it game breaking for me. Does it ruin something. Stop it being fun. Cause a commotion within my gut that makes me want to vomit.
World of Warcraft didn’t excite me anymore. It frustrated me. Age of Conan ran out of quests, leading me to repetitive grind with no focus. Vanguard was simply too big, I felt overwhelmed.
I like knowing my place within a game and the direction I have to head. I enjoy the unexpected and the unknown, the possibilities that only my head can conjure and then being suprised by something else. I fucking love generating ‘stuff’ for my characters. Look, stories, background, reason and drive.
I have 5 characters in CO already, none above level 20, I’m a bit of an anti-altoholic, not really enjoying them, but CO gives me some things that other games struggle with. A depth of character and an unwritten story that I can put into words. I created a hero with a story line I then spent 45minutes making, trying to cram all the detail in a word character limit. A few heros later I wanted to make her nemesis now! So I made another character, one with a story line tieing in who would attempt to follow her, except she went the wrong route due to miss information but they’re gonna cross paths with the actual Nemesis system, me fighting me essentially. I made three others based on different story arcs and lines in my head, constructing a novel that only I would probably read but loving it all the same.
So quite frankly, fuck you and your slow responding UI comments, or your but it’s a griiiiiiiiiiiind whine. If all you can quite frankly say about the game is, “why, I didn’t enjoy it because it didn’t fill out section D of the form correctly” then I simply have to question why you’re bothering to write about it. Go and talk about shit you enjoy, indulge in what makes you happy.
If what truly makes you happy, what actually turns your goat, is whining about ‘something’, or like someone once said to me “their hobby is whining about the hobby”, then life for you must be pretty shite like. I love how Pete for instance was having so much problem talking about his enjoyment he stopped (or switched?) to Twitter and I’ve actually enjoyed his posts more since then. Of course he’s recently returned back to the blog with “stuff I liked doing” and I’ve unsurprisingly enjoyed reading it. Why would someone want to invest mass amounts of time reading stuff that is all repressed and submerged over their hobby?
One of the best bloggers on the MMO scene currently, and always has been really, are the KTR team, because they tell you the fun stuff, the enjoyable stuff, they craft stories with humour, wit, love and fucking passion. Every so often a whine comes in but that whine has a god damn story to it. And for the record, Suzina is one of the best blog posters I’ve seen in the last 6 months in this negosphere.
