We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

These absurd headlines are of course from The Scottish Sun, a tabloid so devoid of intellect it could make a cockroach look like Stephen Hawking. Of course it’s good for a laugh sometimes. And page 3.

A Scottish Couple And Their Orc

The cleverly titled article “It’s him Orc me” was published on Monday and is a story about a Scottish man who, for the past six years, owned a 6ft full size statue of an Orc from World of Warcraft until his wife forced him to give it away, threatening to leave him if he didn’t. Tough call. Of course the really impressive thing is that he’s managed to own the statue longer than the game’s even been released.

But The Sun isn’t just a newspaper just about delivering saucy lifestyle information. No sir, it’s also there to deliver real facts. Apparently experts have now discovered, using science, that World of Warcraft is more addictive than crack cocaine. Great. Now I’ve got to give up both of them.

Yet the saddest thing of all? The Sun is the most popular newspaper in Scotland.

P.S. Thanks to ‘office jerk’ from the comments section of this Keen and Graev post for pointing out the first article to me.

P.P.S. If anyone’s worrying about the Orc, don’t. It’s found a new home with another family in Aberdeen. Bless.

I’m back to work today after a nice 13 day break. It’s funny how quickly one gets into “holiday mode” – I had every intention of being busy and proactive during my time off but ended up, not surprisingly, slobbing around the house for the entire time. It was awesome

Now that I’ve returned to the office and I’m back into my normal workaday routine, I find myself being pulled slowly back towards World of Warcraft. I’ve finished my sordid love affair with Dragon Age: Origins and although I’m trying to spark up another romance with Fallout 3, I find myself drawn to the predictable and familiar warmth of World of Warcraft instead.

I have a theory that a lot of MMORPG gaming is very habitual in nature. Unlike single player games which will ultimately end, MMOs can last quite literally for decades (as Everquest has proved). This makes them very easy to incorporated into your daily routine and are easy to plan your life around them. Get home, watch some TV, eat your dinner, log on, chill out and play with your cyber buddies.

World of Warcraft is also particuarly good at being familiar and comforting. It’s not a challenging game, it’s not stressful or complicated, it’s just relaxing… like a good bath. It’s also very easy to dip in and out off and is perfect for a small slice of quick gameplay during the week or a bigger, more involved session on a weekend.

I know that MMORPGs are ingrained in me as part of my daily rountine and common habbits. In many ways, that’s a very comforting thing. It gives me something to think about during the day, look forward to when I’m stressed or busy and it’s a constant protection against boredom. On the other hand, it’s also quite destressing to think that I’m a slave to my habbits and gaming needs. Sometimes I just want to throw off the shackles and run free in the wilderness, giving up my life in the city to live in little hut somewhere. So long as my iPhone got a 3G reception that is.

I completed Dragon Age: Origins last Saturday evening, almost exactly two weeks after I purchased it (or rather traded in the PS3 version for the PC one) with a total of just under 50 hours clocked. Yep, I had a pretty intense Christmas holiday with it, exactly what I needed. I wanted a great single player game to get stuck into and I got one.

Without a doubt, Dragon Age is a fantastic single player game, right up there with Mass Effect, BioShock, Sins of a Solar Empire and golden oldies like C&C, Civilisation II and Final Fantasty VII (I’m just listing the games that I got truly hooked on and consumed my life for weeks). One of the highlights of it for me was having so much freedom of choice and ability to truly roleplay the character I wanted. I decided right from the start to be the “bad” guy or, well, the “misunderstood” guy who would do anything to end the Blight, to any extent. It made sense to me that a character who lost his family would be driven to the depths of darkness and lose his moral compass. He was also bisexual but that’s another blog post.

After playing MMORPGs for almost 18 months solid since playing another single player RPG, it was very refreshing and welcoming to be given so much choice in my character’s direction and influence. Dragon Age doesn’t hold your hand and prevent you from making bad choices. In fact, some of the decisions I made probably made the game harder for myself in the long run (such as killing a certain magical companion instead of accepting their offer to join my party) but they were my choices to make. I’m glad to say that I really tried to roleplay my character and not just min/max my stats and take the easy, most competitive routes.

Of course, DA:O isn’t without it’s flaws and there are a few biggies that will certainly niggle at you along your journey. For starters, the AI is shockingly bad and sometimes your companions operate just fine on their own and sometimes they act like they’ve had a frontal lobotomy. The selection of companions available is also very poor and you end up with something like 6 Warriors but only 2 Rogues and 2 Mages to choose from and it’s a little frustrating. The game is also incredibly long which, yes, most people will see as a good thing but to me to started to drag, especially around the Dwarven areas. It was a slog to finish (but worth it in the end).

My hat goes off to BioWare for turning out yet another excellent game. I have to give them kudos for making such an excellent RPG that hit the mark on so many levels and truly defined and highlighted the power and point of roleplaying games again. They’re all about character and story and Dragon Age has that in spades.

Suffice to say that I’m now hyped up for Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic more than ever.

Ding! Today I turn 28 years old. Having a birthday so close to the New Year is a double edged sword. It’s good in the sense that I have a solid two weeks of gifts and celebrations from Christmas until now but it sucks in the sense that I don’t have anything to look forward to for the rest of the year.

Turning 28 has given me moment to pause and look at what I want to accomplish before I hit 29. Here are my personal goals for the nex year of my life (in no particular order):

• Be a better husband.
• Learn Hiragana and Katakana script and 250 Kanji symbols.
• Implement another design upgrade on the blog by April 1st.
• Read 10 books (I’m a sloooow reader).
• Come 2011, I will be able to hold a full, basic conversation in Japanese.
• Hit 2,000 RSS subscribers (spread the word! ).
• Write two short stories/manuscripts.
• Play less but more quality games.
• Overcome my inane OCD and be able to leave the house without checking the door is locked 274 times.

Some are obviously harder to achieve than others but I want to give it all a shot. Honestly, I feel a little strange about not only revealing my personal life goals to everyone but also about writing them down. I guess it’s a commitment thing. However, by putting these down in black and white (or in this case, 1s and 0s), I’m setting myself up a challenge.

It’s good to have things to aspire to. What are your goals for the next year of your life?

MMORPGs are pretty spectacular things. When you consider the amount of effort, scope, money and time that goes into one, they are truly the giants of the gaming industry. However, as much as I love them, I don’t think they are necessarily true to their RPG heritage and perhaps calling them such is an injustice to such traditional single player games. You see, MMORPGs do the ‘massively multiplayer online’ part very well but often implement the ‘roleplaying game’ half very poorly.

MMO Win

Ever since I first played Everquest, I was stunned and amazed by it’s vastness and immersion. For the first time I was actually able to exist as an online persona and interact with thousands of other players in a vibrant world.

By their defining nature MMOs do, well, the massive online part very well. It’s their main characteristic and even from games with separated servers to ones like EVE in which everyone exists in a single galaxy, the breadth and scale of the genre is breathtaking. The interactivity and socialising in these microworlds is second to none and the main attraction, for me at least, to these games.

However, as they succeed in being ‘MMO’, they fail in being real RPGs.

RPG Fail

Most MMORPGs should really be renamed something like MMO-acquire-points-level-up-press-button-action-games. Even by the loosest definition of roleplaying, MMORPGs fail completely. Roleplaying games are about becoming a role, immersing yourself in the character, and customising yourself to be individual. When was the last time you were even allowed to assign you own statistic points in a MMORPG? Most now offer only the simple choice of picking a race and class and then deciding which of three specialisation paths you will follow. Hardly unique customisation in my book.

And then we have the questing and interactivity. RPGs are meant to be about undertaking epic quests and shaping the world you reside in, not just about skipping through some text dialogue and then killing X mobs in order to affect absolutely nothing in your surroundings. If I play a RPG, I want to be a holy guy or a malevolent guy or a charming guy or whatever-I-feel-like-guy. I don’t want to follow a pre-deteremined path through a series of events that I have absolutely no control over.

Win-Win

Although we can act anyway we want in a MMORPG and pretend to partake a certain role, I’d find it much more satisfying if my conversation was actually embodied in my character. Let my Warrior have high charisma and speech abilities so he can talk his way through a quest rather than fight it or let my Rogue actually be evil and murderous, using underhand tactics to receive his reward.

I don’t mean to be overly critical of the MMORPG genre but after playing intoxicating single player RPGs like Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Oblivion and Fallout 3 it’s refreshing to exist in a world that has so much choice and consequence.

There is a glimmer of hope though as even games like World of Warcraft invest in new technology like phasing to try to create alterable situations and replacing the predictable “everything will reset in T-minus 6 minutes” environments. I also have hope when I read about forthcoming games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and the developers renewed efforts and focus on story and character.

These games have conquered the MMO aspect, now it’s time to return to their roots and resurrect their RPG half.

Following suit with the traditional raft of new year blogging articles, here’s my rundown of MMORPG predictions for 2010.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Cataclysm will out sell WotLK and become the best selling PC game expansion ever. It will release around May or June to huge critical acclaim and attract millions of players back to WoW.

Mortal Online

MO will prove to be a relative success and receive a niché yet strong and avid following. Blogs and forums will be rife with comparisons between MO and Darkfall and the usual arguments of casual vs hardcore. It will lack polish and be full of bugs yet offer a freedom of play which appeals to many.

Allods Online

AO will prove to be the sleeper hit of 2010, generating a lot of interest and initial players using it’s F2P model. The F2P model will result in some particularly powerful and required items being sold which sparks huge debate over whether or not it’s a successful and fair business model.

Star Trek Online

Will launch to mediocre reviews and a heathly number of initial purchases which then steeply declines after one month. Everyone will criticise the ability to only PVE as the Federation and Cryptic will promise other factions in future expansions.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Won’t be released until 2011.

Global Agenda

GA will receive some positive, although not glowing, reviews and build a healthy base of subscribers as gamers enjoying playing something different. It will be hailed as the MMOFPS that Tabula Rasa should’ve been.

Dust 514

Dust will launch in November and sell well as there will be no other new MMOs coming out at that time. It will receive high praise for it’s interactivity with the EVE Online universe and initially spark a lot of interest from current EVE subscribers. By mid 2011 however, it will be all but forgotten.

Fallout MMORPG

A Fallout MMORPG will be officially announced and the gaming community will go ape-shit over it.

It’s custom to come up with a resolution every New Year and although there’s plenty of things in my personal and professional life that I want to resolve to change, I’ve got a very specific one for MMORPGs:

Play less; play more quality.

It’s now 2010 and when I look back at my MMO gaming over the last 11 years, I think a lot of it has been very blind and habitual, especially around the turn of the century (I feel so old saying that). The simple fact is that I often spent a lot of time in MMORPGs that I never fully enjoyed or, quite simply, weren’t good enough. I did so because time wasn’t an issue and it was no skin off my nose to invest 4+ hours a day playing Earth & Beyond or Asheron’s Call 2 or even more recent games like Aion (yeah, I know some people love it but it just didn’t do it for me).

I also want to make my time in game count for more. I’m a big supporter of making games more accessible (which doesn’t necessarily mean dumber or easier) because, quite frankly, I don’t want to spend my time waiting, queueing or grinding any more. I want to enjoy every moment of the game that I play and if something’s a chore, then it’s not fun and, hence, not a game. This is a difficult thing to balance with the whole risk vs reward aspect of gaming and measures of gaming to make things challenging but I’m a firm believer that it’s possible to achieve without just plonking down an unimaginative timesink.

A lot of these feelings are due to the fact that I, as both a person and a gamer, am evolving. Gone are my wild bachelor student days (I used to be able to rock MMORPGs all night long, baby!) and here are my calm married professional days. My time is simply too precious now to waste on things that aren’t good enough or enjoyable enough.

So that’s my MMORPG resolution. I want to play more quality and have more quality experiences when I play and I’m not going to sink time into games that don’t cut the mustard.

What’s your MMORPG New Year’s Resolution?