Tag Archives: MMOs

…and Let Slip the Dogs of War!

One unfortunate hobby of mine lately is watching the slow demise of my old Warhammer Online guild. While I’ve already cancelled my WAR account it’s always painful for me to watch a gaming guild or clan that I was in, especially one I was real involved in, die. You might remember me describing the demise of my Age of Conan guild last year.

Anyway, the guild I had selected for myself before the launch of WAR had a nice website and seemed like a great bunch of characters. I’d describe them as “casual hardcore” – that is, they’ve got a casual attitude when it comes to rules, raiding, and the like but for the most part they put in the same amount of time and dedication as a lot of hardcore groups. I joined them because of that, their PVP focus, the fact that they were relatively small, they’re only dedicated to WAR (rather than being some massive, multi-gaming mess) and the type of people they seemed like judging from their forum posts. They were friendly, mature, yet they liked to joke around. Indeed I clicked with them fairly well – certainly better than with my old Age of Conan guild.

Through the course of the game we of course got to know each other better after many fun and at times crazy conversations on our Ventrilo server and on our forums, we PVPed together all of the time, and we even set up a little leveling pact group later on that was fairly successful at keeping us playing together. Shortly before I started to lose interest in the game we had finally gotten to guild rank 20 which got us our awesome cape emblems at long last and joined a cool alliance.

I have mentioned some of these issues before but I suppose things really started to untangle towards the beginning of the guild’s life when a relatively large group of our players who were all friends decided to part ways with our guild and form their own on Destruction side. This wasn’t really a politics thing and was relatively drama free but it was a huge blow to our player base and everyone knew it. We had also instated a recruitment freeze for fears of growing too big which turned out to bite us in the ass because of incidents like this one, along with other casual quitters and the people flooding back to World of Warcraft when Wraith of The Lich King was released.

Since before I joined I was aware that the guild had at least some intention of playing both Order and Destruction sides however it was always assumed and even sometimes stated that we wouldn’t explore the other side for quite sometime. When a few impatient people made the push over to Destruction, however, it took off with some surprising success. This resulted in a month or longer phase in which the few of us who remained dedicated to the Order side of things found ourselves playing alone and having to listen to anti-Order comments galore on the Vent server. This created an odd, unnecessary gap between some of the players and did nothing to help the few new recruits who trickled in around this time to stick around.

Eventually all of these issues were noted and Order once again became everyone’s primary focus as we, as a whole, proactively tried to do more to promote playing together and growing the guild. By this time, however, the dwindling populations in the game made recruiting quite difficult and new blood seemed almost impossible to find.

More and more people started to tire of the game and quit. Some talked about going to other games which was met but a rather unrealistic response of “Oh, well, if you’re going to play X then we’ll make an X channel on the Vent server and an X board on the forums!” as if it were that easy to effectively become a multi-game guild. I shuddered.

Finally, to seal the deal, the two main officers who run the guild (also two of the people I got along with the most sadly) hadn’t visited their own site in over a month. Of course people start noticing which caused even more people to hang up their hats or move elsewhere. At the moment that’s still where the guild stands – headless and slowly bleeding to death. It is to the point now where hitting our forums to check for new posts with hope to see the guild leader actually log on and reply to a thread or two is not only a waste of time but also rather depressing…

Girls and Zombies

I had been looking for something new to play co-op with my girlfriend and it doesn’t seem like there are many good, local co-op games for the Xbox 360 that aren’t some sort of totally uber manly shooter games. Sure, I’ve got Rainbow 6: Vegas 1 and 2, along with both GRAWs, Halo 3, and Gears of Wars but she just doesn’t seem to be feeling those. To be honest I haven’t tried to get her to play them yet because I know they’re not her taste thematically never mind that she hasn’t really played many FPS or TPS games.

She’s actually usually a very quick study when it comes to games and tends to be a bit better than me at most of them. Perhaps that’s another good reason not to introduce her to one of my favorite genres – it’d really hurt my ego to get smashed by my noob girlfriend at a tactical FPS. 😛 Then again, it’s fun to daydream about us going online and working as a deadly duo. It could open up a whole new world of possibilities! She could finally play something other than World of Warcraft or The Sims 2 on her PC and I could have a permanent partner in crime. Probably just a pipe dream though…

“Come on, you know you wanted a screenshot of a bag vendor!”

We’d dabbled with a lot of different games in the past but the only ones that had ever really hooked up were World of Warcraft, Rock Band 1 and 2, and Carcassonne. The latter two we still play on a fairly regular basis. We could probably still be playing WoW if I didn’t start playing it with her well after having a main to max level and multiple alts scattered around at various level ranges. In other words I feel like I had exhausted most of the pre-expansion content and, in general, was pretty burnt out on WoW. We both felt a brief resurgence in interest after The Burning Crusade came out and ended up rolling some new Draenei characters which I was enjoying quite a bit at first but, again, burnout hit me.

I’ve been seriously considering going back, especially since Blizzard has bumped up lower end experience gain a few different times since we last played. The most frustrating thing is that I’m absolutely sure we could play and enjoy other MMOs together, ones I’d be slow to become exhausted of – hell, it would have been cool to have her along the ride with the rest of my guild in Warhammer Online. The main problem there is that her PC is somewhat outdated and she can’t really afford to stay in the hardware race at the moment. Maybe in a few more years!

I ended up dusting off my copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I actually got it for free, bundled with my Xbox 360 alongside Forza 2. Neither of them are games I was particularly interested in but both are pretty well respected and reviewed and nothing I necessarily object to owning either. We had played Ultimate Alliance a little bit when I first got my 360 but tired of it quickly and, for no particular reason, never picked it back up. Our save was literally a year old!

“Mission accomplished: We’ve looted Valhalla’s entire supply of beer.”

I quickly remembered why the game didn’t grab me. The graphics are decent, the game is pretty polished, generally, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. My top two complaints are probably that I find the combat to be far too button mashy and chaotic and the RPGish elements (character advancement and customization, for example) to be less than intuitive. I actually remembered having similar complaints when we rented a copy of one of the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games years ago. Regardless, for the time being it is getting the job done without my having to step foot or cloven hoof back into Azeroth.

Speaking of co-op games I had mentioned in a previous entry that I was annoyed about trying to grab the Xbox 360 Left 4 Dead demo as I thought it was something my girlfriend and I could potentially play split screen. It would have actually probably been a great introduction FPS game for her – pure co-op, fairly simple, and in a theme she could probably better appreciate. I also mentioned that a lot of friends had been trying to talk me into buying the PC version but I figured time zones would be a major issue so I resisted temptation. Well, that has changed.

“Da plaaaane!”

Some of the guys from The Untitled Games Podcast and I grabbed the game during a 50% off Steam sale on it. We definitely don’t have the time zone issue as we’re all local and as an added bonus it gives us something common to talk about on the show. We haven’t played together much yet but so far it’s definitely worth 25 bucks! Now I’m wondering if a second copy might not be worth it as it would surely run on her old gaming rig. Maybe I should rent the 360 version for us?

Marvel Ultimate Alliance screenshot lifted from somewhere else since I can’t easily take HD console screenshots.

Farewall to WAR…

As I had mentioned before I’m pretty burnt out on Warhammer Online and MMOs in general for the time being. As I still haven’t felt any kind of resurgence in interest despite lots of cool announcements from the fellows over at Mythic I suppose I’m going to go ahead and cancel my account.

Frankly I’m sure I’ll return to WAR eventually and I’m definitely not saying adios to MMOs forever – I can’t. In fact I’m very interested in how Jumpgate: Evolution, Star Trek Online, The Old Republic, Global Agenda, Free Realms, and Champions Online amongst others all turn out.

One of my WAR specific issues is that it’s simply not a great solo game. Its PVE level treadmill is decent enough but hardly feels rewarding enough on its own. Public Quests are nifty but hardly compelling enough to justify sticking around and I don’t have enough time to do many other group activities even if there were more dungeons and/or raids in Warhammer. World PVP, for me, seemed to devolve into a bunch of repetitious running back and forth and combat that never really felt that fun or interesting, and I’ve already had my fill of the PVP scenarios.

I’ve come to a new realization after thinking about my recent experiences in WAR. Something I’d love to see, and I know I’ve said in that I’m more of an advocate of sandbox style MMOs, is an “theme park” type MMO that feels like more of a single player game – that’s rewarding when I play it solo in more ways than just the occasional whiff of the carrot on the end of the stick you get from normal treadmills. I know some of the above upcoming games, most notably The Old Republic, are making strides in that direction and I can’t wait to see how those efforts pan out.

Sadly enough I’m tempted to give Age of Conan, a second try. I’m resisting though – it hasn’t been enough time and not enough has changed (or at least appears that way from the patch notes) since I last played it to guarantee I’ll even notice the difference. Saldy enough I suppose the lack of updates was part of the reason I cancelled in the first place.

Anyway, here’s a final batch of older Warhammer screenshots: