To The Moon

To The Moon is an interesting little morsel of a game. Only about 3-4 hours in length, but really any longer than that would've been unnecessary. You see, the people at Freebird Games had a story to tell and it is good enough all on its own that it doesn't need any time sink bells and whistles. I absolutely LOVED the story in this game. It was unpredictable and intriguing.

The music? Nothing short of brilliant. It puts you right where you need to be while playing: in the game.

The mechanics were a little simple, but this game isn't about wading through hordes of enemies and random encounters, in fact it's an entirely noncombat game, so you don't need complicated key inputs to proceed. The focus is on the characters, their development, and the world they inhabit though, so this makes perfect sense.

Graphically, cut scenes aside, you may find it lacking by today's standards. It is reminiscent of something you may have played on the Sega Genesis or SNES with charming 16 bit sprites and colorful environments that are 2D. But trust me when I say this takes absolutely nothing away from a game, let alone this game.

Freebird spent a lot of time making sure that what they were putting out made certain that you (the player) would pay attention to the right thing: the story. Because it would be a great disservice to you for your attention while playing To The Moon to be anywhere else.

It doesn't have much re-playability, no more than a good book you may wish to dust off and read again might, but that's okay. They aren't charging an unreasonable amount of money for the enjoyment this game will give you, even if just the once.

FFXIV Launch Review

So, launch. Let me begin by saying an MMO having a flawless launch is pretty rare. The closest I've ever experienced was the launch of Age of Conan, a game that was somehow better out of the gate than it was several months down the line. The worst launch experience I've suffered through was the launch of World of Warcraft, where the game was by and large unplayable (a fact many people seem to have forgotten). By comparison the launch of FFXIV 2.0 falls somewhere in between.

In my beta review I mentioned how ambitious I thought having such a short stress test was and how brave it was to do so so very close to retail launch. Everyone I know tried to convince me I was just being a Negative Nancy, perhaps bias from my previous experience with the earlier incarnation of the game. I stuck to my guns though and, shocker here, was right. People forget I've had a lot of experience here. I'm a Stress Test guru of sorts. I can read that shit like a psychic reads palms.

Let me preface with, I know the below sounds really bad, but the fact that despite all of that I'm still playing every day says a lot. The game itself is enjoyable. So what has the launch experience been like?

During Early Access many servers hit cap right away. By 10:00AM the next morning, many servers were locked to character creation meaning no new characters could be rolled there. So if you didn't pop on right at 2:00AM, you probably didn't make it on in time to create a character on the same server as your friends. Even if you did, most servers are full at all times of the day.

This, originally, was alright because you could just get into queue and eventually get in game. To throttle, they removed the queue on day one in a vain effort to get people to just reroll on other servers. Thing is, people roll on a server for a reason: to play with their friends. Convincing large groups of people to up and leave isn't an effective means by which to solve the congestion problem because it's just not going to happen. Especially not when their friends are likely already well established on the server due to there being no character wipe after open beta.

This means that early access was basically useless for a lot of people because they couldn't create a character and/or log in. To have any chance at all you had to sit and spam the log in process repeatedly, sometimes for hours, to get in. The sad part about this is that it's kind of an easy fix. As of now there's still no log out feature implemented for idle players online. This means that once you're online, you can go afk perpetually and remain in game unless your computer crashes or servers go down, meanwhile people who would actually be playing, can't.

That's kind of a huge oversight.

By official launch the problem was only worse. On launch day every single North American server was closed to new character creation. So you essentially went out, waded through a crowd, spent money, and couldn't even play the game. Square has been ineffective about communicating its intentions to fix the problem, creating a lot of understandable frustration. In short, my prediction during beta came to fruition.

I'm not wholly certain how they so woefully underestimated the amount of interest in the game. It's almost as if they didn't even bothering looking at the presale orders before setting the original server caps because, let's face it, the issue of over population became apparent during the first 24 hours of early access. Throwing retail buyers on top of that mess was obviously only going to exacerbate the issue.

In summary, if you are on your way to the store to pick it up... give it a week or two. Trust me, your experience overall will be much more enjoyable. Don't worry about falling behind, you'd do so anyway unable to create a character or login. Waiting will spare you the frustration.

Other than the congestion problems the launch has been a success though. I've yet to encounter any glitches, bugs, or game-breaking exploits that ruin my good time and if you do manage to get on, the game runs smoothly and there's very little (if any) lag.

FFXIV, Again

Disclaimer: Please pardon any jumping around that may take place with topics as there is a tiny human who insists I get up and sing the ABC song every five minutes.

After playing the atrocity to gaming that was FFXIV during it's initial open beta (launch build) back in 2010, I have to admit that I was looking forward to this do-over about as much as one looks forward to going to the dentist. Let me begin by saying, this is in fact like an entirely different game. Sure it's still the same setting (in fact the other launch is even written into the plot) with the same locations and races, but everything about it is better. Which isn't difficult because I'm fairly sure my infant son could've designed a better game than what this one had been back in 2010.

Character customization is much the same, which isn't a bad thing as character customization was basically the only working feature from the first launch. Though they have updated the controls during, which makes the process much smoother. For instance you no longer HAVE to use J, K, L, and I to move the camera during this process. You can just swivel views with your mouse.

They have expanded upon your options here a bit. For example, before there were gender restrictions on two of the races, those have been removed. You can now be a giant chick (Roegaydn) and a cat boy (Miqo'te). Granted I'm still not a fan that cat people exist at all. Your feature selections are all still presets with no sliders or color wheels, but you can manage to look fairly unique if you spend enough time on it. It's more in depth than WoW, but not as in depth as some other MMO's presently available.

Again there are two clans available to each race that further define you as a pixelated being, but again they don't seem to particularly matter a whole lot. Neither do your birthday or patron deity as far as I could tell.

Your class dictates your starting city and the beginning of your storyline and you cannot leave until you've progressed far enough in your quest, so if you want to play with your pals right off, plan for that. Don't worry too much about your initial class choice either, as you can change it at any point in time except inside of dungeons and during combat. Eventually you can master them all if you're so inclined.

The guy narrating the opening cinematic sounds a little like the guy from True Facts About... which is pretty distracting and made it hard for me to take seriously. But Square has never been known for their strong voice acting when it comes to their English cast, so, this shouldn't be new to anyone who has ever played a modern FF game. The mini cut scene next is fairly uninspiring and if you're starting in Limsa expect the little plot that introduces you to things to feel forced and more than a little awkward. Having played the other cities as well I can say they flow more naturally. Maybe this is something they'll work on before launch day. It's basically just an introduction to the game and the world anyway. The story doesn't really pick up until about level ten or so and from there it seems alright.

Graphically the game is on par with most of the others presently available, but musically it's fantastic. Which, being a Square game, shouldn't be surprising either. I was more surprised when I played the original game and the soundtrack was bland enough to be classified elevator music. Movement is typical of an MMO, though you also have the option of using a gamepad rather than mouse and keyboard.

The chat interface is fairly intuitive and you can expand your chat box to encompass your entire screen if you so choose, which may seem excessive, but for roleplayers or people trying to get a clear screenshot of a conversation, this is fabulous. You are limited to four chat tabs total though, which is a little weird. The HUD itself is clean and polished and you can customize it in a number of ways. Among the quick buttons like character sheet, armor chest, inventory, and system is even an emote list that brings up all of the animated emote list.

The emote list is fairly expansive and every one of them is thoughtfully animated. Speaking of emotes, there are also custom emotes also, so you can roleplay to your heart's content if that's your thing. Just keep in mind the command to do so is /em not /e, not /me, etc., etc., otherwise you'll stand around motioning towards yourself like a tool rather than actually emoting. Oh, and when you have entered text into the chat buffer, your character's mouth moves as if they are talking. That's pretty cool. More cool? Jewelry shows up on your character model when you equip it.

You can also sleep in beds, and sit on anything nearby with an appropriate sitting animation! So if you are standing beside a chair and type /sit you will sit in it. If you're standing beside a bed and type /sit, you'll sit on it. If you're standing out in the open and type /sit, you'll sit on the floor.,. And all three animations vary.

The game now makes use of hardware mouse! Not software mouse like it used to, for some insane fucking reason. This alone is cause for some serious celebration. Here's a drink to you, hardware mouse. Taken for granted until you're gone.

Quests will be very familiar to you if you've ever played an MMO before. Collection quests, kill quests, and random world events (likened to GW2) they call Fates. Quests are not voice acted but scroll out into chat bubbles via text. This gives the game a very RPG feel, which seems suiting of a Final Fantasy game. I like it. Having to sit through hearing Kate Mulgrew be my Trooper Mommy all the way through SWTOR got old after the first "Hey it's Captain Janeway!" moment. The NPCs however can be overly verbose, so figuring out what you're being told to actually do feels a lot like trying to solve a math word problem. This encourages you to just spam click through the dialogue to accept the quest and then just follow your quest tracker. Ignoring any story completely.

It doesn't help that many NPCs speak with a bad Cockney accent ('ey 'dere 'ow yous doin' lass? I be nee'n ya ta go'in get me summa 'dem whatev'as! -- FFS) meaning you may spend several seconds per sentence trying to sound that shit out to figure out what's even being said... and there's paragraph upon paragraph of it when all they want you to do is go get a carrot. Dear Square, not every quest needs an epic dialogue. If the farmer just needs some carrots he can just ask me to get some carrots. He does not need to tell me the life story of how he became a farmer, how he planted his crops, what his favorite colors are, and that he has a wife and nineteen children who all love carrots so so much. That's all entirely unnecessary to my gaming experience.

Once in a while would be funny. All the time is just a little obnoxious.

There is rested experience, so you should log out in appropriate cities or inns to maximize your exp gain when you log back in. There is no trash loot, which is amazing all on its own. When you realize you never have to buy a bag upgrade, it's even better. You start the game with all your bags and they're roomy and spacious and you can hold lots and lots of goodies. Your armor goes into it's own separate inventory so the fact that you need several sets of it to change job classes at a whim doesn't at all impede your ability to be a hoarder. There is also an onscreen display do that you know when your bags are getting full without having to open them all and dig around.

There are armor dyes that allow you to customize your look further once in game. You can buy them from a vendor and change colors as much as you like. Sadly not all of a piece of armor reflects your dye choice though. So sometimes it's not as useful as you'd like it to be. Even so, it's better than no armor dyes. In this day and age of gaming there's really no excuse for that except developer laziness, if you ask me.

Guild features are fully implemented and extensive.

Class roles exist and are fun to play. I disliked that class roles were done away with essentially in GW2. I prefer knowing who will be doing what when we enter a dungeon based on what their class is, honestly. Dungeons are straight forward, which is a great thing, in my opinion. I am so tired of dungeon content trying to be new and innovative. Don't mess with a good thing, man. New and innovative typically just comes off as absurd and convoluted.

Where it's like, "Okay, tank this while standing on one foot, reciting the alphabet backwards, and hopping. Oh, and keep all the adds on you by doing cartwheels counter-clockwise. Don't forget that you need to shout 'Bananas!' every 31.2 seconds or you'll lose threat." W-T-F. That's how I felt by the second WOW expansion.

This is better. It's tried and true. It's classic. If you're the tank, you tank. If you're the healer, you heal. If you're dps, you dps. As it damn well should be.

When loot drops, you can roll need on it if it's for your class. If it's not you can only roll greed. No longer will your leather hat be stolen by the mage who wants to sell it on the auction house.

Unfortunately holding a open beta stress test that lasts only a single weekend , ten days before launch seemed a little over-ambitious to me. This was only reinforced when I logged in on the very first day of open beta and the server all of my friends were on was already full. To prevent over-crowding Square restricted access to the server, meaning no new character could be created there. This meant I could not play with my friends. There were fifteen North America servers and of them only one was available to create new characters on. And that server had a queue. I created there just to test the game out to write this review, hoping that the server I wanted to be on would reopen to new characters at some point, but Sqaure never increased the server cap. So I spent the entirety of the weekend playing by myself, when I was able to play.

Error 3102. Around ten PM on Saturday night my game crashed. When I tried to log back in I received an error stating that I could not log in because my character was already logged in and to try again in a few minutes after the game had finished logging my character out. Okay, I thought and did just that. Only five minutes later? Same error. Ten minutes later? Same error. Several hours later? Same error. Even after Square took the servers down, same problem. Actually the problem got worse. Before it only seemed to affect those who had crashed, after the server down it was effecting over half of the beta testers on North American servers. So now not only could I not play with my friends, I couldn't play at all.

Japanese servers were fine though, so you could at least hop over there to play in the meanwhile. Granted uselessly. Open Beta characters won't be wiped come launch. So it would have been ideal to roll your character on your future home server. Those of us who couldn't now have leveled characters on useless servers. So when the game launches, if you plan to play it in retail, all of your friends are going to be levels ahead of you. If you have early access you'll be spending it playing catch-up. If you don't and they do, you're going to fall further behind. This isn't a deal breaker, it's just a little disheartening.

At around seven PM on Sunday error 3102 struck Japanese servers too. They managed to finally fix the problem at around eight or nine, but it persisted  on NA servers until past midnight. Over twenty-four hours of being unable to access my character. By then I had to go to sleep though, so when they extended beta from two am until eight am it wasn't much compensation.

There is a misconception that FFXIV will be free to play. It isn't. From what I was told, if you actually bought the previous FFXIV, as an official apology from Square, you can play totally free up until September 9, 2013 and transfer over your old character to a Legacy server with a few special rewards. Everyone else has to pay to play.

Overall? I enjoyed the game. I'm still personally undecided about whether or not I'll play it. If it were free to play I'd definitely invest. As it's still following the monthly subscription model though (get with the times, Square!), and with my limited time I'm just not sure it's worth fifteen dollars a month to play only two hours a day.

Do I think the game will be ready for launch in less than a week? Probably not, no. However with this whole experience from last launch to this open beta I feel Square will continue to improve the game even post launch, for free. PVP won't be in for launch, nor dueling, and several other things, but they have been promised to come soon, so. We'll see. It has potential to be a great game.

Tomb Raider

Lara needs an adult!

I have loved the shit out of this series since it's premier a million years ago. A strong, intelligent protagonist that also happens to be female? Sweet. It's the only video game I've ever played that manages to keep me seated and entertained while simultaneously making me want to get off of my ass and get some exercise.

Up until Tomb Raider 4, I'd say the franchise was easily my favorite. Beyond that point the controls got hopelessly convoluted. Once the series moved from Playstation to newer gen consoles the game also got away from puzzle solving and dove head first into action, explosions, and shooting bitches in the face. Thing is, if I wanted to shoot some bitches in the face, I'd just play Halo, CoD or one of the trillion other shooter games that are flooding the industry right now.

For my birthday I got me the new Tomb Raider game on the 360. Until now, no one has been able to recapture that feeling of adventure and accomplishment you felt playing through the originals. Unlike the previously mentioned games post Revelations, this is really fun and I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit. Even if Jude likes to get me killed. A lot.

It doesn't play like the old classics, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's more of a plot here while not losing a sense of adventure. I think any hardcore fans of the old, old Tomb Raider games will like this. When you're first starting out, you feel a sense of hopelessness. When you first encounter bad guys capable of sentient thought, you feel a genuine sense of dread. These are bad mother fuckers. When you need to sneak around without being seen, you may find yourself holding your breath trying to be as quiet as possible. That immersion and feeling of attachment is the sign of a well designed game.

On top of that the script is well written though not quite as quippy as its predecessors (which could be good or bad depending on your opinion of quipiness), the music is fitting to the scenario, and the graphics are beautiful and gritty. Also, Lara's accent isn't quite so canned. My only dislike thus far has been that there is no "Lara's Home" tutorial stage, like in the old school Tomb Raider games. I understand why that is, as learning as you go is sort of the theme of this game, but still -- I miss it.

I've only just begun, so all I've got is my trusty (read: crappy) bow, and I've spent a good deal of time just sneaking around killing animals and hunting achievements and that alone is adding up to a lot more fun than it should. As I progress I keep waiting for that moment of disappointment I've felt with the other games but what I find instead is myself liking it more and more. Color me surprised and thrilled! A new Tomb Raider game that's enjoyable for old Tomb Raider fans!

Reviews MIA

Many of my older reviews, uploaded to Gametrailers where I am a moderator, are currently inaccessible and my flashdrive with all of the back-ups is MIA. Until either of those issues resolves itself, only new reviews and those previously written for Blognari will be posted. Sorry for anyone looking for the more in-depth versions of a few of these, or the ones not posted at all anymore!

Guild Wars II

I beat this up at level 3. Yep, that's frost on my eyeballs.

Tonight I bring you a first look at Guild Wars II, having played the most recent beta build this last weekend.

I know a lot of you, much like myself, see NCSoft in any capacity and automatically go, "Oh yay, another Korean grinder." The term affectionately (or not so affectionately) tied to pretty much every game NCSoft has had its hand in (Lineage, Tabula Rasa, Aion, etc.), as well as all the others that fit the bill (Tera, Rift, etc.) You know the sort: remarkably pretty in the art department but also remarkably shallow in every other capacity, resulting in months after months of what equates to mind-numbing grinding of monsters with little to no actual content to compel you forward. Other MMO's at least try to mask the grind with fluff like quest-related stories and group activities.

But I digress, because much to my surprise that's not what Guild Wars II is like at all! You may not believe me at first because at a glance, the art direction makes it seem very, very much like that is what you can expect. Once you get into the game however you quickly realize this is not the case. In the course of three days I made it to level 15 without ever just having to senselessly kill wolves, or spiders, or bats.

Quests come in a few varieties and are voice acted, some better than others. There are personal story quests to advance your class/race/caste storyline which are somewhat unique. There are typical quests. Then there are area quests (much in the vein of Warhammer Online) where the overall goal is worked at by everyone nearby, not just you and whoever might be in your group. So long as you contribute, you get credit. Completing such quests earns a good portion of exp, whereas killing stuff just for the sake of killing it isn't half so rewarding.

Area quests may also have an actual impact on the environment, short term or not. Such as the entrance to a cave being blocked off, or a city being under attack. Which makes them somewhat more interesting than just things happening and then things no longer happening. If there aren't enough people around to finish a goal, there just might be consequences. You can "lose."

While it's all still questing it isn't a boring hassle.

You can also get a good amount of exp just from exploring, and there's plenty of unique locations around the world that are actually worth exploring. Kind of a win:win there. See cool shit and level up, why not do this?

Speaking of class/race/caste, I should probably explain what the hell that even means. During character creation you select your class as per usual and your race but you also select several other options that will later change the way your personal story progresses. Such as caste -- being a commoner rather than a noble (human) or being born in the dusk cycle rather than the dawn cycle (Sylvari). I have yet to play long enough to see the end outcome of these decisions, but I've seen far enough that I'm aware they have an impact on how the game will play out for you.

Character creation itself is nice. There are base faces from which to choose from and then sliders for things such as eyes, nose, lips, chin, jaw, etc., so that you may further refine these base options into something more unique to your character. There are also a variety of body types and a height slider. Hair options are currently tied into racial choice, but are quite detailed and numerous. And there are a ton of colors from which to choose for things such as eye color, hair color and skin tone. One of my personal favorites here is the attention to detail. If you choose to be dark skinned -- you will have light skinned palms.

Another way in which you can further customize your character's look is through armor dyes. Yes, you read that correctly. You could do this in DAoC way back when and since then it's a feature that has been largely absent in recent titles. It makes a reappearance here, starting you off with a few basic options and granting you more as you play through looting and perhaps other means I've simply not yet discovered.

There are a number of classes from which to choose, all pretty well explained on the game's official site, so I do not feel compelled to needlessly repeat that information. Same goes for the races at your disposal. One thing I will say, however, is that there is no stealth as stealth is traditionally presented in MMO's. Instead you have a number of abilities as a Thief that will put you into stealth, but only for a few seconds at a time. Some people will love this, other will hate it. I personally dislike it. During my playtime as a thief I had a number of survivability issues that would have easily been solved by being able to stealth for longer than 3 seconds at a time. It is beta however, I imagine these things will be taken into consideration before launch. Either increasing stealth time or improving innate survivability.

Artistically the game is beautiful. Character models, creature models, architecture, weather effects, and reflections are all lovely. Environments are large and spacious. The music is expressive and from what I've witnessed suiting to whatever situation you may be in at the time. There's also ambiance. People talking, birds chirping, foot steps in the distance, etc. All making you feel very much a part of the location you're in. Excellent for role-players, certainly.

Interestingly, despite being so damn pretty the game also runs well and loads quickly. I would say the graphics are easily above and beyond SWTOR in every perceptible way, but the game loads at least 4x quicker, with a more consistent frame rate to boot.

Mechanically the game is fun to play, with a combat system reminiscent of the original Guild Wars only more polished. WvWvW is a PVP mechanic similar to Dark Age of Camelot's 3 realm RvR system, so there is a lot of appeal to that. Three servers vie over a map, and the victors get special bonuses. Unlike Battlegroups in other MMO's these match-ups are not permanent and will alternate so that at no point are you gong to get stuck on the losing side as the under-dog forever. There are also quick match games, much like Battlegrounds in other games (DAoC, WOW, SWTOR, etc.).

The auction house is stable and you can check your mailbox from anywhere, which is nice. Though presently you cannot open trades with other players, the only way to transfer items or money from person A to person B is to mail it to them. Not a huge issue, just a little strange.

Much to my dismay there are not a ton of additions specifically for role-players. There is an extremely limited number of emotes presently in game, walk isn't a toggle, and you can't interact with the environment a whole lot (such as sitting in chairs). That said, people role-play anyway. It's rare to find in a game's beta, but I encountered more role-play in three days of GW2 beta than I have in most retail MMO's presently on the market.

There are chat bubbles and custom emoting is in game. Though, custom emotes have an excessively long range, sometimes carrying over almost the entire zone, which is a little weird. As a plus it means you can tell there's RP happening and go search for it. There was never a time where I dropped a custom emote and at least 5 people didn't show up soon after. Kind of nice.

There is also something of an appearance tab, though not in an incarnation you'll be overly familiar with. Rather than your combat armor/weapons tab taking stat precedence over your appearance tab, one replaces the other. Which I actually prefer. I have a strong issue with someone running around in a bikini only as it turns out it's actually got the magical stats of a full suit of plate armor. In Guild Wars II, if you have your Town Clothes on and leave the city to go try and quest... you are going to die miserably. As well it should be.

To wrap it up here, though I'll undoubtedly add more and amend things after future betas, the game has no monthly subscription fee, so you only need to pay for the base game. Which is $60.00 and can be preordered now despite that there is no set launch date at this time. This means even if you only play casually, it essentially pays for itself in the first few months (other MMO's charging $15.00 per month in addition to their base price). In essence, I don't see much of a reason at this point not to play.

MMORPG's

From time to time I look back fondly on all the MMO's I've played. Even the ones that took an unforeseen turn for the worse -- I focus on the enjoyable experiences prior to whatever patch or bug destroyed the game and/or community. It's not quite nostalgia, because I do not long to return to any of the games I've stopped playing. I stopped playing them for a reason afterall. I just like to think back to the days of old, when each MMO actually had something that set it apart from whatever other game was on the market at the time. Not things that made it necessarily better, just things that set them apart. That's difficult to find now.

Most MMO's bank all of their effort toward repeating whatever worked for whichever game came before it based on popularity of said game. This ultimately fails because it provides gamers with absolutely no reason to switch from the game they're already playing to the new game. Why start over with no gear, friends, or money in a game that's basically exactly what you're playing anyway?

A lot of people incorrectly label this the WoW Effect. Since World of Warcraft was for many people their first MMO experience, every game which followed afterward that had similar features was dubbed a WOW clone. With even just the slightest amount of actual research however, you will realize that most of the features in WOW were actually completely ripped off from other MMOs before it. That's right, Warcraft was not innovative at all. For instance the beloved PVP battlegrounds everyone thinks are token WoW material were actually alive and well in DAoC long beforehand. Talent trees, classes specialties, and even PVE instancing were all present in games predating WoW by years.

I find it incredibly interesting that while I liked WoW the least, it was one of the longest games I ever played. The learning curve was nonexistent. You could effectively do most tasks by rolling your face back and forth across your keyboard and get by just fine. The expansions were always just more of the same, to the point where even the models and other art were simply copy pastas of previous content. World PVP did not exist once BGs were introduced which reduced all player v. player conflicts to mundane, preplanned events. The only thing WoW had was the people.

Don't misunderstand. The majority of the Warcraft community is akin to some sort of special gaming Olympics. Millions of invalids who can do nothing but regurgitate old memes at one another with the overall combined charisma of a rancid turnip. Every once in a great while though, you'd stumble upon a genuinely intelligent, reliable human being. And if you were really lucky, they will have already sought out other such individuals and combined themselves into a small tightly knit guild, making the game worth playing where otherwise it would not be.

It's amazing how one or two great people can keep you around when all else can't. Especially when you manage to find them in what is essentially the Mos Eisley of gaming communities. Looking at the other games I've played, the reasons I had for sticking around post-apocalypse were much simpler. They were fun. Dark Age of Camelot had amazing PVP in its youth. Anarchy Online had a truly imaginative PvE instancing system, catering your 'dungeon' to your specific desires. To this day I am unaware of any true MMO that allows that. Starwars Galaxies had astounding role-play. Matrix Online had a truly immersing environment, add in enjoyable combat and interactive locking emotes and you had the recipe for role-player bliss. Everquest 2 was just amusing to play, the mechanics were simple but efficient. Age of Conan had a seriously innovative combat system and an impressively loyal community. Warhammer Online was an entertaining foray into the living, breathing Warhammer universe.

Ironically their short-comings were somehow related to why they had been worth playing in the first place.

DAoC tried to out-do their own PVP experience and basically ruined what had kept people playing in the first place. Seeing the error of their ways they reintroduced 'classic' servers. Sadly it was too little too late for the game to make a complete recovery, resulting in the combining of servers to combat the ghost towns they had become.

AO didn't change. Which is both good and bad. The good is that the gameplay remained entertaining and unique. They never tried to over-do it. This is also bad though because it made the game stagnate. The graphics are more or less the same as they had been when the game came out ages ago, despite all of the vast advancements in computer capabilities. Funcom has had a graphical overhaul planned since 2007, but there has been no change and no set date as to when this change could be expected.

This means your playerbase is composed entirely of the especially die-hard fans of the game and no one else. New players won't join because they dislike the subpar graphics and many old players leave because they've grown bored. If a new player does get over how out-dated the entire game is, they feel lost and hopelessly too far behind as soon as they login and realize almost everyone they meet is 200 levels higher than they are.

You can play it for free, however, so there is no reason not to play it every once in a while.

SWG's role-play came to a grinding halt once they took a game with over 20 classes, that you could hybridize to endless possibility -- to a game with fewer than 10 starting professions that could not stray from the set path in any capacity whatsoever. One completely game-altering 'upgrade' was enough. The second effectively killed the game and it's now shutting down forever come December. Despite the communities outrage and disappointment, SOE decided not to heed them and refused to roll-back to how the game had been, or even provide a 'classic' server where people could get away from the NGE. This was such an enormous marketing disaster that a member of the staff who pushed the NGE forward actually killed himself.

It is to my knowledge one of the most devastating changes made to an MMO in history.

MxO had everything going for it, except that it was run by SOE. They couldn't leave well-enough alone and made change after change until the original player base had basically evaporated. It remained alive for a little while, attracting the occasional Matrix fan, but ultimately met a swift, timely end. The rate at which SOE is handed liscences to games that should have 0 chance of failure, that fail, is boggling.

EQ had a very easy-to-play gaming experience. Quests were easy to follow, combat was simply executed, and they offered an optional graphical upgrade to those who wished it. Meaning if you had a crappy computer, you could still play, but if you had a good computer you could play and not look like you were molded out of Playdoh. While a simple game is a nice get away from games that require some form of degree to play right, it also gives you little reason to stick around. By level 20, you really had nothing to do but continue leveling up. Money was easy to come by. Leveling was a breeze. PVP only existed on certain servers. The most fun I had after level 20 in EQ2 was decorating my character's apartment.

AoC had one of the most innovative combat experiences I've ever had the joy of playing with. Incidentally it also had the smoothest launch of any MMO I've played -- and I've suffered through a lot of game launches. Patch after patch however created bug after bug and Funcom was rather disinterested in fixing them in any timely manner. This created issues that completely broke the game. The fantastic combat system was now a method by which you could charge up and behead someone at 10 yards; before you'd normally even be in range to swing at them.

This bug also only effected melee characters, so before long all of the healers and mages disappeared and the world was filled with warriors running around trying to chop off eachother's heads. Combine that with Funcom going back on their no graveyard camping policy, this meant that if you beheaded someone and ran to the resurrection pad fast enough -- you could murder them repeatedly all day.

This obviously had several damaging effects on the game. Since all of the healers and mages rerolled as melee... you could no longer efficiently get any PVE done. Which meant your entire gameplay experience rested on the enjoyment of PVP. Which you also couldn't do because any time you logged on, someone would chop off your head from 10 yards away before you even loaded.

Now, before you think, "You're just upset because people were chopping off your head!" you should know that I was usually the one doing the head-chopping. I'm just not so much of an ass I can't admit that it was broken.

Warhammer Online was the purist disappointment when it came to games I had been looking forward to. It was developed by Mythic, who did magical things with DAoC back in the day, so I was expecting more of that. It was also set in the richly story driven Warhammer world. How could they go wrong? Well, basically they pushed the game out much too fast, meaning that while all of the races were present, only two of their cities had been included in the game. They also apparently forgot that at the essence of Warhammer is role-play... because there were absolutely no tools implemented within the game to make this possible. You could not walk, or sit, or write custom emotes; you could barely even customize your character (which is forgivable provided you can do all of those other things).

They decided to make the focus PVE and PVP, which is fine as a Mythic game. That's basically what DAoC had been, but as a Warhammer game this was unacceptable. You had this vast, rich world full of life... and no way to interact with it. It was surprisingly disappointing. World PVP was also kind of broken, which left you to do nothing but run BGs. In which case, you may as well have been playing any other MMO already out, like I mentioned above, and avoided starting over. Which is exactly what happened after the first month live.

I realize this turned into more of a rant than I had originally intended starting out. I could gripe about the cons until the cows come home, or alternatively fawn over the pros until I convinced you to play them, but I think I'll spare you this time.

In short, what I was getting at was this: why can't developers create something fun anymore? Something that takes what's right about the other games and combines it all together, leaving out the bad. I mean, that is what made WOW successful. To copy Warcraft's success you do not need to make a clone of WOW. You need to do as they did and steal every good idea from every other MMO currently on the market.

Then, while it would not be a completely unique idea, it would at least be worth switching to from whatever you're playing now. I don't want mind blowing innovation. In my experience that's always bad (Tabula Rasa, Mortal Online, DDO, GW, etc.). Also, why is it the new trend in MMO's that to be innovative you have to switch to first-person perspective? That's not innovative, especially when nothing else is any different mechanically. I swear if one more up-and-coming MMO decides to  broaden it's audience by being first-person, I'll punch them with a dolphin.

I like toast and butter. I do not like toast crumbs in my butter. In that light: I like first-person shooter games and I like role-playing games. I do not however enjoy FPS games in my RPG games. If I wanted to play an FPS, that's what I would've bought. ffs.