metaViper

It seemed stupid, I told people I wouldn’t do it. What could on online role playing game offer that I didn’t already have? There are many great single player role playing games out there; my favorite of all time is the Gothic series, www.gothic.net . In Gothic there is a medieval world that’s truly alive, everyone stays in character, and you are the center of the universe. No one is better than you, and no one can take away from your experience. But paradoxically, no living person can add to it either.

I found myself learning weaknesses in the AI of almost all video games and exploiting them. No matter how new or great the game there is always a way around the next tough boss or “impossible” puzzle. Don’t believe me? Try building five pieces of +20% blur armor in Elder Scrolls Oblivion. Wear them all at once and say hello to God mode. You’ll be able to walk through the whole game bashing monsters in the face. All they can do is stand there and die.

The video game industry and I grew up together. Back in the day, and in some respects still today, the RPG world was trying to match table-top gaming. Most video role playing gamers over the age of 20 have roots in Dungeons and Dragons. I did my time as dungeon master for 13 years – yes, I’m an alpha geek. Then everybody grew up, got jobs and the other people in their lives prefer they don’t spend every spare moment on weekends in the basement with potato chips and D&D buddies.

The desire to be an RPG gamer doesn’t die; the gamer just becomes smarter, more efficient. While video games don’t yet encompass the worlds we D&D’ers dreamt on paper, they take no time or effort to create. That’s all done for you, now you just load up and play. You can spend as little or as much time as you want in a session. The problem was that there was no one to play with, no one to share the adventure with, and no sense of human companionship, competition and accomplishment. Until now.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games (MMORPGs) aren’t new. I heard gamers talking about spending months and years on EverQuest, Guild Wars, and Final Fantasy 11 for Playstation2. I knew they were paying big money each month to play. There was no way I’d pay every month to play a game I already purchased. I was from the “buy the game, play as much as you want” school of thought. In fact I believed in it so much I could have been the headmaster of that school.

It boiled down to two major things, money and people. I figured if I had to pay for a month of game time, I would be forced (by my own sense of ethics) to spend as much time as possible on the game to get my money’s worth. That would mean every waking moment, every lunch hour, every sick day, every penny-pinching minute. It would be dangerous for me to take that kind of challenge. There wouldn’t be any time for enjoying the game, just get it done, save more money.

The second major problem sounds far fetched, but I contend that people make or break all experiences. From your first kiss to the guy who kicks the back of your seat and repeats everything Captain Jack Sparrow has to say during the latest installment of “Pirates of the Caribbean”. I didn’t want to risk ruining my role-playing experience with people who weren’t going to role-play. Gold farmers, spammers and children were all threats to my role-playing experience. That’s right, I wanted people to say “thee”, “thou”, “milord”, “your grace”, the whole nine yards.

With these rules in play I assumed I would never play an MMORPG. So I lived from RPG to RPG: Gothic, Oblivion etc. and talked with my old group about the long gone “good old days” of D&D. No game was going to meet my expectations. They weren’t even in my league.

Stop by metaViper tomorrow (or read the feed to find out what broke my resolve and brought me into the world of MMORPG gaming.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.