I’ve played a damn lot of MMOs so far. Some of them were free (Voyage Century Online, Space Cowboy Online, Trickster Online), some of them were not (Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains, World of Warcraft) and some of them I’ve only tried with a trial (Lineage 2, Everquest 2, EVE Online).
I’d been playing Guild Wars for an awful long time – 1.5 years. In those years I made some very good friends (Becky, I can’t be grateful enough for knowing you!), and had a lot of great time. But then, somewhere at the release of Nightfall and at the inner conflicts in Psycho Bunnies (it was probably the best guild in GW so far…), the game started to become tiring and annoying. I spent hours at one outpost trying to get some help from my helps to no avail (well, Becky tried to help a lot of times but two ain’t enough where there’s 8 required), and in the last months logging on for 5-10 minutes made me so annoyed I had to take an hour break from everything. Now the new expansion is coming – actually, the first and only expansion for Guild Wars, because all the previous releases were standalones which you could link to your other chapters -, I was tempted to buy it and try it again, but then I realized it would only get on my nerves, and I can spend that money better.
Around last christmas I signed for a 10-day trial of Lineage 2. I installed it, played for about 6 hours, got to level… 4? 5? And then, I was jogging outside of town toward my next quest goal, and there came a level 30+ player, saw me, hit me twice and I was dead. I said okay, logged off and uninstalled the game.
In those last months I spent some time with Trickster Online, which is good, but I got bored real fast – the lack of a story and the aimless wandering around couldn’t entertain me for long. At least it was free. Next stop – Space Cowboy Online. It’s good, it’s really good, but the near-terrain dogfights with hovercrafts ain’t my style really. Then came Voyage Century Online.
I love VCO. It has a lot of possibilities: you can be an explorer, you can be a gatherer, you can be a merchant, or a battleship commander, and if you get bored with any, you don’t have to restart from scratch – simply start to concentrate to an other aspect, with keeping every experience you got from the previous one(s). Or you can go over the edge and become a pirate, raiding other players’ ships, trying to avoid or escape from pirate hunters. Unfortunately, its interface ain’t (or, back then, weren’t) perfect, and the quest engine is… well, let’s just say, without google I couldn’t have finished almost any quests.
City of Heroes, City of Villains. It was really entertaining for a while. Its system is really good, a lot of other games could learn. The character creation is… well, it usually took me about 1-2 hours, and choosing my abilities took 5-10 minutes from that. The rest was creating the look of the character. The possibilities are almost infinite. There’s like 18 sliders just to define your head shape. There’s a vast combination of your costume, and later you can unlock and buy new pieces.
Unfortunately, the quests weren’t that impressive, and though I found a party very often, I found myself stuck with some particular quests because I couldn’t find anyone to help with those, and when my account expired I didn’t feel to renew it.
I bought World of Warcraft instead.
Again, it started out well. The first some levels were entertaining, the quests were fun (except the farming ones), and I’ve even found a reference to Forrest Gump. I’ve met some nice players, even found my own guild (The Beat Alls), but now I’m kinda stuck again. The quests at my level are… well, they aren’t at my level. And even those which are… let me take an example: I’m level25, I’m doing a level24 quest, and there comes a level31 creature pwning me. Mind you, 2-3 level difference in WoW really counts. Then, I’m hitting a level22 wolf which attacked me, and suddently a level ?? defender appears and hits me twice and I’m dead. Level ?? means waaay too big level difference, the game engine won’t show you the exact level of mobs (or opposing faction players) if they are way too many levels above you.
That suddently evaporated my fancy and I just quit. Maybe I’ll log back tomorrow, but I don’t know. It seems that that game is full of inbalanced mobs like that, and it’s no fun for me.
I just hope I’ll like Warhammer Online.
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Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 
Yesterday after work I decided to try Southern Comfort, because I’ve read about it and I liked what I’ve read.