A New(ish) MMORPG
So the past week or two I have begun casting about for a new MMORPG to waste my time with. Currently I only play Lord of the Rings Online, and my opportunities to log into that have been few and far between so I am not sure why I am bothering.
I have a lot to do in "real life" (I'm a parent) so I really have little time to play any MMO grind-game. But still I am called back, mostly because of my love of virtual worlds (at least those where you can actually do something) and my desire to defeat the forces of virtual evil (has to be virtual evil since Dick Cheney's security detail would crush me in a second making any thrown pies or rotten fruit a semi-worthless gesture).
So I have been strongly considering Darkfall, partly out of pre-existing curiosity but largely due to Syncaine's writing about it. I have also been on-again/off-again following the development of Fallen Earth, which was just relased yesterday. However, the $50+subscription price tag for both of those games has really put me off.
I'm pretty cheap like that, but more than just cheapness is guiding these feelings. Mainly, I think, it is because of the Warhammer release. Yes, I shelled out almost $60 for that steaming pile. Yes, by the end of open beta I was sick of it and played for maybe a week after only to never pick it up again. That's near-$60 wasted. Completely. To me we are now in fool-me-once territory, considering the disaster that was Age of Conan (which I fortunately missed) and the generally crappy reputation MMORPG as an industry has for technical issues.
Combine this with cookie-cutter gameplay, shallow, story-lite immersion and the fact MMOs have overtaken competitive FPSs as asshat-sinks (who would have thought in 2004 that WoW would become the new CounterStrike?) and I am largely over MMOs in general. Yet still I keep getting called back ...
So at this point I basically won't try anything without a trial, and even then I can be pretty unforgiving. So while I have been looking pretty strongly at Fallen Earth (I still might have to plunk down those 50 bones), I have looked beyond for greener pastures and have come up with ... Saga of Ryzom?
I had wanted to try out Ryzom quite a while ago, but the seemingly-perpetual business problems surrounding it sadly left it a game in limbo for longer than my attention span would allow me to follow it. While it looked like a really good game, it also seemed destined for nothing more than the dustbin of MMORPG history.
Imagine my surprise then hearing people recommending it on forums as an alternative to Fallen Earth. And here I thought it was dead and gone ... but no! As of late May of this year the game has come back under the ownership of Winch Gate Property from that magical island Cyprus.
It is still too early to tell, as I have only one night in, but I have decided to stick with it at least for the next two weeks. Everyone starts with a three-week trial then if you continue you are charged a little more than $10 a month with no buy-in fee. It's a subscription, but not too bad a price overall.
So far the main thing I have noticed is that there is no jumping, whether off cliffs or merely a foot off the ground. This actually bothers me a lot and might normally be a deal-breaker (I know I'm a little crazy like that), but I'll stick through it to see the rest of the game. I've heard it has some of the better crafting in the genre and ... drumroll ... you can actually create your own instances of the game world! I have yet to explore it so I do not yet know the particulars but I logged into the builder for a second, and yes it allows you to place mobs and terrain very reminiscent to the Neverwinter Nights module builder. Pretty damn exciting stuff if you're like me.
The character I am playing is an eponymously-named Tryker Gatherer. Hopefully by the end of today I will have a firm grasp on character progression and the basics of the game. I do know that while I picked the Gatherer package when creating little Fortuente, the sytem allows you to progress in any direction you desire. I have no firm goals at this point, as I do not know the system well enough, but my general plan is to make a gathering-crafter.
So where does that leave LOTRO? Well, I still like it even if I am a bit disenchanted with Turbine (arising from having to deal with their horrendous customer service because of DDO which has about caused me to swear off that game entirely even though it is "free"). I don't know, I recently paid up for my three months in LOTRO so I won't be actually quitting that game soon even if I don't manage to log in overmuch. But if Ryzom is a success with me then LOTRO has to deal with that, Team Fortress 2 and my city-builder addiction. But then, if I wasn't such a die-hard Tolkien fan and Turbine had gone in the phat-lewt direction with the game, I would probably have cut off LOTRO quite a while ago.