Back from the Trollshaws

Well, I just got back from an extended vacation out in the wilds of Northern California. There is really nothing quite like crapping in a bucket and dodging feral pigs out in the wilderness to really bring you back to down to earth.

I also once again personally proved the effectiveness of FPS games as firearm trainers, despite barely ever firing a handgun I was pleasingly accurate. With more real-life practice I could be a fair shot. Thanks, Counter Strike.

The funniest thing was the terrain - I could have sworn up and down I was in the Trollshaws of Eriador. Minus the beech trees and adding madrone, among others of course. The cattle country on the way in also reminded me precisely of the Barrow Downs - if I were going to film a theatrical scene in the Barrow Downs, it would make a really good location.

So for the past few weeks, I have been living without the Internet but with electricity thanks to Honda and their handy generators. So I spent at least some of my off-time playing through Torchlight on my trusty laptop. And I'm still playing it now that I am back. I was never a huge Diablo/Rogue fan, but something in Torchlight really caught me.

Yesterday I logged back in to LOTRO, after roughly a two-month break. I think with the fresh perspective I understand the major drawback that game has for me - quests. WoW-style quests, I mean. I can handle "kill ten rats" to a certain degree, but elaborate quest chains and travel quests friggin' kill me.

On the same topic this is ultimately why I'm not playing Fallen Earth and why I have no plans to do so in the near future. I played through the first 10 levels or so and had my fill of the exact same style of advancement I was (subconsciously) fleeing in basically every other MMORPG I have played. Dealing with quest logs full of largely unrelated quests is enough to turn me off completely to a game these days - regardless whether I can solo them or not.

So for now I am satisfying my MMORPG cravings with DDO, which does not suffer from quite the same problems as the traditional model descended from DikuMUD. I may resubscribe to LOTRO simply out of love for Tolkien and to hang with my Landroval kinship Tirn en Taur. Money is only getting tighter in the coming months, though, so we'll see - fortunately $10/month is doable.

One thing I am still not doing is buying/playing Dragon Age. Which is strange considering that I've been waiting forever for it to come out. Basically it comes down to an EA issue for me. I don't want to be nickel-and-dimed and I especially do not want to be forced into marketing channels like Games For Windows Live. So I am going to wait and see and do more research before I start laying out nearly $100 for a semi-static single-player game I may never even have the time to really play. Oh well.