Lifestyle change

February 7, 2005

This is a MMORPG post, so if you have no clue or interest, move along.

For almost the last eighteen months, my wife and I have had our heads in a multiplayer computer game called Star Wars Galaxies, but a host of annoyances, serious concerns about the future path of the game, and a really bad session have caused us to set the game aside for awhile—possibly forever. To fill the void left by this game, we’ve taken on World of Warcraft, an MMORPG so popular they actually had to stop selling the game for awhile to get the servers back on their feet.

SWG is fun as long as you are talking to people, decorating your player house, or just looking at things. Try to interact with any computer bits, and you’ll find the content sorely lacking and horribly buggy. A year ago, there may have been an excuse. But even now, for all the vastness of the SWG universe there’s still precious little content. Playing SWG is like walking through a painting.

And while the society aspect of SWG is fun, misguided attempts to create a “realistic” experience deadened the game. Early on, players had to wait up to ten minutes for mass transit mechanisms (shuttles, starcraft) in the game. That wait was reduced, in stages, to sixty seconds. But early on I had entire gaming sessions spent simulating waiting for the bus. For this reason it’s also very difficult to get a group together to do anything. As most services are player-supplied and demand far outstrips production, it can take up to an hour to get everyone organized to do a group activity.

With so little content, character advancement is mind-bogglingly tedious. Sure, it’s realistic to have to make 2,000 “droid personality chips” before you can take the next level of Droid Engineering skills, but we’re not making droid personailty chips. We’re pushing mouse buttons. Over and over and over again. And then when we do level up, we get the same task except more so. It’s about as mentally engaging as filling in my social security number on op-scan sheets over and over again. And killing Rancors is fun the first time, but having to kill 1,000 of them to advance? Give me a break.

SWG got a lot of the eye-candy right, but if you ever want to accomplish something in-game be prepared for a lot of boredom and frustration. We held on a long time in the hopes that we would finally unlock that part of the game that was so much fun, but every time we unlocked something new it was just more of the same stuff we had already done but more time-consuming. So we’re taking a break.

We’ve only had WoW(World of Warcraft) for a weekend, now—I’ll let you know how that goes once some of the glitter of new wears off.

Posted in Technology, World of Warcraft