Roleplaying games

Some people are nuts. Really.

I was one of them, but only for one night, some years ago. I had agreed to go out with some friends of mine. I knew there would have been also a nice-looking girl I met last weekend. Of course is easy to say that now, but I think that she was interested in me at the time….

So what happened, and why I’m talking about this in a roleplay blog? Because at those times, the hype of the moment was Everquest 1. Yes, the first incarnation, with that horrible 3d graphic (that at those time looked fantastic though). I was wandering with my level 6 female monk in the east commons, and got killed by a giant spider in a far away zone. Man, how good was the MMORPG at those times!!!

No gold sellers, no raids, no uber-players, no powerleveling… it was like a virgin territory to explore.

So, as I said I was killed and had the famous trouble of retrieving my corpse with all my precious valuables (that were really ridiculous, but I was just an EQ newbie at those times!). I had tried but there were too many monsters. And the time was running fast… until I realized that was already 8pm and I should have met with other REAL LIFE friends at 8.15!!! impossible of course since I was living 50km away, and had yet to prepare myself.

Guess what I did? I called a friend of mine telling him, with lot of embarassement, that I couldn’t come because of… that game! because I had to retrieve that damn corpse! my friend thought I was joking with him, but when he realized I was serious, he just said “are you nuts? fuck off!” and hanged the phone.

That night I was up until 2am playing EQ, until finally I got back the corpse with the help of one of the very few high levels character that was on the server. The morning after thought I realized how stupid I was. I got news that the sexy girl was there, and another friend of mine kissed her (and probably did a lot more than I know).

I said to myself “this will never happen anymore”. And luckily it didn’t. I kept playing EQ, but never started to play it if I knew that I had to do something important, in my real life, not the fictional life of MMORPG!

I often wondered that myself. Are MMORPG really fun? or is just a way for the big companies to try to suck more money possible from a single person?

For normal singleplayer CRPG, you just buy the game once and stop, no more fees. With MMORPG, even the new “fake free games” trend, they have just one purpose: get more money possible from YOU. Either with a monthly fee, or with more or less ridiculous add-ons, etc.

I enjoyed playing lot of MMORPG, like Everquest I and II, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, EVE, and recently Vanguard. They all were fun of course, but enough to keep me interested in playing it for long time? except EQ 1-2, surely not.

They use the method: you need to kill tougher and tougher mobs to get better stuff, then you level and the stuff you have sucks, so you need to go out and kill even more tougher mobs to get even better stuff, until you level again. There is also the motivation of discovering new spells or new skills/abilities. Or to get a new class or a variant of the base class. Or to have enough gold to buy mounts or weird stuff that will reflect your higher social status.

But in the end, all that stuff… is fun??

My answer is yes, but just in the initial period. After a while it gets repetitive and boring. Expecially once you reach a level so high that you are forced to group or, even worse, to do raids! but I’ll talk about this in the next post…

Just got a news about a game I reviewed some time ago, “Magic Stones“. The authors have released an interesting add-on called “The Magic Shop”. What is it? in practice it allows you to spend XP and PP (prestige points) in a sort of shop to buy avatars upgrades or, more interestingly, “perks”.

The word “Perks” instantly reminds me of the great Fallout game. Indeed, perks are some “special skills” that you can unlock only in the shop, and that will give your druid extra powers like faster mana regeneration, some elements bane (for example “air bane” will decrease the stats of all opponent avatars that are air-based).

The add-on can be obtained for $4,99 which seems reasonable. I had followed the author’s thoughts about charging for each new quest, because of the amount of work involved, but I see in the end he opted for giving away yet another free quest, but charging only for this add-on.

So personally I’ve decided to buy it, also because reading his blog, he has already started working in another rpg very similar to the old classics like “Dungeon Master” or “Eye of the Beholder”… this guy needs some encouraging!