Roleplaying games

I recently tried one of those new free MMORPG, “Tales of Pirates”, and was both fun and at same time disappointing to see that there was still the “camping” present since the first days of Everquest…

For those who don’t know what it is, is quite simple: in a certain location spawns a powerful (or even not powerful) monster, that once killed or performed a task, gives you a very powerful item who everyone wants. So, there are thousands of players on server but the world is one: what happens? that people sits nearby the spawn point and try to kill it as soon as it appears!

In many MMORPG the first party that does damage to it gets the loot, or recently in a better way the party that does more damage to it gets the loot. But is really fun to see groups of people battling over it, trying to get the reward

I just asked myself from a gamedesign point of view if is a cool thing or not: it sucks because people with lot of time can always get the loot, while the more “casual” players will almost never be able to get it (if is really so powerful and sought). On the other hand, this solves the problem of having too many people getting powerful quickly. I remember in Dark Age of Camelot that when you kill a named NPC all players in the party gets a powerful item. I don’t think that this is really the solution, to give all the party members a reward for killing it – makes the game progression too fast IMHO.

Anyway talking about that MMORPG in particular, seems quite nice. It’s free, but is one of those “use real cash to buy items inside the game”… so as always you’ll see people that spent lot of money on it leveling to lvl 60 in a few days thanks to the uber powerful items they bought… I have yet to understand if in the end you pay more that way than with a regular subscription!

Today I woke up and this question puzzled my mind. Seriously, I’m the only male, roleplay fan, that hasn’t even only tried to play WOW for 5 minutes? not even the free demo? probably yes!

To be honest I never ever approached that game because I was quite confident that… I would have been addicted. Knowing how good are the Blizzard guys, I suppose (because, as I said, I just saw some screenshots about WOW and that’s it) that I would have been “enslaved”.

I know another friend that entered the beta program, played the game for 10 minutes, and commented “it’s magnificent, a masterpiece” then quickly uninstalled it, and gave the beta copy to another friend, all this just to avoid to vanish from real-life! he has a family and a daily job… quite hard to play WOW and have to work/feed someone at same time!

Also considering how many ads you see everywhere for “WOW Gold Sellers”, I suppose that only looking at that you can get a good estimate on how that game can be popular.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll try it – but surely not now. I’m too scared to disappear from real life.

When was the last good commercial RPG you played? ok, except NWN2. Nothing comes up, huh?

Surely you can find some cool “action-rpg” or the so-called “Japanese RPG” like Final Fantasy, Suikoden, and so on. But what about Troika RPG ? good old-school rpg with thousands of stats and skills, really hard quest and long lifespan? and a game like Vampire bloodlines? with adult content, and not only those cute-lovely-anime characters that personally I can’t stand anymore?

Well unfortunately the whole CRPG commercial sector went mad. Everyone is either:

1. making the ultimate (boring) MMORPG with subscription
2. making the ultimate (boring) FREE MMORPG (just to charge you for every single item you buy that is above level 1)
3. making those cute-lovely-peaceful anime/jappo RPG where characters have 3 stats
4. making an action rpg, where the RPG component is 1/10 of what it was in Diablo 1…
5. simply NOT making a rpg

and so on. The situation is dramatic, really. As an old-school player I can find hope only in indies. Spidweb, Winterwolves or hopefully new forces will be strong enough to provide some decent old-school CRPG.

Because I have enough of MMORPG or cute-anime characters!!!!