I confess to only my second occassion of burnout playing WoW. It happened last week, mostly as a result of a serious grind with Vilemedia, to get Hellgrima to 70, which we accomplished. Hell may end up being better than Hall, largely because of the advantage of being version 3 of an endgame toon. Yeah, there is stuff to know.
So, since I'd finished pounding out both class syllabi, despite being on a gamer machine with no apps. (god bless you Google, for Google docs), I decided to see if WoW was really that darned good or if most decent MMOs are just that good. +grin+
Sarah and I couldn't resist ducking into the EB Games to oogle titles. Frankly I was curious about BioShock, a 'new gen' FPS allegedly. But I don't have an XBox just yet. They had one copy left of LOTRO, an MMO which I'd been thinking about anyhow, since I am a serious LOTR fan. (Have read the books and own all the flicks and did the midnight stand in line for the last flick. I even read the book about the books, that tells how it all works out for the characters.)
So I installed LOTRO, and man is my lappie good or what, while playing WoW I downloaded all the updates (about an hour's worth) in the background. And then... I stepped in to take a look around. I'm on a 10 day free trial. What my household doesn't need is another game subscription (we have 2 for me, and one each for Akie and Clive. cha-ching.) While looking at races and classes, Akie and I found ourselves using WoW to characterize the choices: healer, tank, pallie, mage. etc.
I've rolled a tank (Guardian), hunter, and healer (Minstrel) and started to play a bit. The graphics are very different. The effort is to be realistic, but I keep feeling like it's 2D even though it isn't. I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's because the character movements are so stiff compared to WoW (and it's not like WoW is that life like). I also feel very separate from my toon. Not sure why. The landscapes are interesting and there is clearly general MMO knowledge that lets one navigate with skill. You can just "feel" where you should go and what you should click.
There are a lot of elements that have been borrowed from WoW. Instead of a ! over the head of a quest giver you see a ring, but hey, same thing. The big and mini maps both have more built-in info iconically displayed, and that's nice. The story is there, but well... it ain't exactly literature, nor is it particularly well woven into the LOTR line, at least in noobie ville. THe quests for noobs are similar: kill 20 of this, talk to this, find this and bring it back. This really might be a noobie ville thing so I'll suspend judgment.
At any rate, I feel very distant from this toon. It feels like paper dolls played through a veil of some sort. I dunno. I'm gonna play the full 10 days. It may just be a matter of habituation to WoW.
Sadly, their server update day is ALSO TUESDAY. arg! Here are shots of the quest log and the character panel. I don't like the quest log. It's so... intrusive. And hey, where are the tooltips?! I'm a noob and help is very hard to come by. Hmmm James, maybe a comparison is in order here. This may illuminate what makes WoW different.
I had the same disassociation with Vanguard. WOW has an exaggerated aesthetic that actually conveys information quicker then a realistic approach.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Vanguard seemed like WOW done poorly. Blizzard works hard to do things right. Many of the conventions in WOW were not created by Blizzard, but perfected.
A comparison and contrast is most likely in order. Yet . . .
One thing WOW has going so well is that it isn't really about skill [though skill helps], but time. My to-do list for VileMedia is still long . . . both personally and communally.
And it isn't just play time. The amount of out of game research is staggering. WOW wouldn't be WOW without its out of game community of developers and documenters.
That's a good point, and it makes WoW more of a hobby than a game. IMHO.
ReplyDelete