EPTI am a straight up gamer, Just like any kid that was born in the late 80's I got to see the rise of the internet and the rise of online gaming in its full force. My weapon of choice has always been the PC as console games always seemed limited to me and they didnt get the online portion for awhile. First real PC game??? Warcraft 1, blown away. I was in first grade and I remember waking up at 6am to ask my sleeping mom to make sure I could play before school starts. Building huge armies and taking over what a sick game. Second game? Warcraft 2 of course, I got in trouble in second grade for writing in my journal "Now that I have Warcraft 2 I am going to kick everybodys butt."
This was all jibs and jabs because the next game which some of you may be familair with on this website was called Star craft Brood War. Holy shit what a game to die for at that day and age. My first online game was vs my friends older brother was a TvT on challenger. I remember tons of BC's and me and my two friends that were watching me play keep yelling YAMATO!!!!!!. Needless to say BW will always have that place as a great game in my head, I have come back to that game so many times now its pretty absurd.
Next up was my first MMO; Asheron's Call. This game blew my mind just about as much as BW did. Living in another world is prety much a win. Me and all of my friends played and needless to say every day at recess at school we would sit down and just talk about all of the experiences we had had in the game. Asheron's Call was amazing because it was not like WoW and your tradiotional MMO now, AC had freedom, there were no factions, no "zones" you killed shit, met people and PvPed. What was sick about the game was that death actually had meaning, when you died in PvP people could loot your corpse and take your most valuable items. The result was player made factions which was incredible. There were guilds that declared themself "Non-Looting guilds" and I was a part of those guilds we were the nice guys that would not loot a body on kill. However, the "bad guy" guilds developed a faction of looters. They would sneak on people kill them and loot them. So what ended up happening was tons of battles all over the world between these 2 factions/guilds. It was absolutely amazing, we would have to hunt these guilds down and find out where there group was and take them out. The reverse happened way to many times as well, getting caught by the gank squad=There goes my really expensive helmet
. I felt like a hero in the game defending the right to Non-Looting. This is what an MMO should be.Next game was Tribes 2 my first amazing PC FPS. This game was so sick, the skill cap was like BW. Skill made a huge differance in this game. The game was so fast and you had to work well with your team as everybody had there own role on the team. Very simple, and Insane Gameplay
Next game was War 3 and this was when I was in middle/High school now and was actually old enough to be good at a game. I loved War 3, the graphics, the gameplay, the hero mechanism was such a sick idea for RTS absolutely loved it. Each race felt so amazing, I loved Undead, and the Night elves, playing vs an Orc Army felt epic and the battles were so long. I was so obsessed with this game that I would write out BO's during lectures at school.
Next game was vanilla WoW during my senior year of HS. My immense love for Wc3 made WoW spectacular. Seeing all of the RTS ideas I had come to love in a massive world was mind blowing. I remember seeing an AoW at the Night elf main town and going HOLY SHIT!. The game was so well polished and I hadnt played an MMO for like 6 years so I got sucked in. My sr year was a breeze to so I could easily stay up til 3 am playing WoW and still get good grades.
After finishing HS I quit WoW and started up BW again for about a year. And now this is where the blog starts to get Juicy.
During my 2nd semester of college I wanted another Good MMO. SC2 had just been announced and I was giddy like a fan girl, thinking ok Il wait one year and then SC2 should be out and il relive all those BW days right?
Wrong.
I had no idea I was going to have to wait 3 years for SC2 to come out.
This IMO is finally when video games began to fail, every game up to this point had immediately captivated me in every way and usually had a window of at least 2+ years of game time before I even felt the slightest bit of "burnout"
Warhammer Online was the first PC game that failed me. The game design was brillaint, PvP everywhere and go crazy. But they ended up fucking up the game by making to many servers. So what should of been a batshit crazy PvP gore fest, turned into ghost towns and one 1v1 PvP battle an hour within a few months and then everyone quit. Pretty sadening.
At this point I went back to BW as Sc2 was getting closer and I wanted to make sure my mechanics were set and good to go for release. Everyone was expecting beta at any moment.
Sc2 finally got released and now I was working on my Major in college. I knew pretty quickly that Sc2 was no BW at all. However, I played it for a year as my immense love for BW channeled me to play. If I had never played BW SC2 would of not lasted long at all for me. So I spent about a year on it then got way to frustrated during the Lings of Liberty era and got to the point where logging in was stressful.........
Next up was LoL, I had played a good amount of Dota during my wc3 days so this transition was easy, but LoL was the same thing as Dota and I had already burned out on that long ago. LoL didnt last long at all.
By Now I had just starting working full time for the first time ever in my life so I thought well, Sc2 is to stressful, LoL is dumb, FPS is to simple so I thought once again its for an MMO!
Perfect timing because SWTOR had just been released. I bought that quickly, played for about a month and then out of no where my brain said "your playing WoW with star wars skins. The game failed hard and only lasted a month..............
This was really where the first time in my life I had no game to play, nothing to captivate me and give that feeling of "Oh man I cant wait to get home and play that game!" Video gaming was turning more into a "Oh I have 2 hours to kill I guess il play"
My next game was Diablo 3, I had never played diablo at all so this was a whole new experience. Going to level 60 was pretty damn exciting and I thought I was back fianlly with a game that I could spend a few years on. But nope I hit level 60 and then the game got really stale with no PvP and a boring "do the campaign over and over again.
By then it was about fall 2012 and il give you 3 guesses which game I went back to........
BROOD WAR. I played for a month straight and got really hooked again, I would get off from work and be excited to play. Let me tell you that is pretty damn good for a game that came out in 1998 that is now trumping all of the modern games.
I was browsing tl for BW stuff when I came upon GW2, and was sold by there statement "The world actually has consequences no more meaningless quests!" That sold me in a second and I picked up. This game also lasted about a month for me after I quickly realized that they had marketed a bunch of bullshit that really wasnt dynamic after all. I quickly quit that game.
By now the beta for HoTs was out and so I gave that a whirl hoping and praying that Blizz could finally make SC2 enjoyable. But I was wrong, I quickly burned out again.
So what does all of this lead to?
Present day me August 7th 2013.
I am 24 years old and love video games, but there has yet to be a game since Vanilla WoW that truly has captivated me and genuinely excited me. Flop after Flop after Flop. Its really quite saddening. To me video games has become more of a "Lets make a sick CGI promise a bunch of features we can half ass to sell a ton of copys."
I want to be amazed again and challenged and be able to immerse myself in another world of video games again, but no game company seems to be able to do it anymore.
I used to believe all of the Nostalgia talk when people would say "Hey your old now you wont like video games anymore, you are yearning to be young again and that cant happen.
I dont think that way anymore, there is still so much to be discovered in the video game department, its just a matter of when someone will finally put a game out that can do it.
So if you made this far in the blog than high five to you cuz that was damn long.
Anyone else feel the same way?
And one more thing, Im not a loner! I have a full time job a GF my own place, a ton of friends, So no I am not that wierd guy that spends 80 hours a week playing video games.
