EPTOn occasion, generally I'll get online and drunkenly queue just to see how many Zerglings it takes to kill players in Platinum these days. Having fallen from masters, it is generally still a good bit of fun. The one genre that never suited me, or perhaps more appropriately, never struck the right tone with me were MMO RPGs. After building my first PC when I was around eighteen, I was rooming with an MMO fiend and I never got it (To a certain extent I still don't quite).
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The older I get, especially in games with social elements, the more I feel like Randy Marsh from South Park and I am very much ok with that. Now, how do I hand something to another player?
I played Age of Conan with him, but gave it up. Really I just had a character on an account I would mess around on, and in retrospect I really dug the combat system in that game; but he would explain to me his brief forays into EVE Online, returns to Guild Wars 2, what made Rift so interesting in comparison with the laundry list of MMOs he had installed at any given moment. It was all water off a ducks back really.
I think the largest part of the mental block for me was the settings. Fantasy and myself, as a broad genre, have never gotten along. There was a short while when I was in elementary school where I fell in love with the Redwall series, but since I've never found myself gripped with swords, elves, orcs, or some of the other mainstay races in the genre which packs countless shelves at Half Price Books across the United States.
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I think I may have just thought it was cool to have a mouse with a sword, or I think it was a dirk rather, I am likely crossing wires here but I do own Lord Brocktree in hard cover if that is any indication of elementary school me.
That being said as a classic Sci-Fi Junkie, even SWOTR didn't get me on my ass and into MMOs. I rationalized this around the cannon vs. non cannon and a completely unfounded notion that the Star Wars universe was best left un-expanded upon; I say unfounded in that I have similar feelings about Spotify without having a real reason to dislike them but I do. What can I say? I am a complicated nerd. I will put an asterisk and say that Knights of the Old Republic the RPG, should be played by everyone with the means to do so. Again, complicated nerd.
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I may not have been there at the beginning, I may not have know how good it was, or how important throughout the original trilogy, but I can remember Episode IV on laserdisc. That's right, laserdisc.More to the point though I've never felt the need to know more about one specific planet, race, what have you in Star Wars
In line with other sci-fi interests of late, I even peeked into the Star Trek Online MMO, a universe into which I absolutely have looked well beyond the stated cannon of the series. For whatever reason I couldn't ever get the launcher to work and wasn't interested enough to try and troubleshoot what to me should have been a non issue to begin with. Lo and behold that same former roommate, having gotten wind of my looking into MMOs, pointed me in the direction of Wildstar.
I did my due diligence into some of the story, races, and was genuinely interested in the premise they had come up with. For those who don't know I'll save you some time and say that the game revolves around a planet on which the gods of the Dominion, an empire charged by their gods to set up an empire across the galaxy, inhabited. The planet was discovered by exiles who fled dominion control and conflict ensues.
For me there was no contest for choice of faction once I heard about the Mechari. Sorry Chua, your maniacal, mousey charm just didn't cut it. Once you tell me I can play as an alien Terminator, I am pretty much going for it.
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To use the developer's words: The Mechari are a race of 9 foot tall robots, highly-efficient killing machines that make it their business to eliminate traitors and spies on Nexus. Originally engineered by the Eldan themselves, they have fallen into the hands of the Dominion. They are not known for their keen sense of humor.
The other bit, as may be evident by the bit written by the developer, is that the game doesn't take itself so seriously. It strikes a tone somewhere just short of Borderlands' level of sardonic and serious. I always had gotten the sense, watching games like WoW and Everquest being played that the lore for fantasy MMOs insofar as I had seen, was just shy from sacred. Given my previously stated position on fantasy, I couldn't bring myself to open my wallet to those titles. Whether or not that is actually the case, I'll never be certain; I get the sentiments of feeling protective of a Universe or story you are vested in, I am in a similar place with Star Trek, but different strokes and all.
So now, most evenings, I can be found on Pergo, intermittently chatting with Sermokala and a couple other TL'ers about miscellaneous stuff, and grinding out levels as the other half of my screen has Deep Space Nine rolling along or a Starcraft tournament. There are issues with the game, the client isn't stellar, and some of the community has gone to great lengths to fix issues specifically with frame rates, but for a casual like me it is a nice, relaxing way to pass an evening that doesn't always involve copious amounts of grain alcohol, or going out.
Despite the fact I am still not sure what I am doing all the time, or where I am going with this game, there is a certain je ne sais quoi about it that keeps me wanting to come back. So, for the time being I am making my best effort to turn off, and just enjoy the game for what it is. One last thing about Wildstar, and the amount I've been playing lately is:
As always thanks for the read TL.
