More on MMOs

First, I am still enjoying Conan, though, if you read the forums for the game, you'd think I was the only one. Guess those that enjoy something do it, while most of the whiners post on the forums.

That's not to say there aren't some happy posters, there are, and those are the posts I actually read.

I have noticed something in many of the adventure MMOs that does frustrate me. It is the Killing = Experience = Leveling = "goals". There seems to be little thought given to other methods of character advancement. Why not give more experience for persuasion, sneaky things, and cooperation and making killing the last ditch strategy of the incapable? I'm not suggesting this for every MMO, because I like to randomly kill things once in a while too. It's just not what I want every adventure to be about.

I suppose one reason is it is simpler to create an "us" and a "them" to thump on and then let the players spend most of their time killing randomly re-spawning beasties. It take lots of time to create intricate and involved story-line content. This was the difficulty faced by the Myst Online: Uru Live team. And I've seen it just messing around with the content creator for Neverwinter Nights. Good NPC conversations and intricate story take a lot longer than painting an area and populating it with beasties.

Still, the table-top RPGs I enjoyed the most emphasized story and intrigue over just killing things and grabbing loot. Maybe that was why it was hard to find consistent gamers. Fortunately, I have found several that enjoy that kind of scenario, so we meet every two weeks to solve the problems of that particular campaign.

To use the too-oft-used song line: "If I were a rich person..." I'd develop an MMO that fit my ideals and hope to get enough non-traditional players to make it go.

MMOs and the demise of Uru

When Uru shut down I thought I wouldn't do another MMO. Partly for the time and partly because World of Warcraft and the like never appealed to me.

As the old saying goes, Never Say Never. I picked up Age of Conan a few weeks ago. What first caught my eye was the beauty of the graphics in the screen shots and trailers. I have always enjoyed the world of Conan stories as well. It is an MMO first and foremost, so there are some down sides, but I am actually enjoying it. Even the odd control it yourself combat system is better than I feared. It still is difficult as a solo gamer because as you go up in level the quests get much harder.

You start in a solo adventure, to learn the game, and then go to a town where there are solo and group quests. The solo ones I can handle, but, as a casual gamer, the group quests are quite a bit more difficult. Since my life outside the game is quite full, I don't have the time to devote to the game. This makes it harder to find other people to help with the multi-player quests, so I die a lot trying to complete them solo. I am glad the death penalties aren't too harsh because that would drive me away very quickly.