Well, with my resubscription to EVE Online, something else had to go. In any event, I wonder if playing four different online games at once is at all healthy, or indeed feasible. My current smorgasbord tendencies with MMOs mean that I end up skimming a lot of titles, but not actually getting anywhere in any of them.
It’s probably a commitment thing. I like variety, certainly, but many MMOs seem to punish people who like that. It’s gotten better in recent years certainly, but at their core, the majority still have a basic repetition exercise as their main way of progressing the character – mob-whacking mostly. So I dabble with trade skills, I explore the maps, I eventually start alting to see if the other classes have it easier, and when my need for new experiences still isn’t satisfied, I fire up another, different, MMO.
This recent round of ‘free’ MMO deals isn’t helping either, sending me into something of a magpie-like downbload-and-install hoarding frenzy. I may be just collecting them as trophies, to be honest. My precioussssss... I can think of six titles now, for those online gamers who still reject the idea of the monthly fee:
- Guild Wars
- PlanetSide: Reserves
- Puzzle Pirates
- Shadowbane
- Second Life
- Anarchy Online
Which isn’t bad, although I suspect Shadowbane is only on that list for the remainder of it’s now uncertain, but most likely short, life. Various links to the left to get those. Out of the six, I’d suggest that only Anarchy Online represents the traditional MMO grind experience, and time commitment, and out of my current four, it’s probably the one that’s got to go.
It’s one of those amicable partings though. I don’t hate it, I just don’t have time for it. My recent, and very brief foray there showed the game I remember, with a few new touches, but nothing revolutionarily different. It’s hard to review it, because for me, it is very much a trip down memory lane, taking me back to the year I spent in it, fully involved and immersed, and living another distant life. It’s a place of echoes now, in more way than one.
The newer bits I hadn’t seen – the Alien Invasion stuff seemed to consist of very Star Wars: Galaxies style player towns mostly, along with a new newbie area (so-so), and a huge amount of new dialogue driven quests, ala World of Warcraft, which I’m not sure it really needed. Like the SWG towns, several months in, the novelty of owning a guild town, and the reality of what that actually amounts to, seems to have caused an almost identical problem in AO – towns everywhere in the wilderness, all of which are mostly abandoned and empty. At least in AO, the individual buildings are a great deal more detailed, and are far better integrated with the terrain they are on, with paving, roads, and massive, distantly visible, futuristic towers somewhat like a chrome vision of the Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City.
Trouble is, they look nice, but don’t seem to actually do anything. Presumably some of the buildings might have some function, but only if you’re in the town-owning guild?
The idea of the town as a municipal hub never quite seems to work in MMOs, I’ve found. At best, it is merely a bank, trade spam and travel nexus, with scenery, and at worse, a nightmarish drain on client memory and bandwidth – a navigational hazard. Real towns exist mostly as a focal point for industry and commerce, and the residential needs of a populace. In an MMO, a hero usually has no need of food, warmth or shelter, and their primary industry usually takes place deep in the Mountains of Peril. In that kind of situation, the successful bankers and armour-smiths would probably be the ones that set up new branches just outside the raid entrance, to better reach their customers. Dedicated Trade channels are usually only limited to town locations purely to force players to go to a town to trade – some pretence at reality perhaps?
Travel is the real need for most players, and the main centre of player density invariably moves to the most well-connected crossroads. In EQ it was the East Commonlands Tunnel, on the crossroads between the two main routes across the biggest continent. In SWG, it was Coronet Starport, which allowed access to the most planets. In AO is was Omni Ent Plaza, again, with access to the most teleporters. In WoW it’s Ironforge – again, a major travel route, and has auction house access. The places with the most traffic offer the best opportunities to sell the most shineys, and because so many people are there, these place then become the best places to just hang out and show off how firey one’s sword is. I suppose in the real world it would be Heathrow and JFK airports.
In these kinds of worlds the idea of the Player Town is pretty much doomed from the start. Usually only a large guild has the resources to complete the tasks needed to build one, already making the town an exclusive project, rather than an inclusive one. Then those guild members still need travel and trade anyway, so the whole enterprise becomes little more than a trophy, maintained because, well, you’ve got to keep up with The Order of Jones. The players nominally ‘live’ there, but rarely spend any actual time there, leaving the sight, familiar to anyone who has played SWG or AO, of the tumbleweed-strewn desert of buildings, none of which serve any function, save as a rather poignant scenic interlude in the trek across the wilds.
So I’d sit in the empty plaza for a while, listening to the familiar echoes of the past; the excitement and anticipation of planning, the communal enterprise of building, the pride of ownership, the bonding of the residents, the gradual disillusionment and the entropic drifting away, as the residents reached that sad ‘So now what?’ moment, and then the inevitable abandonment and finally the soft howl of an imaginary wind born of misplaced expectation, singing to an empty and pointless monument to a facsimile of a real life that just doesn’t exist in MMOs. Then I finish my sandwiches, pick up the shotgun, and continue on my way to the mission.
It was nice to see the old stomping grounds again, certainly, but to be honest, online games have moved on from the technological masterpiece that was once Anarchy Online, and I think, so have I. The abandoned gleaming towers seem a rather appropriate analogue for the entire game itself, in a way, although to be fair, there seemed to be a reasonably healthy population in there, so it’s perhaps not quite as melancholy as I make it sound.
I expect I’ll keep it installed (it is free, after all) for those nights when I’m feeling all maudlin and introspective, but it’s not something I’ll be playing with any regularity, so I think it’ll be going in the Dormant sidebar category to make way for EVE Online. More on that later…