Well, that's probably enough free trial hopping for the time being, I'd say. Been an interesting month and a half though, and it's always good to broaden one's horizons, even if it is only 'trying a different kind of computer game for a bit'. I quite enjoy the occassional change of scenery from time to time anyway, and tend to be a bit of a fickle with my Brand Loyalty to be honest, but this particular mini-run of Operation Cheapseats did have a kind of focus to it: looking for a 'different' MMO.

I'm sure the more perceptive of you have been silently adding the invisible 'to World of Warcraft' each time you read me ranting about 'different', and it seems you can't throw a stone in the RSS reader these days without hitting someone who seems at once obsessed, and yet also irritated, with the big-ass Blizzard success these days. I hear there's some kind of new expansion in the works for it? "Insurrection of the Undermine?" Something like that anyway.

(I still maintain that the best expansion for WoW would be one in which both the Horde and Alliance get goblins as a playable race, and a huge civil-war in their city. Goblins is the best part of WoW if you ask me!)

Everyone seems at best unimpressed with the details so far, in the same way that they aren't that impressed with the other expansion that I'm also missing. I have no experience with any of it, having hung up WoW, contented, after reaching L60 with my first character. Job done, tick in the box, moving on! Don't get me wrong mind you, I'm certainly not a 'hater'. Thoroughly enjoyed the whole journey, and perhaps when enough years have passed, I might even like to try it a second time. Hopefully, as a goblin!

Many others aren't so sanguine about WoW having, well, an end I suppose, and plough head first into a variety of unsatisfying 'make-busy' tasks and subsequently seem to get themselves in a terrible state, which is a shame. This kind of souring threatens to tarnish the memories of the good times that were had in there, and seems so avoidable too. Not my place to tell folks what they ought to be doing with their free time, of course, but it's always seemed quite clear to me what one should do when a game stops being fun.

Anyway, I sometimes think I was never quite playing WoW 'properly', and my most scarey top-end dungeon was Lower Blackrock Spire, so treat my opinions with the dismissal they no doubt deserve! (I think that was what it was called anyway - the one with the evil dwarf town.) Still, when I get fed up with an MMO, I try different one, and that's what Operation Cheapseats is all about. Any MMO worth playing at all has some kind of free trial these days - usually a 14 day romp around the low-end newbie content, letting prospective subscribers have a bit of a taste before doing anything drastic with credit cards, and despite what many people think there's actually hundreds of the things out there. Here's a list, if you don't believe me! Granted, not all of them have quite the polish of WoW, but odds are there's something in there that'll entertain for a couple of months.



This particular go at the trials had a bit of a theme; the pursuit of this nebulous 'different' I keep carping on about, and the three games I saw all had that in spades. It was also a good chance to fill in some notable blanks in my otherwise broad canon of MMO gaming, which is always important if you hope to rant about MMOs and be taken seriously in any way at all. I still haven't played Dark Age of Camelot or Merdian 59 yet either - glaring ommissions that will probably have to wait until the Cheapseats mood takes me again. I'm also morbidly curious about Matrix Online too - is it really all that bad?

Three very good examples of how else it can be done this time around though, with some surprises.

Auto Assault was a lot of fun, with a setting like no other, and yet surprised me by being perhaps the most WoW-like of the three, despite it all being fast cars, mutants and machine-guns. With the announcment of it's mothballing, I kind of wished I'd tried it earlier really. Still, glad I actually got a look at all, now its soon to be no more. Maybe something similar will rise again. Exanimus sounds like it has shades of the post-apocalyptic about it, and Interplay continue to sit on the Fallout MMO licence. I suspect they're just waiting for The Right Price, before turfing it over to someone more suited to putting the idea into practice - this new Zenimax MMO lot perhaps? Elsewhere in The Grim Future, there's Tabula Rasa and Huxley to look forward to. I hope we'll see more Sci-fi not too far ahead.

City of Heroes is one I'm glad I finally got round to. Lots of people say the grind is a bit of a nightmare, past 30, but I did love the early levels, and the fantastic travelling powers. Godforbid a jaded old hack like me even consider 'RP' anymore, but it was one of the few times in recent gaming where I've actually felt like the part. It's also a refreshingly casual thing too - I can see myself just dipping in for a mission or two, rather than the five-hour slogs I'm more used to. After all these years of caving in orc, wolf, rat and skeleton heads, bouncing about a busy metropolis fighting Crime is going to take some wearing out, I think, so I think this'll be one for a subscription, and should make a nice change of scene for when I'm in that vigilante mood. The surprise there was how much fun MMO gaming can be with the constant spectre of Stats looming over my shoulder.

Dungeons and Dragons Online was the biggest surprise though, showing me how utterly different modern day MMOs are to the dice-rolling group-play of Ye Olde Penne And Paper. Turbines go at making that style of thing into an MMO was solid enough and polished within itself, but at the same time, was almost an completely different gaming experience to any other MMO I've played, and for something that looks so similar to Everquest 2, plays in almost alien ways than I was used to. Hard to say which of us was at fault there really, but for me at least, things have changed a lot since I last picked up a pointy dice. Faced with something so completely different, I realise now that perhaps there can be such a thing as 'too much change'. I'm glad I gave it a go though...very instructive, and perhaps one day, I'll be able to return to it properly.



I guess there are two types of MMO gamer these days; those of us who are happy with our game of choice and willl keep on playing until they forcibly evict us, and those of us who are still in search of a game we can truly call home.

I started in on Anarchy Online just after it's notorious release, (Which really wasn't all that bad, if you ask me. Laggy for a month or two and a bit tempramental, but soon patched into acceptability.) I made a lot of friends there, and had a good year or two. Eventually, I moved on though. A good few years later, I popped back to check out Shadowlands, and one or two of my old compatriots were still there, on the same characters, doing the same levelling, hunting, missions, shopping, etc, four years in. On my occasional revists to Planetside, I see the same old names on Command Chat, and in the kill-spam. When Pirates of the Burning Sea is out, I expect I'll go with the Access Pass again and take the opportunity to pick up the Bolt Driver once more, and I have no doubt it'll be the same names again. Some folks are perfectly happy where they are, and I envy that in some ways. I expect there's a significant number of folks in Star Wars: Galaxies, that have been there from the start, stayed through hell and high-upgrade, and still love it today.

We're not all that lucky though, and for the rest of us nomads, myself included, it's an ongoing oddessy; an ongoing Operation Cheapseats, of various 'trial' length and costs. I think the trick is not to give up, and to keep on looking. But we'll never know for sure unless we give it a go. Next time you're slumped there at the arse-end of an unsucessful raid, or your twenty-ninth farming trip on The Throne Of Dooooom, or just bogged down into level 48 and going nowhere fast, why not take a bit of a break and hunt down that free trial you never quite got round to? In the words of lisping potato-faced celebrity chef Jamie Oliver: "Try something new today!"

(And if you do, do pimp any blog ramblings about it here. There's a lot of games I can't free trial now, having subbed and seen them to death already. Always fascinated to read other people's first impressions of them!)


Anyway, it's back on the Tuesday N00b Club for me, (more on that tomorrow), and probably a few months of superpowered mayhem in CoX too.