Wednesday, March 24, 2010

New Blog

OK, I guess I can't give up on blogging completely. :)

I'm going to move to tumblr and give that a whirl. My new blog is www.mymomentofzen.com. See ya there!

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Time to Move On

I think I've grown tired of the MMO treadmill. I've cancelled EverQuest II. No, don't worry - no whiny, this is why I'm quitting post follows. It's a fun game, but ultimately, it's just a treadmill, and I've reached a point, where both of my characters had their mythicals, and a decent assortment of fabled, that while they certainly weren't uber in any normal sense of the term, it's as close to winning the game as I care to get.

Hopefully one of these days, we'll see MMORPGs shift from being treadmills to having event-driven gameplay (like Guild Wars 2 promises). Where logging on is driven more by a desire to keep up with the everchanging story and everchanging world, and less by a desire to increase arbitrary numbers. There are enough games like that already, and I think I've grown tired of them. And I'm starting to realize that what I want most in a game is to feel like I'm a part of a damn good story. Bioshock gave me that. Mass Effect gives me that. Dragon Age, Final Fantasy XIII, and Guild Wars give me that.

World of Warcraft and EverQuest II are fun games, but they don't have that. Sure, there's some good writing in some of the quest arcs, but ultimately, the stories do very little to disguise the fact they are thinly veiled plots to get you to run to five random places and click on five random things. That's not entirely bad; it's fun on occasion. And I'm not giving up on MMOs completely: I will play Star Trek Online casually for the time being. And I'll probably check out Final Fantasy XIV when that comes out.

But MMO play is going to move to the backburner; my gameplay time will likely be spent playing single player games. And I also intend to complete one of my dreams: actually publishing my own game, probably for the iPhone. I've started writing a few games as prototypes and just have to figure out what I want to follow through to completion with.

I'm not going to continue updating this site, since I have little to add to the MMO discussion, and I think I've said about all there is to say about MMOs as they are now. Maybe I'll start up again if something revolutionary comes out.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have continue to have a great time wherever your online adventures take you.