Poor MMORPGs, has it really come to this?
I play EVE. It's more interesting to watch grow than it is to play. It's full of not quite realized possibilities. That is, unless you're all over playing the market or joining a corporation(clan). Sadly, your stats and loadout seem to mean more than actual skill, the number of characters with you disproportionally more than that.
Aion I was keen on until I watched the gameplay videos. After playing so, so many of EQ's progeny, you can quickly see that sort of combat flow. It wasn't very impressive, but still quite pretty.
EverQuest 2 was a barren wasteland of muddy graphics and critters that I gave on up at lvl 20ish. I don't even remember the name of the MMO I tried that was EQ 2.5. Something that looked and played only slightly better? (Vanguard: Saga of Heroes after a brief search)
I adore the space combat in Star Trek Online, but I think they're listening a bit too much to their forums and spending way too much time on ways to make more money out of the game before it dies. I believed in this game all through the beta because I wasn't able to see how unfinished everything after the beta content was. Some great writing. Ground Combat is generic as hell. End game content they're finally patching in is *still* buggy as hell. Great start, broke a leg halfway through, and now I'm not even sure it's trying to make it to the finish line.
Warhammer Online. Yeah, schizophrenia. I'm going with the idea that it was trying to be a cooler, PvP version of WoW. Very Interesting classes. Really boring instanced PvP. Really dead RvR and Group Event deals. And got bored and quite at lvl 30 something because the world seemed to just sort of peter off into saminess quazi-desolation.
Tabula Rasa was almost fun. RIP, although I never spent much time with you.
Ultima Online kinda lost it's charm when you realized that early converts to DSL and Cable ruled the world. And then gaming moved on and it became something totally different than it was. Kinda like the story I heard about the old Star Wars MMO, which also sounded painful to actually play.
Final Fantasy XI is the worst MMORPG I've ever played. When looking at a zone is painful, something has gone terribly wrong. Makes for great character screenshots, I guess?
So yeah, WoW. It's only getting better while the competition is either half of what WoW has become or just trying to get their act together in general. I can't wait for Cataclysm. Trying to level alts through Vanilla content (even with all the updates and ease of access) is painful as hell.
All Points Bulletin I'm almost interested enough in to see what's up. Global Agenda sat here for a while. I'm not even sure what The Old Republic is trying to be except a very scripted WoW(EQ) with Chest High Walls. Remember the part about being able to see EQ's combat flow? It's there, just really cinematic this time.
Who knows? Maybe Guild Wars 2 will come out of left field and finally impress me. I just didn't have the friends to pull me into the Nightfall X-pac on the original.
