The Church of Dan

So it’s 2:20PM, and I have to start getting ready to head over to my aunts for Easter lunch – without my dad. It’s unfortunate that his back condition hasn’t improved and he finds it difficult to sit in one position for extended periods of time, which means that he won’t be joining us for lunch. I really hate leaving him home on any holiday. At Christmas, I took the train (express go-train) to Newmarket and had my cousin drive me home. I don’t even remember if he went for Thanksgiving, I think he did and left early. Bleh. No matter what we do his condition just isn’t improving.. for anyone that may read this ( I doubt theres anyone else to read my crazy random thoughts) but anyways, he has Spinal Stenosis, and his feet go numb after a few minutes of standing/walking/sitting and the pain is pretty much chronic. He can’t take strong pain medications because they upset his stomach. Bleh, indeed.

I’ve cancelled my Warhammer account and have moved back to Final Fantasy XI. I figure, why pay for a game that I have to play 3 different classes in order to prevent boredom from setting in. Shouldn’t the game be interesting enough that I’d WANT to get to level 40 on one character? Sadly no.. The game is the same from Level 1 to Level 40, the only difference is how fast you die – or how fast you can kill someone else. The more and more I think about it, the more I realize how rushed and unfinished the game was before release. They probably should have taken everything from Dark Ages of Camelot – and just renamed it in Warhammer – then they’d have a decent game.

Now a quick rant about why I HATE Blizzard and World of Warcraft. Before this game, MMOs had a different feel to them. Everquest and FFXI are the only two examples from experience I can provide. These games did not give any ‘quick’ rewards. Anything you did, achieved, found, or wore, pretty much took a lot of work – with a fair amount of risk. The risk in Everquest being much higher because when you died, you had to go back to where your corpse was and get everything. This added to the thrill of adventure – you could die, lose your corpse, lose a level in certain circumstances. It made dying something to hate, and avoid. It also provided a rush of adventure. Moving forward, games starting to stray from this sort of ‘challenging’ environment, and made it into a quick reward, low risk style game.

Oh no! I died in Warcraft! It’s ok, my stupid ass ghost can run harm free back to its body and just have to pay to repair my armor. Oh no I died in Warhammer, now I just pay a silver to restore all my health to full. Oh no, I died in FFXI, lost 10% of my next level xp (1000xp if you needed 10k to level) and I’m back to the city that is my home. Now I have to walk back to where I was and get all that experience back. The other factor are monsters. IN the previous 2 games mentioned in this paragraph, monsters stop chasing you after a certain distance. In EQ/FFXI they keep chasing.. and chasing.. until you zone into another area. In most cases, you die. Even after you make it to the zone line, when you load you could still be dead (if the monster was still hitting you)

If they remade Everquest, with updated graphics, mechanics, and skills, but kept everything else the same, I think people would love it. Not the majority though, because most of the MMO community has been infected with the easy-mode mmo disease that World of Warcraft has spread.

If FFXI fails to keep my interest, I’ll likely be leaving the MMO world and going back to console games. Time to get ready to go!