By ALEXANDER PECHA
Arts Editor
Hello. My name is Alex Pecha and I can’t stop playing MMORPG’s. From the fantasy world of Azeroth in ‘World of Warcraft’ to the far reaches of a galaxy far, far away in ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ I just can’t seem to quit the MMORPG genre. We all have our flaws after all.
These games offer huge engrossing experiences where you can experience epic stories and be a world-saving hero but you can also group up with other players from around the world to defeat epic challenges or you can take to the battlefield and fight other players in epic player versus player action. MMORPG’s promise all of these features and more, such as crafting unique and epic gear and finding epic mounts. And yes, the overuse of the word “epic” the last paragraph was deliberate.
You see despite these games promising all of this and more they fall rather short. MMORPG’s actually turn out to be grind-fests where you take around 6 quests at a time, go kill X amount of enemies or collect Y amount of things and turn them into a quest giver for a certain amount of XP so you can level up and get more quests to kill and collect more things; On top of that most MMORPG’s use an antiquated system of activating abilities with number keys in combat that most closely resembles old versions of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ games. The purpose of all this grinding and subpar combat mechanics is to get to the max level so you can partake in raids and the end level player versus player where you again grind either some alternative form of experience or currency to buy better equipment so that you can grind harder challenges so you can get better money and experience to buy even better equipment so you can fight even harder challenges…you see the cycle here.
And yet I can’t stop playing them. To quote a great man “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” (Al Pacino, coincidentally, starred in a ‘World of Warcraft’ commercial using that very line). I’ve been playing ‘World of Warcraft’ off and on since I was in middle school. I usually play through one “class story” in ‘The Old Republic’ every few months. I played ‘The Elder Scrolls Online’ at release and plan to go back when it becomes free to play. I captained a Starship in ‘Star Trek Online’ for over 3 months. I got destroyed in a starship in ‘EVE Online’ for about a week. I experimented with ‘Rift’ for about half a month and played the original ‘Guild Wars’ for over a month. The MMORPG subgenre has eaten a surprising amount of my life away, and every time I leave an MMORPG I promise myself that I won’t go back. It’s gotten so bad that a friend of mine remarked recently that I always seem to have a blind spot for MMORPG’s in terms of seeing their flaws.
The thing is it’s not that I don’t see their flaws. It’s that I really love certain parts of MMORPG’s and I keep hoping that there will be an MMORPG that truly reaches its potential. At their core the MMORPG is supposed to be a roleplaying game that you enjoy with a huge crowd of people and almost every MMORPG I’ve played does at least one element of the idea better than the rest. ‘The Old Republic’ delivers the best story and the feeling like you and your friends are part of a greater galactic struggle. ‘Guild Wars’ nails the idea of sharing in an old school RPG with a bunch of friends. ‘The Elder Scrolls Online’ really capitalizes on the player versus player aspect with the sieges and Cyrodill idea. ‘World of Warcraft’ is probably the best balanced of all MMORPG’s in terms of quality but doesn’t really excel anywhere except for raiding and dungeons.
I want MMORPG’s to be good, no, great. I want a game that manages to deliver an epic story while allowing you to spend your off time bashing in other players heads and round it out with a great end-game challenge. But it never happens. We always get an MMORPG that does one or two things well but utterly fails at the others so it’s popular for about 3 weeks before everyone goes back to the old solid and steady World of Warcraft until it inevitably goes Free-to-play and gets a steady, if small, playerbase.
So until some developer actually tries to a deliver a great all around experience I’ll wander like a vagrant between MMORPG’s depending on if I want a solid story or if I want to hit other players over the head and hope, nay, pray that one day us MMORPG’s players get the promised game and can finally feel proud about our chosen subgenre.
It may be a long wait.
