Adobe atmosphere not only tanked, it never made it out of beta, hacking and bug issues clouded NWN's meager success, Second Life's alarmingly high costs and less-than-robust software make it more the environment of chinese money farmers than anything else and games that once claimed they would add a world-building aspect to their MMOs have since renegged. So does this mean that create-your-own content is dead? Well, as I write this there are no games whose major plans include this ability but should we all give up hope? ------ The vast majority of gamers who have played city of heroes or champions online will be quick to tell you that, while there might have been issues with content or bugs or myriad other aspects of the games, character creation is by far the most robust...and interesting aspect to both of them. Do you need to be a 3d modeller? Do you need a background in Poser, Maya or Lightwave? Heck no, both games supplied you boxloads of Mr Potato-head-like pieces which you simply snapped together in seemingly infinite combinations. A lot of players said making toons was their favorite part of the game and would make dozens and dozen, often not even playing them. While the gameplay of Spore is diverse and fun, the novelty tended to wear off fairly quickly -but the creature creator seemed to capture everyone's imagination. There are hordes of players who crank out endless ranks of unique and fascinating creatures, replete with clever backstories, only to rarely -if ever, play them. The Sims games very often ended up the same way. Sure, lots of people enjoyed maxing their Sims' skills, marrying them off, producing endless generations or even, disturbingly enough, found joy in locking them in a doorless house full of stoves. But what seemed the number one attraction to the Sims games? The websites, including the Sims2 own site, was chock full of custom skins made by, you guessed it, the player base. So popular was this that Maxis very quickly released the tools to package and upload your customs to your game and to their website. And houses? People seemed to very often build the most elaborate and fascinating homes... and rarely play in them at all. None of this is to say that the games themselves weren't good or fun or robust, nor is it imply that the gameplay should've been secondary to the creative content, but it does tell us that while being a passenger in the dev's car can be fun, making the car yourself can be even more fun. ------ What the market needs is a click-together MMO, more detailed, robust and safe) than NWN that has the freedom of Second Life, the ease of the Sims and the robustness of Spore. Want to play with your friends on a spaceship? Make one! Click the parts together and make it as simple or detailed as you wish. Prefer a legendary forest of elves and sprite? Do it! The servers should be maintained like Blizzard maintain's WoW's servers, keeping it safe for everyone, stable and... lucrative for the gaming company. If, unlike Second Life, I could have a huge chunk of workable space for the same fee I pay for WoW, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Sure, I'd pay extra to expand the size of my lot but for god's sake not thousands of dollars, and upkeep fees etc. Nor would I like to be in a vast, unending ghetto of shops, RP structures, sex parlors and what-not like SL gave us. I could simply log into the game, select my "world" and go to it.. and only it. Yes, we'd LOVE a dropdown menu that would let us visit other people's worlds, if they've left the door open for us and not made it private (which should be their choice) but to stand on the outside of my "spaceship" and see the sex parlor next door and the shop beyond that..and the lag that comes with it, is neither immersive or fun. ------ Some day, some big company might just latch onto the idea. Imagine the dev teams getting to dream up more click-together parts, more tools to create your own parts and more drop-downs and radial menu options to add dynamic gameplay to your world, rather than spending a year thinking up a single-genre storyline and thousands of quests that, after a month, players complain has been exhausted. Some day... it sure would be nice.
When I'm not gaming, its a pristine altar to the computing gods, displaing my system on an all glass desk that looks like its straight out of star trek. Subtle lighting, ultra-modern wall sculptures and futuristic decor adorn the room. when I AM gaming, its a testament to soda cans and cigarette butts. sad but true. ;)
WoWhas changed a lot over this last year so I'd have to say it depends considerably on what kind of MMO gamer you are. If you're a hardcore end-game raider type who pushes for excellence in gaming, you might be very disappointed. Blizzard's new motto is, "everyone should raid," so they have instituted systems that take even the worst player and puts them in high end raiding gear. Thus, while your own skills are unaffected by the amateur beside you, your raid will suffer unless you are involved in an extremely selective raiding guild. Blizzard has also redefined the treadmill in this latest expansion, adding raid armor tiers 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5, 9, 9.3, 9.9, 10, 10.3 and 10.9. Walking in now, of course, saves you from grinding your butt off for the each successive tier only to have it replaced 3 months later but you can bet this philosophy will be present in the upcoming expansion. If you're not an endgamer, and just enjoy questing and levelling, you would have some issues at the lower levels as the old world is fairly barren of players, especially new ones and the quests are frankly in no way innovative or interesting. Kill X mobs, collect Y items, escort NPC Z -the usual. Its only at the Lich King level of questing (71-80) that you really find the newer, more interesting quest forms and god help you from 60-70 as the in-between expansion world, the Burning crusade, is even more of a wasteland and is home to just a scattered handful of Death Knights and alts. My advice would be, if you're hell bent on playing WoW, to start when cataclysm comes out as it will be revamping the entirety of the gameworlds from level 1 up and their new "simpler" gearing system will be in place. The learning curve right now for gearing would be intense (just read really any post at elitistjerks.com to see what I mean) and you'd basically be learning it for nothing as half of it due to be scrapped at cataclsym. Turhtfully, by the time Cataclysm comes out we'll also see Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic which promises the most absorbing questing in MMO history, to say nothing of vastly superior graphics and gameplay. Some will disagree with me. Gameplay in mirror is funner than it appears. Void where prohibited.
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