Ok, it's official. I have canceled my Warhammer sub. The three months don't end until Apr 21, so I might pop in to see if I can stomach trying to hit max level on the Marauder, or putz around on the Orc Choppa a little.
It's not really any fault on Warhammer's part though. Or maybe it is, I don't know. The slower pace of combat is good for pvp, but less so for pve, and there's something lacking in the pve world design that for lack of a better term, we'll call 'soul.'
The world is faithful enough in lore and graphics to Warhammer, but you never really feel like much of anything (a hero, a soldier, whatever) in the game. Perhaps it's just the all-too-obvious metagame of "Oh, let's kill the other side in pvp so that we can unlock this and that and invade their city...for bragging rights and phat loot." Mostly phat loot. An odd WoWish mindset translated into a 'kill the other guy' setting.
Didn't help that a bunch of technical problems handling massive hordes of people kept crashing servers and putting a crimp into any serious organizational plans for city invasion either, I think.
Ultimately, you have to like the whole "let's run in teams and pwn the other fellas better" to enjoy Warhammer. Kinda like the pvp side of Guild Wars. Or any team vs team FPS.
Personally, I think I rather play the PvE side of Guild Wars, which is 'free' since it has been bought already. Or aforementioned FPSes because they're easier to jump in and out off, and don't cost a recurring fee.
I do still like the attempts at burying stuff in the world for Explorers. I think it's pretty neat, along with the Tome. But like AoC, bits of it that are neat are fondly remembered, but hard to justify a long term subscription to.
So LOTRO remains my standard MMO substitute, at the cheaper monthly subscription rate, as a fallback should I get nostalgic for endless running through pretty wilderness.
I also gave some serious thought as to the state of CoX. I haven't kept track of it in forever. However, I see that Issue 14: Architect has made it to closed beta testing, and that gives me a teensy more hope for the future.
It's probably still worth keeping it going, I'm just waiting for something that can vary the pace and layout of missions enough to make it interesting again. The first round of the mission editor might not be enough to draw me back as yet, but I'm sure they'll keep working on it.
Why the pressure on the old MMOs? Well, it's also official, I'm staying in Egypt.
Through whatever vagaries of fortune and circumstance, I have found on the whole, a mature, laid-back, fair-minded if not good-hearted group of people still used to using the keyboard as a means of chatting, not the microphone.
And I happen to be lucky enough to have taken up with one of the most overachieving guilds in Egypt, who are still accepting of differences enough to let slower folks piggyback on their shoulders. While a couple individuals are slightly more mercantile, the rest are generous to a fault.
I wonder if it's the game, in a sense. That it is a game meant for community building, using crafting and building big stuff as a creation metaphor, instead of just plain destroying and killing things.
I went mushroom hunting in a awfully remote region today, looking for seven of a semi-rare mushroom. I found six before the time of shroom spawning ran out. Frustrated, and not willing to wait another 8 hours, another day to come back and try again, I thought I would try to trade for one on their regional chat. I figured, the mushroom was endemic here, so residents would probably have a couple stashed away that they wouldn't mind trading off.
Well, I got two people offering to give one to me. Free.
Mighty generous offer there, to paraphrase Nathan Fillion in Firefly. Lot of altruism going on in here. I did pass back a little wood I had collected while running about, just to make it a little more reciprocal, but it rather touched me. I'd like to see City of Heroes doing something similar now that ubar lewt has contaminated the system, let alone the other standard MMOs. :P
Sure, every community has competition inbuilt (otherwise, it would stagnate, won't it?) and people not liking other people that drive them nuts, but I find that on the whole, it is a more unified community, a sort of small tribe or a tiny little burgeoning civilization of teensy towns on the virtual edge of nowhere (er, Egypt) than the big MMO servers.
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