MMORPG's and Leveling Up

Afraid I lost track of time while playing Dark Age of Camelot tonight, so the mega-rant I had planned is now cancelled.

Wow, this seems to be a pattern.

Anyhoo, I might as well explain DAoC for those of you unknowledgeable in such matters. For those of you who DO know what I'm talking about... Nothing new here.

I am an avid player of MMORPG's, which is a somewhat o'erlong acronym that means Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games.

In short, they are computer games run on central computer systems (The server) to which individual users (the client) connect and play against. Hundreds (Thousands?) of clients can each be connected to a single server, and play and interact in the same game world. The model is also called a "persistent world" because there is no saving, no going back. You fuck up, you deal with the consequences. Sort of like real life, but in real life you can't get resurrected.

I play two of these MMORPG's. The first one is the Original Granddaddy of the modern MMORPG, Ultima Online. I've been playing it for about six and a half years out of its seven years in existence. The second one is Dark Age of Camelot, a game I play with my buddy who lives in Oregon. (In both games, I play a heroic Knight in Shining Armor, who wanders the land, protects the innocent, and rights wrongs... Sort of like a Knight-Errant. :P ). I would play more, but MMORPGs have a big downside. They require subscription fees to keep playing. As of this writing, I'm paying just over $20 a month to play both games. Actually, I have multi-month contracts, in which I pay only once every three months. I end up paying a lot per-pop, but less over time. Another downside is time. You need a LOT of time to invest in these games. Which explains why my characters go nowhere.

I'm curious about a lot of other new games, like Blizzard's World of Warcraft... but I don't want to play too many at once, it gets expensive. I was sorely tempted though.

I was actually going to cancel both my subscriptions in preparation to play a new MMORPG called Mythica in which you played a deity. Good thing I did not, because at an unexpected juncture (as in, very far into development), the evil empire of Microsoft canned it.

A new one that I'm watching is the oft-renamed Mourning. (It was Realms of Torment, then Realms of Krel, and now Mourning) It seems to be a fairly interesting take on RPGs. Characters can grow old and die, leaving their decedents to pick up where their predecessor left off. So in Mourning, you don't play one character, but rather an entire bloodline. That sounds awesome enough to me, but there are the added bonuses of complete player rule: A character can found a city, build a nation, conquer an empire... or just build a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. The politics belongs to the players.

It's either going to be that, or Middle Earth Online that finally cracks me and makes me pay for a new one.

So what's the best part about medieval fantasy MMORPG's?

No matter what the game, it's always the same thing: Becoming strong enough to beat the living snot out of something that used to kill you a lot at lower levels.

It's a goodness, it really is.


A partial listing of other notable MMORPG's:
EverQuest and EverQuest II, Sims Online, Final Fantasy XI, Ascheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2, Lineage and Lineage II, Shadowbane, Guild Wars, Anarchy Online, Second Life, Darkfall, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes.

There are a lot of them. They are fun, but they are expensive. Bummer.

Ah well, time for bed. So 'til next time, rock on.