Imperium

Hi,

All of my experiences playing WoW and Eve Online have led me to a single conclusion: the game designers have it all wrong.

“Collect 20 Murlock spleens and return to…”
“Kill 15 Black Bears, then speak to…”
“Take this list that is on the table next to me to my (enter relation here) who is sitting next to me”

Classic quests there! I can only recall the details of one or two quests of the hundreds I’ve completed which just goes to show you how memorable WoW and Eve have been. The NPCs have little or no personality, the world remains unaffected by the player’s actions, and all that keeps the player playing is the constant drive to progress to the next level, to get more powerful skills and spells and so on. But even when the player makes one of these advancements it actually means very little; he just gets more of the same dull missions, except they’re harder to find and take longer to complete!

Please explain to me when this became entertaining! When was it that the game designers had a brain-wave and thought that giving all the dull repetitive stuff to the people starting the game would encourage them to continue? This lack of quality is of course a result of the demand for a vast number of quests inherent to the genre. Compare WoW or Eve with The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion. Certainly, there are far fewer quests in Oblivion than there are in Wow, but I have yet to find a quest in Oblivion that wasn’t amusing, challenging or well designed. There is no excuse for repetitiveness in quests; all it boils down to is lack of imagination or simply lazyness.

Another problem with WoW especially is that there is very little content designed for the casual gamer. Why do all instances need to be huge? Place a small dungeon in the context of a well written quest and I would be quite happy. And how can you feel truly satisfied when all your hours of toil avail to nothing? All the beasts you slay are replaced and instances can be replayed even though you have already killed everything that was in sight! Arghhh! By far the most significant improvement that could be made to WoW would be to make the world more dynamic.

Incessent repetitivness without reward is the plague of the MMO! It can only be described as bad game design, and without some fundamental changes I can’t say that I’ll ever desire to play an MMO ever again.

Well, enough of my rant.

Carry on,

Tom (previously Raedwulf)

Hmm,

When I made my way downstairs this morning I came across a strikingly large fly. Just out of curiosity I imprisoned it within a jar and flicked through a guide on insects to try and find out its name, but to no avail. The guide was A Field Guide to the Insects of Britain and Northern Europe by Michael Chinery. The closest match I could find was Leucozona lucorum, a member of the family Syrphidae: a hover-fly, but this chap doesn’t hover! For a fly (if indeed it was a fly) it was extremely large, about the size of an average bee, it’s abdomen was composed of two bands of colour: a pale, dirty white and black, it had a black thorax and quite large eyes. Fairly nasty-looking bastard actually, although it doesn’t pose much threat inside a jar! Ha!

Anyway, right now I’m contemplating whether to release it or not, or just keep it for my twisted examination.

UPDATE: I let it go, unharmed.

Eldilor