..what happened to online gaming? (Part 1: mmorpgs)

I really loved to play online-games, or especially mmorpgs. I started with Ultima Online back in 1997. From Atlantic, to Catskills and finally Drachenfels. It has been a great time, lots of PvP but unfortunately also lots of Patches which at last destroyed the PvP we liked and for what we played that game. In fact I’m talking about PKing, PvPing is what had been left after they patched the PK System to death.

After UO my fellows and me moved on to EverQuest, our first contact with a mmorpg based on Levels. It had been a pain in the ass, leveling your char for a PvP Experience which had not been worth the time. Best thing was training people by pulling many aggressive monsters behind you and walk above another Player, yea that was quite funny ;). However, I guess I never made it above lvl 30, just too much timewaste for nothing. So some of us started up with Asheron’s Call, also Level based but great PvP on Darktide. Although, we were a bit late for Asheron’s Call, we joined about 6 months after the game was launched and everyone was kinda high level already. It was all about macroing and if you didn’t have any help it was pretty difficult to level up. Nevertheless we did level ~70 there, but everyone was lvl 126+ at that time already. Wouldn’t be a problem at all but we disliked the leveling stuff pretty much. After that we moved on to Asheron’s Call 2. Just another level based game which was discontinued back in December 2005. The game wasn’t half finished, no NPCs included etc. Big waste of money and time. By the way, I left out our comebacks in UO, Everquest, etc. but they didn’t last that long as you can imagine that nothing had become better than before.

I don’t even have to talk about all the other games like Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Neocron and so on.. we tested them all and they all sucked. Well, at the moment we’re playing World of Warcraft. Guess what, just another level based mmorpg but at least the most smooth one. We started with the US Version and switched to the European Servers at release. On the EU Servers we switched from Ravencrest to Destromath after about five months of playtime, yea just another timewaste happened here. Later on we moved our Chars on Theredras. I’m lvl 44 there at the moment but PvP is also a joke in WoW. No loot, no XP gain, no whatsoever, in fact the victim doesn’t take any harm at all. I’m just too demotivated to grind my char to lvl 60. “For what?” I ask myself, for that kind of carebear pvp? Oh well..

With WoW a new word evolved, it’s called “to grind”. Grind XP, grind Honor Points, grind Items. Yea, it’s all about grinding. Spend thousands of hours in killing NPCs and Monsters to gain levels or items. They even turned PvP into grinding. Kill other players to get better items, yea, that’s itemize! If PvP would be a good thing in WoW I’d have been lvl 60 months ago, but that way, it’s just annoying.

So what’s left on the mmorpg sky? Yea right, nothing at the current time. No mmorpg with good PvP or PKing exists. There’s a mmorpg called Darkfall which is being developed at the moment but it’s pretty unsure if it will be released sometime. It could be vaporware but it’s our last hope. Check it out here. It has PKing, PvP and no levels. That’s what an mmorpg should look like! No fancy coloured worlds with carebear pvp and rpg quests all the way..