The extended memorial service for City of Heroes, posted earlier today, aside, what’s new for me and online gaming?
Um … honestly, not a heck of a lot.
First off, it’s been a busy month or two. Margie’s been away on business. I’ve been away on business. Holidays and social butterflying and all that sort of thing. And the next month isn’t looking any better.
Secondly, yeah, I’ve been in mourning. Mercifully, Margie talked me into playing CoH one last time before it went away. But since then … really haven’t felt the yen.
And thirdly … well, I haven’t found … the thing. The game to take its place. I’ve done some World of Warcraft solo and duoed, and likely will some more. But while it’s a decently pleasant passtime, I’m just not feeling the characters as such (something I became very aware of as I was crafting my endless memorials). There’s more variety (if of a less-rich nature) than of Lord of the Rings Online, but, honestly, I don’t feel invested in the characters in either game. With everyone wearing whatever they pick up, and the power/skill selection being fairly categorized, the players are (absent a strong social environment, which we’re not and not likely to get into) pretty much cookie cutter in nature.
(And that, I’m realizing, was one of the geniuses of CoH — that your fundamental appearance could be so different and unique, and the encouragement to have an origin story and a cool super-name to go with it, and that even your power selections could be tailored and tweaked and recombined and enhanced and respecced and recolored to make you completely individual. The focus was more on the characters than on the setting, though the setting was still pretty full of content.)
I’ve given Champions Online another go, and while some of those CoH advantages might seem to pertain, it feels both too mechanics-driven and too arduously neutral / balanced, to the point where every blast power is kind of like ever other blast power, and so forth. And the setting starts to come into play again as feeling uneven and alternately goofy and grim. Plus, the whole game feels like a carnival in so many ways.
I haven’t retried DC Universe Online, or Star Trek Online, but I don’t recall much (or see much in current press) to make me feel they will fit any better.
Maybe we need to try D&D Online again / some more, since that has such character differentiation. There was something vaguely disjointed about what experience we had there, but we didn’t really drive things to any great conclusion.
I keep hearing encouraging words about Star Wars: The Old Republic — and highly discouraging words about it, too. But maybe that’s a possibility.
People keep suggesting to me Guild Wars 2, but aside from my fiery passion to not give another red cent to NCSoft, I hear a lot of trouble in that particular paradise, too.
So … what next? I haven’t the foggiest. And, honestly, given the “firstly” above, I don’t expect to make any great progress until January. At least. At the earliest.
And that’s okay, right? Because it’s not like I don’t have eleventy-dozen other things going on. And while Playing Game with Margie is a lot of fun and doing-stuff-togethery, it’s not the be-all and end-all of our relationship.
I’ll — we’ll — find something that we enjoy together. And (assuming it’s a game), we’ll give it a try. And we’ll have fun. Or not, in which case we’ll move on.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah,
La la, how the life goes on.
