Subject To Change

Or to give it its full name “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning”, the new pretender to WoW’s MMO crown.And I’ve been playing for a week or two now in open beta and pre-order early access.So, how does it rate, compared to the current crop of MMOs out there? Well, it’s a lot like WoW in certain ways. As soon as I loaded it the UI looked very familiar from my time playing Blizzard’s world conquering offering. The skill bars look the same, the menus are similar, in fact the resemblance is spooky. But once you get into the game itself the resemblance pales slightly (in some aspects, at least.) Sure, you could grind through “Kill x rats” quests if you wanted to, and doubtless doing so would give you a pretty similar experience to most PvE-centric MMOs. But you can grind your way to Rank 40 (the highest level in WAR) purely through PvP. In theory you can get to R40 without doing much more in PvE than running to the first warcamp and entering scenarios and Realm vs Realm combat. You gain experience and Renown Rank (another type of experience used to unlock extra talents and weapons only available through PvP) just by playing PvP.And from the little I’ve seen, the PvP is good. Not quite as tactical on the face of it as Guild Wars, but more tactical than WoW. Fast paced, very well balanced for a launch title. Most classes have counters, none seem obviously overpowered so far (though that will doubt come with time and people learning to exploit mechanics…)All in all, WAR looks good, only time will tell if it’s going to be another WoW or an Age of Conan/Tabula Rasa/Hellgate London (the list goes on…)

…in the browser wars.

Chrome is available  here if you fancy trying it out.

…is doubtless how some think of me. With a certain amount of justification, to be fair.

I play, as I’ve mentioned before, Guild Wars, a MMO-type game which includes guilds (failing to do so would probably incur the wrath of various advertising bodies). And I’ve been in a few guilds in my time, but there are two that may have the right to accuse me of the aforementioned activity, namely the Scouts of Tyria and Blu Ray (henceforth to be known as SoT and BR respectively). I’ve been in BR twice and SoT three times now. I started in SoT, moved to BR at a point when SoT lost a lot of players, especially Europeans which is the time zone I generally play in. I spent some time in BR then my amount of play time dropped off for several reasons so I left and formed a one-man guild which I was happy in for a couple of months. Then I headed back to SoT. After a while I was invited back to BR and for various reasons re-joined. Then, a mere 2 months later I left to head back to SoT where I am happily ensconced once again. The reason for my return? Friends and fallouts. I had the former in SoT (though I still have many in BR) and I had the latter in BR (with 1 or 2 people who shall remain nameless, but it seemed these problems were insurmountable without causing more fuss than it was worth).

So I’m back in SoT is the long and short of it. And until the advent of GW2 I’m unlikely to be leaving.

So, I find myself playing a couple of games these days. Guild Wars is one I’ve played for a long time, Team Fortress 2 is my new found timewaster.

In GW I started life as a warrior. I’d run around, hit stuff, mutilate my way across continents, the usual testosterone fuelled, Club 18-30 holiday scenario. But I got bored of the violence. So I played the more esoteric professions. I started an elementalist (wizard type), but quickly tired of nuking stuff. On to the ritualist, but that was even worse than the elementalist. The mesmer captivated me for a while, but nobody wanted me around as a mesmer, so that foray didn’t last too long.

Throughout this time I’d tried to play monk on a few occasions. I failed…miserably. But I gave it one more shot. The monk in question was called “Flossie The Sheep”. I never expected her to last, let alone become my main character. Had I thought she would I may not have named her quite so frivolously, but these things happen in life, hence the existence of Dweezil, Moon Unit and Diva Muffin Zappa. And at least my silly name is just a character in a game, not a real child. But names aside, I persevered. I found myself enjoying healing people. And people wanted me around. Not many people like being a monk it seems, yet everyone wants one to heal them. As time went by I started getting compliments on my monking. I started to take pride in it, read articles on how to get better at it. And I’m not bad at it

So along comes TF2. A game that seems very dissimilar to GW on the face of things. You run around, you shoot people, they try to shoot you. But TF2 has classes. I wanted to be a Spy. They’re cool, Spies get all the girls etc. But I kept ending up on teams without a Medic. Heavies need Medics, they have a wonderful synergy. So I ended up filling the spot on servers I joined, just because someone had to. And again I found myself getting good at it. People would remember me between games. If I didn’t play Medic and we were losing people would suggest I switched. Once again I fell into being the healer.

The funny thing is that in “RL” I’m not a team player. But in the strange world of teh interweb, I seem to have had it thrust upon me. I have discovered a side to my personality that I was unaware of.

There is no moral to this story. I haven’t taken what I found out online and applied it to my life and become a better person because of it. I don’t want to be a doctor. Helping people? Don’t wanna, just want them to leave me alone. If you thought there might be a heart-warming ending to this post, then you should try a fairy-tale or one of those “human interest” stories at the end of the news (which I don’t find interesting, obviously condemning me to the ranks of the inhuman).

Just as a post-script, when games force me to be a healer I generally take great pleasure in destroying those I am meant to shepherd. My “Theme Hospitals” were hideous places that made the Black Hole of Calcutta look like Butlins. I took great pleasure in the Sims (for about 10 minutes anyway before un-installing the annoying heap of crap) in building nice houses for my Sims, lulling them into a false sense of security then walling them up, Cask of Amontillado style, to die slow deaths. Doubtless this shows some serial-killer-esque tendencies, so at least when you see me on the news you can tell your family and friends that you’re not at all surprised that I was the one found to have killed 17 people and hung their dismembered bodies from lampposts.