Angelthorne's Bard College

As I mentioned in a previous post, Neverwinter Nights was my first MMORPG, and still my favorite. Okay, yes, in some ways in suffers in comparison to World of Warcraft, especially in terms of graphics, and the fact that in WoW, you can actually swim, climb, ride animals and jump over small chairs. Same thing goes for City of Heroes. Okay, I admit it, it suffers A LOT. But NWN still gets the edge for one reason and one reason only: module play. The ability to make your own scenarios (which I lack the skill to do) or just running someone else's adventures with just your own little crew is essential for RPG snobs like myself who really have no burning desire to share some PW with noobs and munchkins who speak only internet-gibberish and wouldn't know role-playing if you jammed a red-hot poker into their eye sockets. Take City of Heroes, for example. Citizens run up to you gasping, "I've never met a hero before!" Huh? How? Heroes outnumber citizens like 100-1! And most of the heroes are, frankly, stupid; typically either monstrosities created by rules lawyers or Japanese schoolgirl types with huge...tracts of land. And can NO ONE ELSE be bothered to come up with a background for their character? How much frickin' effort does it take to put just a micron of originality or thought into your creation? I hoped against hope that City of Villains would siphon off the munchkins, and to some extent it has, but of course that only ruins the PvP areas for heroes, since A) you never know just how lonely the hero business is until it's just you and three other guys forming the Thin Spandex Line against a living wall of lame villains and B) it's no fun fighting lame villains. An old friend of mine once said, "Being a villain is always harder than being a hero because a hero merely rights the wrong while the villain must create them." Truer words were never spoken.
World of Warcraft suffers from the same glut of idiots who mock the very idea of role-playing and seem bound and determined to suck all the enjoyment out of the experience for everyone else. Could I be in town for just one frickin' minute without 257 morons challenging me to a duel? Eh, sigh.
Sadly, I'm probably swimming against the tide on this. PW games like WoW and CoH are probably just as much the wave of the future as pay-to-play. The loss of the ability to create modules is just one more example of an industry leeching all creativity out of players who are becoming increasingly passive cyber-potatoes. Seriously, though, folks, if you aren't interested in any kind of RP experience, couldn't you just stick to your FPS and leave the rest of us alone?

Labels: City of Heroes, Neverwinter Nights, World of Warcraft