Angelthorne's Bard College

...of the FUTURE!

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

Labels: World of Warcraft

An excellent article in Slate about a topic we've discussed here before, namely the existential boredom of WoW and what could be done to fix it.

Labels: World of Warcraft

From Penny Arcade!

Labels: Random Art, World of Warcraft

God, I hate this series; but I have to admit, this was pretty damned funny.

Labels: Television, World of Warcraft

If they could see me now...

Labels: World of Warcraft

...like getting together with friends to slay ogres. God Bless America!

Labels: World of Warcraft

From the almost-always hillarious Real Life!

Labels: World of Warcraft

Okay, let me be the official last person to complain about the latest WoW update, specifically making the LFG channel worldwide. First of all, if my little 10th level hunter is happily slaying murlocs in Elwynn Forest, do I really give a crap that some 47th level shaman a continent away in Mulgore is looking to put a group together? Second, the LFG channel was hard enough to monitor when it was limited by realm; now so many requests (not to mention random idiocy, such as today's spirited debate over, I kid you not, health care policy) scroll by, it's just a meaningless blur. Blizzard, stop the madness!

Labels: World of Warcraft

Have been playing alot lately and I'm starting to actually get into it. All of my characters are on Cennarion Cirle--a 15th level human Rogue named Hale, a 15th level human Paladin named CrossTheSky (would've been Panther-Crossing-the-Sky, but they don't give you enough room!), a 10th level Night Elf Hunter named Aredhynn and a 5th level Dwarven Warrior named Dworthin. Hale was recently invited to join a guild, and that's opened up the opportunity of almost always being able to get a party together. If you see me online, give me a buzz.

Labels: World of Warcraft

Okay, so is it just me or is WoW, well, basically boring? At least at low levels? This may just be a reflection of the servers I'm on, but I notice that unlike CoH where there always seems to be a pickup team of heroes to go and whup evil, teams are hard to come by on WoW. And you spend a lot of your time just...walking. And the missions are all pretty much "go there, kill this, come back, get an apple." Not to harp on NWN again, but at least there, you know you always have a group because you're playing a module and have the group assembled first. WoW is like the equivalent of a convention full of goobers all playing solo D&D, each at their own table. Or maybe I'm just anti-social; which is true, but I don't think that's really the problem here. I've tried to get groups together from time to time, but tend to get ignored, especially if they discover I'm RP. Of course, it's a frickin' RP server, so why wouldn't I be? Sigh.

Labels: World of Warcraft

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