For years and years and years I've been saying something. I must have said it tens of thousands of times by now: I'll never play MMO's with quests, and I'll never pay for an MMO. I'm opposed to the very concept of paying money every single month for a game,
any game, but moreso I'm opposed to playing a single-player game in a multiplayer environment. To me, it seemed silly to do "quests" on the internet when I could just have easily played a game like Elder Scrolls or something. And I'm probably the least likely person in the world to get into an RPG... I'm the hardest of hardcore FPS fans on the block.
Cut to Easter Sunday. The family is doing its thing, with the ham and all that. My brother walks up behind me and puts a game down on the table next to my dinner. World of Warcraft. I almost laughed him out of the house. I mean seriously, me? Play World of Warcraft? You must be mad! But he is my older brother, and younger brothers have a few complexes that in this particular event were my folly. One is that you always want to hang out with your older brother because he's the coolest guy in the world, even true today when I'm 27 and he's 34. The second, of course, is that you absolutely must try to compete with your elder brother in every way, shape, and form. So naturally, I took the challenge of trying something new, and with a ten-day trial in hand, I installed World of Warcraft, assured that if nothing else I'd get a good laugh out of it. I followed his directions, and landed myself on a server called Antonidas.
Enter "Mattrock." Mattrock is my character in World of Warcraft (and in most of the other games I play, when I'm not playing as Simon Phoenix of course). I made a human warrior because, well, I don't know anything about FPS games outside of the
Fallout series and the small handful of
Final Fantasy games I played but eventually got bored with. RPG's just aren't in my blood... I prefer said blood splattered all over the wall. FPS games take a keen eye, sharp wit, and a fast hand, whereas RPG's are slow, cumbersome, and lacking that sort of blood-pumping, vein-throbbing excitement that I love. In an RPG, you're administering a character, but the character is doing all of the work. In an FPS game, you ARE the character. But my world was quickly turned upside down...
Anyway, I made Mattrock and played the game for two hours. I didn't have much time for anything more, because I'm in the middle of the alpha testing phase for
Eternal Equinox and in the process of making the subsite for the game. But then the next day, I played again for two hours. And then tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. And today I plan to play for four hours (I need a break from the EE stuff), and now... are you ready for this? I'm actually going to pay money to play a game that for quite some time I've been referring to as "World of Warcrack."
So I guess that's it for me. I'm hooked now, paying the pusherman for another fix. And my girlfriend, a natural RPG fan, is even more addicted and has played it substantially more than I have.
So I guess that's that, my big news. I was wrong for the longest time, and now I need to apologize to everyone that I referred to as "Tyrone Biggums the Magician." I can't pick on anyone for being addicted to an MMO because I'm just as addicted as they are
.
"In an interstellar burst, I'm back to save the universe"
