Eaten by the WoW Monster
Well, my shortlived contribution to SupCom Talk is over, at least for now. I realize this may be disappointing to some, but the truth is that writing regularly on a blog takes a fair amount of time and effort, and when you are one of the only people writing posts it becomes even more difficult to take the time to put out quality writing on a regular basis. Having a kid recently has certainly cut down my available playing time as well.
However, all that said, the principle reason I have subsided in my writing is that I have gotten into the World of Warcraft lately. Now I realize many people have strong feelings about this game, a lot of them negative. I have played EVE Online before which is an extremely hardcore Sci Fi MMO and, while I greatly enjoyed it, it just didn’t fit my lifestyle. WoW on the other hand is much more casual and, best of all, I got my wife into it too which means we can play together. Now I don’t know how many of you are married, but I love my wife very much and she has always been very understanding of my gaming. The ability to play a game with her is worth a lot to me as it is rare that we find a game we both like. So with what limited gaming time I have now I primarily adventure with my wife around the World of Warcraft and to be honest I am loving it.
Now unlike Cyde Weys original departure post, I have not actually lost any interest in Supreme Commander. The Forged Alliance expansion fixed any and all issues I had with the game, and I bought my new computer with Forged Alliance in mind. Supreme Commander remains my RTS of choice, and I still get a game in every now and then. It may very well be that I will start playing more often in the future, as I don’t see another RTS coming out that would pull me away from SupCom. I’m basically just taking a break from the RTS genre in general when it comes to large commitments of my gaming time.
As for SupCom Talk, I sincerely hope it stays alive. There is so little community for this great game and this blog has been a bastion of great discussion in the past. I fully intend to keep my account on the blog and as future opportunities arrive I would greatly like to post again. I’ll just have to wait and see.
So this isn’t really goodbye or anything, just an explanation for why I have stopped posting frequently after such a short time. Hopefully you’ll see more posts and comments from me in the future, in the meantime I hope you are enjoying the great game that is Supreme Commander and that if you do take a break you will come back again down the road. Also, anyone interested in contributing articles is welcome to let me know by posting a comment on the site and I will get in touch with you.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
well its sad to see u go BUT i can understand i know how hard it is to get the wife intrested in ANY game…. her game of choice is STILL black & white 2 which is years old now but i just cant find anything else that she likes!
good luck and tell the wife to enojy herself on the WOW drug!
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Oh God, stay the hell away from the WoW monster! I’ve heard countless stories about people’s lives being lost to it. Heck, I even wrote two posts about it myself:
The dangers of WoW addiction
World of no-regret-craft
To this day I haven’t played another MMORPG, and I won’t allow myself to, either. That’s why I’ve been into games like Supreme Commander and, more recently, Team Fortress 2: because they’re not going to suck up my whole life.
Also, when it came right down to it, I ended up picking blogging over gaming. I accept that you’ve done the opposite though.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:52 am
Not sure how you can say WoW is more casual than Eve, but best of luck with the family.
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
My wife and I like playing WoW together as well, when we get a chance. Real life doesn’t leave us much time.
January 23rd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Good luck buddy!
January 24th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I used to play WoW a lot, but then I realized how bad it was for me…
January 25th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I’m quite a compulsive games player when I get into a routine. I did nothing but play SupCom ranked matches all day long for a couple of weeks trying to get myself into the top 100. Eventually stopped playing because exam time was looming and I hadn’t gone to college in days.
Thankfully I’ve always found anything RPG related fairly unnatractive so I’ve never really gotten sucked into these games, although I haven’t tried one since Ultima Online. I never liked the idea that you have to spend time grinding to level a character so you could kill something or someone at a lower level than you. Surely a game should be about having the same tools as everybody else, and the game being that you use your resources/moves/pieces more intelligently. Like chess or a traditional RTS.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Molloy, you are right. In fact, I’ve been designing a game based off of those same concepts.
January 28th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Any game can be addictive - I’ve spent > 300 hours on Oblivion, > 100 hours on Sup Com, and I’ve even logged over 30 hours on TF2 in the last month. WoW is nicknamed Warcrack for a reason though.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:23 am
I’ve spent probably 2000 hours in UT2004 over the past 3.5 years. D:
I really fucked up Oblivion. It could have been great for me, but I spent so much time trying to perfect my class that I replayed the same, tired crap in the beginning 5-7 times over. All those quests were redone so many times that nothing was a surprise or a challenge. I really, really liked the game when it was fresh (even on my crap computer), but as I started redoing things with a new classes it became increasingly annoying to the point that by the time I’d get a somewhat decent distance into the story I’d suddenly lose all interest in playing. Because of that I never got very far along in the story — the furthest I got (not sure which time through) was to where I had just started convincing other towns to provide support to Bruma. And I never reached a double-digit level because I spent so much time trying to ensure my class didn’t suck by developing skills as much as possible. Even now that I have a computer that would allow me to play at 1680×1050 with highest details I’m very wary about installing that game again, because I fear I will once again dip out after doing the same early quests (seemingly) for the billionth time.
In my defense, the first time I restarted the game was because I had no idea you could catch diseases or heal them. I eventually turned into a vampire, and I started the quest to cure it, only to realize it was really fucking hard. Because I also had no idea you could bite sleeping people to nullify the vamiprism, I thought I was completely fucked and restarted. :[
January 29th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I think Oblivion is what set me up to enjoy WoW. I had never really played an RPG before, being so heavily into military strategy games and first person shooters. Oblivion was the first time I had really sunk time into an RPG, and its immersive and free-form nature was instantly addicting. What turned me off to it eventually was the difficulty scaling with you (very lame) and, funny enough, the lack of multiplayer. As much as I enjoyed the world of Oblivion, in the end I felt kind of lonely there. I just kept thinking, how cool would it be if my brothers could play this with me. WoW fixes that problem by allowing you to do exactly that, meet up and play with people online doing many of the same type things you would do in Oblivion, kill stuff, do quests, go into dungeons, etc. Of course Oblivion had the advantage that since the world exists only for you, you could actually change it through quests. The world in WoW, on the other hand, has to stay stagnant for obvious reasons which makes the quest in WoW much more shallow by comparison. That said, I greatly enjoy that in WoW your environment is fixed so as you level up you can venture into new and exciting areas, rather than the world scaling to you wherever you go. I find the PvP enjoyable as well, such as it is.
I find Molloy’s comment a fascinating comparison between the RTS genre and MMORPGs. The RTS genre is built around everything being competely fair, even to the extent that the maps are symmetrical. The factions are balanced so that while styles differ the ability to win is identical. Thus the skill of the player alone determines victory and this purity is attractive. However, every time the game is over you lose the entire base you just built. WoW, on the other hand, lets you keep what you won every time you log off, so that you can see and enjoy a gradual progression of your character. Whether one genre is more enjoyable than the other is going to be up to an individual, but I think they both have their merits.
Lastly, @Deman, how can you say EVE is more casual than WoW? EVE is an insanely intense and PvP-driven game, where your character is capable of enormous losses very quickly and where you can see weeks of work disappear in one short battle. The fleet maneuvers can take hours and hours and the logistics are massively complex. I think EVE is a fantastic game that greatly rewards teamwork and offers a deep player-driven environment, but casual it is not, unless you stay in High-security Empire space the entire time in which case I would argue you are missing out on the meat of the game. Compared to EVE, WoW is a kids game where you can sit back and kill some stuff without worrying that dying will cost you everything you are carrying as it does in EVE, and enjoy the fun story telling as you slowly make your way to Lvl 70. The hardcore gameplay in WoW, the high-end raids, are completely optional.
Anyways, all this to say thanks for the concern, I don’t think I am addicted too badly, any worse than any other game I’ve played at least.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
There’s a mod (or a few of them) for Oblivion that limits world scaling to certain levels depending on the enemy. This way you won’t end up in a world where every enemy is wearing glass armor and wielding a sword bigger than you. That mod is pretty much a requirement, IMO, since the leveling world also nullifies the benefits of being a thief. If every enemy wears expensive armor and carries expensive weapons, you have no reason to steal stuff. Ultimately, leveling up but perceiving no benefit is very trying on the morale, I think, so this mod ups playability by a large factor.
Mods are a huge plus to Oblivion over WoW, since they allow you to craft the game to fit you and your style of play. Very few games allow these sorts of things, especially to this degree. There are mods that make huge changes to the gameplay or story if you feel you would enjoy the game more that way. For instance, I recall reading about a mod that got rid of the main quest so you were simply an anonymous entity within a virtual world who could go in any which direction “life” took you. You just don’t see that kind of stuff in most games.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Also, I’ve heard many, many times that Morrowind is a better game than Oblivion in every area except graphics and perhaps combat (since I don’t think you can block; what you block is based on stats). People claim it is much more immersive, less repetitive, and has no silly gameplay issues like a world that scales with you.
I bought Morrowind some time ago but I’ve yet to do anything with it. I think my poor experience with Oblivion as far as trying to perfect a class and thus repeating a lot of stuff has scared me away from that type of game. :[
February 4th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I know the exact mod you are talking about, I think it was called Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. Great mod, made the game much more challenging and feel like it should feel. Overall though, the mods are part of what killed my interest in Oblivion, it got so complex with the conflicts and what not that I started running into problems, but after I had all the mods I couldn’t go back to the basic game. Plus getting the game to run well on my machine was a constant challenge.
I have a lot of faith in Bethesda, I’m sure their next Elder Scrolls game will learn from the lessons of Oblivion. They did so many things well and they can only get better from here.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Another bugaboo of mine with Oblivion was the leveling system. In order to level efficiently and get the most stat gains per level (three +5s or two +5s and +1 luck), you have to farm skills that don’t necessarily relate to the character you’ve created. So, to get more health as a mage you have to run in and take damage with a shield (ups endurance) and to up your fatigue as a fighter you have to sneak around like a thief (ups agility). What sense does that make?! And not only does it make no sense, but it’s very tedious and anti-fun.
Luckily, there are mods that deal with that too. I started looking into mods since I got another urge to play the game after talking about it here, and I found one called “SPAM” that removes the tedium from leveling so you can play your character how it was meant to be played without having to worry that you’re upping your major skills too fast and will only get a couple +2s when you level up. I found a lot of others that help with immersion, including one that starts you off arriving on a ship like Morrowind, so I’ll probably try to play through the game with those mods running.
OOO + SPAM + Living Economy is probably enough to remove almost all of Oblivion’s issues. The one I had tried before was called Francesco’s Leveled Creatures/Items or something that incorporated a lot of changes all together. I’m not too familiar with OOO in how it compares to Francesco’s, but I’ll probably use OOO this time around so I can see if there’s a noticeable difference.
Perhaps we should rename this blog OblivionTalk? :P
February 5th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I highly recommend OOO but I remember there being a list of problems with the most recent version and the mod author kind of disappeared. I personally didn’t run into any bugs with it so I would still say give it a try. It’s a huge download and a huge amount of changes, but its a new game. It includes mods like Living Economy and at least a dozen others. There are also different versions, a lite version with minimal added content and a regular version with a ton of bundled mods and the like. Just google Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, you should find the guy’s page with all the info.
I’m at level 32 and still not sick of WoW…
February 7th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
I dunno, I recall seeing some release candidates for a new version floating around. The one I recently downloaded is v1.31, but I’m almost certain I saw a v1.32 RC5 somewhere.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I can’t get along with rpg’s that don’t tell a decent story. Those sandbox games, like the Elder scrolls series fail to enthrall me somehow and WoW is just somehow.