Tastes Gamey

This blog is about stuff. Sometimes that stuff has to do with MMORPGs.

Author: neschria

If you haven't been following my saga (and, really, why would you?), I'll bring you up to speed: We're getting ready to move. First we have to sell our house, and to that end, we've been cleaning and packing and trying to make it look bigger. My desktop PC got packed. I am on an old, slow laptop until the move is complete. I don't have a lot of spare time right now, so it hardly seems worth it to pay for a game anyway, so I thought I just wouldn't play anything. That's when the late night boredom started creeping up on me and I started looking for free games I could play on this laptop.

My husband had previously installed VCO on this computer. That's Voyage Century, for those of you that are snagged on the tangled underbrush of MMORPG abbreviations. It runs ok, except for the part where it crashes if I zone more than twice. That is, I can go to the high sea and float around, and then return to a city's local port, but entering the city at the dock = crash. Or I can go into a suburb and harvest, then come out to the city, but when I try to go out on the sea or back to the suburbs... Dumped to desktop!  This is frustrating. It has kept me from playing VCO since I switched to the laptop.

I could, in theory, anticipate the crashes and maximize my time in each playing area, planning ahead to make some kind of progress with minimal restarting. The problem is obnoxious in its regularity. This is, by the way, a quirk of running it on this crappy laptop. None of this happens when I play on my PC, which makes it all the more infuriating because I know it doesn't HAVE to be this way.

I briefly installed Trickster Online, thinking that something that looked so primitive should run well. I was totally wrong about that, and I couldn't seem to do anything to make it run better, so it went to the great recycling bin in the sky pretty quickly. It didn't crash, at least. It went for the lag-and-freeze method of pissing me off. It had run ok on my PC when I had tried it there, but it didn't really capture my attention then either, so it was no big loss that the laptop refused to go on running it after a few minutes. (Maybe the laptop is smarter than I give it credit for.)

So, yesterday, in  a fit of insanity, I decided to download and install Shadowbane. Now, I know it is a game with issues. I've messed around with it a little when it went free. Last time I played, on my desktop PC, it crashed randomly. Sometimes I had 5 minutes, sometimes it ran like a champ for hours. But how irritated can I be at random crashes when I know they are likely? I guess it aggravates me less because it isn't the laptop's fault. I'd be at the mercy of whatever twisted gods control the stability of the Shadowbane client, no matter what I was playing it on.

What am I going to do in Shadowbane? I don't know anyone. I don't really have a good grip... or any grip... on the details of the game or how it is played. I remain a complete newb, despite browsing newbie guides. I figure I am going to bumble around the newbie areas, trying different classes/templates, for a while. I might try to talk to people. I am notoriously slow at leveling, even in games where it is easy and quick, so I imagine that will keep me occupied until I get my real PC back. It may not REALLY be playing Shadowbane, but it is enough to fill in a few moments of boredom here and there.

I might actually check out Shadowbane a little more seriously if the cyclical server thing goes in. (http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/135940 for redirection to threads elsewhere) The idea of a winner being declared and starting over sounds like fun to me. I think it would be a constant refresh on a game that could otherwise get stale. It also takes the focus away from building a character to controlling territory, which would be an interesting change from the mainstream. I might actually try to play for real on such a server.

I am hoping that we have a little money left over from this move to allow me to purchase a new desktop PC. Call me a masochist, but part of me is dying to try Vanguard. It's morbid curiosity. I do hold out a little hope for it in the longterm. SOE may be an evil, money-grubbing corporation that doesn't care about games or players, as some people around here like to say, but they do care about money, and they didn't buy VG just to flush it down the toilet.

Anyway, when EQ2 was released, I went with WoW, and when they first released a trial for EQ2 (about the same time I upgraded my computer so I could play it!), I hated it. They turned that game around. It's actually fun now. Sure, they may have lost a few people who couldn't stand to see it changed, but I am sure they've made it up in new and returning players. Let's give them a chance to take VG into the shop and see if they can put a little polish on it.

Maybe it will even be good by the time I can actually try it out. Maybe the demo will be out by then so I won't have to buy it to find out.

It's going to be a lot harder for Vanguard to come back from launch than it was for Anarchy Online (a game I purchased on release day, so I know how baaaad it was), because there are new releases on a regular basis these days. Back then, games came along one at a time instead of in hunting (for customers) in packs. Vanguard may have blown its chance to be top dog, but it still stands a chance of running in the middle of the pack if they can pull it together and at least get it stable.

(There's a one-liner about Shadowbane and stability somewhere, waiting to come in at this point and tie this entry together, but it hasn't quite come together for me. Feel free to supply your own.)