I read a post that I quite liked today at lunch on Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog: Aions 3rd Beta Weekend thoughts: Class choice and whether to beta test or not. I had exactly the same thoughts while playing…although I really, really wanted to play I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to continue into the beta. I didn’t want to affect my enjoyment of playing my own characters when the game is launched, and Aion is a very, very enjoyable game.
Also, I had been doing the beta partly because of that min-maxer type-A viewpoint that wants to level as fast as possible to be ready for endgame, with the best spec. That’s why I quit playing Warcraft – I was done with raiding and everything that goes with it. I want to relax, and enjoy the ride. I don’t want to be in a guild where everyone is expected to learn new raid bosses on the PTRs to be ready to eat through content when it goes live.
I’ve been dabbling with a lot of games recently. I re-subbed to Age of Conan for a month, but cancelled within the first few days since it now ran so slowly and buggy – much worse than it did when I was originally playing it. I still dink around in Runes of Magic and Guild Wars.
I’m going back to EVE to make another attempt to find “my” game within that universe. I’d not been logging in because my games time has been so limited lately, and every time I logged in I had this “but I don’t wanna!” feeling, like I was getting something unpleasant out of the way. Silly when we talking about a game, but I think it was a result of the negative feelings I have about totally unbalanced PvP. So, back to my ship to see what trouble I can get into.
And Warhammer. I just got one of those free-time offers for ex-subscribers, and I patched everything this morning. I always did love Warhammer, I thought it was so much fun…it just didn’t work if the server population was too low. Public quests are tough to complete by yourself, and I still have yet to experience city sieges and so on. So we will see.
At the moment I am a shiftless vagabond, without a home to call my own. :)
I think that you and I are in the same boat on this one. I’m still playing EVE, but I’m always looking for other things to do. I’m currently in Champions Online closed beta and now Aion, but have very little enthusiasm for either, though they are for different reasons. Champions is disappointing, and Aion is great – like you, I don’t want to play too much of the content now only to find myself needing to repeat it at launch. As we have pre-purchased Aion it isn’t even a decision about whether we’ll play it when it is released.
I recieved re-activation offers for both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, I’ll probably give them both another play. I quit WAR just after the Slayer/Choppa were released (I eve did the event quests to get early access to those classes) and found them very fun to play, maybe I’ll try one for a bit. My Witch Hunter was in tier 3 and I got bored when I hit the necessary grind there – it seems now they’ve increased the rate of levelling in tier 3 and 4, so maybe I’ll get that to R40 after all!
I found that Age of Conan runs better on my machine than it used to while using direct x 9, but runs horribly with dx10. Along with my re-activation offer there’s the option to create a brand new character at level 50! I think they’re getting desperate..
I reusbbed AoC about a month ago and it is running much better on my machine. The L50 is a one-time offer for those who already have L50s in order to skip the L1-50 grind. There is also apparently a 14d free trial and a 14d “please resub for free” offer. I am enjoying AoC, but can see that racing to L80 is a death knell for casual players like me who just don’t have the time for raids or mass-pvp operations. One of the reasons I stay in EvE is the sandbox, play-at-my-own-speed style.
@Latrodanes – that’s weird. I have a better machine now than when I played it at launch (we upgrade our gaming machines quite regularly) and it ran worse for me this time. Perhaps I had some settings that were causing it to have issues, I don’t know. Or, as Happy San said, maybe it was DX10? I didn’t think about that. Hmmnnn…
And I’d forgotten about the Slayer/Choppa! Cool – I’d not had the chance to start either of those. I think I know what I’m doing this weekend. :D