First Loves

I’m tired this morning – raiding too late and getting to bed at one am is making me not a very nice person.  It’s making me an evil cow who made a nice but very slow cashier at a petrol station cry, actually – not to put too fine a point on it.  (Dear lady, I’m sorry that my tapping the nozzle-thing on the pump kept setting off alarms behind the counter so you couldn’t think or wait on customers. But you want to know the honest truth? At the time, I didn’t care. Turn the pumps on. When a customer is standing there looking at you through the window, turn the goddamn pumps on. I don’t care how slow you are or how many customers are waiting for you to give them the wrong change. Just turn it on.)

Meh.  It’s definitely a Monday.

I’m thinking about buying Tabula Rasa, and getting a subscription for a while. I like the idea of main story-driven characters that are actually walking around in game, played by real people.  I’m still addicted to WoW – as I’ve written before, even with the problems involved in juggling work and life and gaming, I still love it. It would be nice to have a change, though.  When I was a kid and teen, and to a certain extent even now, I was a total sci fi nerd.  I loved Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and so on. A sci fi MMO might be interesting, and I hear that Tabula Rasa has improved since the beta, when I thought that it seemed too drab to be interesting to play.

I think part of the problem is that other games just don’t compare to Warcraft.  I read a good Tobold post this morning about this effect: Spoilt rotten by World of Warcraft?  Someone (I don’t remember where) called LOTRO “the methadone of WoW”.  In other words, you get addicted, but not as much – it’s a way of weaning yourself off MMOs. Nothing else is just as immersive – I don’t connect with those worlds as much as I have to Warcraft.

And yet, like wanting to fall in love again, I want that.  I want that feeling of the first day that I realised that I’d played for four or five hours straight, totally immersed. (A huge step for me, as I’d never really played an MMO before.) I want to fall in love with it…and I just haven’t met the next “One”.

Ah, WoW.  We’re still speaking, even having fun together now and then. But we’re at that point in the relationship where we both know it’s ending. Somewhere out there is the one for me, my new love. I’m waiting, and looking.  Oh, sure, we’ll promise to always keep in touch, and we’ll probably have one night stands now and then, reliving old memories.  But we know it’s over.

3 thoughts on “First Loves”

  1. TR is pretty fast paced and more action oriented than most fantasy MMOs I have played Ravven but you might like the atmosphere. It pretty fun to get into but if you dont like shooters, you may be disappointed. I wrote a small writeup about the different systems in game and it might help you make a decision.

    Hopefully the trial comes out soon for those of you on the fence about it.

  2. Bah, rubbish – the WoW needle’s firmly stuck in your arm and will remain there for a good while yet!

    So – you may cast your eye at a fresh young thing, a new challenge, a new conquest, even get them bedded down together – but the novelty soon wears thin and you’ll be back in the arms of WoW again! (Probably playing a Death Knight)

  3. I ordered Tabula Rasa yesterday, and I’ll pay for a subscription for a month or two in order to try it out. I do like shooters, but I have an issue with motion sickness in games – we’ll see how that goes.

    http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001588.php?page=1

    Looking at the Player Life-Cycle chart on Daedalus, I think I’m in the Burnout stage on WoW at the moment, but I could either fall in love again (regress to Mastery) or move forward into Burnout. :)

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