MMOs I've Played

While this blog is about Star Wars: The Old Republic, and SWTOR is the game I spend by the far the most time on these days, I have on occasion tried other MMOs. Sometimes I've even talked about the experience on here, but not always. Either way, I thought it would be interesting to write a little summary of all the MMOs I've tried over the years. It's not that many in the grand scheme of things, because I'm ridiculously picky when it comes to even trying a new game, but there's almost always a funny story there.

World of Warcraft

Alright, so I won't say that much about this one other than that it's where it all began in 2006. My first MMO and I loved it. I played nothing else for several years. I learned what raiding was and enjoyed it. I met people and fell in love. I moved to a different country. Playing WoW helped me find a job. It changed my life.

However, by 2012, I didn't like it all that much anymore and made the move to SWTOR. I went back once during Mists of Pandaria because my pet tank gifted me a couple of months of play time (I think to spite me after we'd had an argument about pandas). In 2015, I discovered private servers and the Vanilla WoW retro experience, something I engaged with on and off again. I'm looking forward to WoW Classic now.

I also have a blog about it, where I wrote about my adventures regularly from 2009 to 2011 and where I also documented the above-mentioned MoP stint and my private server adventures.

Champions Online

In 2009, I still wasn't really interested in playing anything other than WoW, but my then-boyfriend gifted me a copy of Champions Online for some reason, so we tried that together. I created a character called Val(k)yrie and took a screenshot of her. I also created another character, a little green reptile person, of whom I unfortunately never took a screenshot. The character creator seemed pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, the game was utterly unplayable for me. In theory, my old PC met the minimum requirements, but even with the graphics turned down, the game was nothing but a slideshow and my input with keyboard and mouse only caused erratic responses, if any at all. I struggled to even move around and only made it through the starter area by basically having my partner complete all the quests for me while I clumsily tagged along. When we moved on to the next area, I fell off the platform we arrived on and somehow managed to wedge myself into a corner I couldn't get out of, not with how unreliable the movement controls were for me anyway. I sighed and logged off, never to be seen again.

It's a testament to the strength of the character creator that I actually found myself missing those barely-played characters in a burst of nostalgia the other day, to the point that I contacted Cryptic's customer service to ask if my account could still be recovered somehow. (When I downloaded the game and logged in, with the same credentials I used back in the day, nothing was there.) The answer seemed to be "maybe", but only if I created an entirely new Arc account because for some reason they couldn't link my old account to my current one. That was more effort than I was willing to go to in the end.

Warhammer Online

Fun fact: Warhammer Online was what got me into World of Warcraft. How does that work? Well, my boyfriend at the time was into tabletop gaming and introduced me to the world of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. Somehow, while reading up on these online, I came across the site for a game called Warhammer Online, which sounded amazing! Unfortunately it was still several years away from release. But there was this similar game called World of Warcraft... the rest is history.

By the time WAR actually came out, I was way too engrossed in WoW to care about anything else. Though I remember a friend of mine playing it and getting all glassy-eyed when he told me about his dwarf standing shoulder to shoulder with other dwarves to hold off an orc attack, saying it was the most fun he'd ever had in PvP.

Anyway, I did eventually get around to trying the game, but not until early 2011, by which point it offered a free trial. It wasn't easy to find though, as EA seemed to already have more or less abandoned maintaining the website at the time.

Again, my then-boyfriend and I went in as a team, me as a warrior priest and him as a bright wizard. The starter area seemed okay, though not particularly exciting. I do remember being impressed by the first public event we encountered, as I hadn't seen anything like it before, though I also remember the scoreboard it had being super confusing to me.

However, by the time we got to the next area, the population thinned out drastically, and the next public event we encountered proved too much for just the two of us. (These things didn't scale at the time.) We made a note to come back later, but then never did. RIP WAR.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

No need to go into any detail on this one, that's what this whole blog is about!

Neverwinter

Initially it looked like Neverwinter was going to be just another experiment with friends, as everyone including myself lost interest in it within a month, but then we came back to try again and since then I've never entirely gone off it. I have a blog about this one as well, though I only update it sporadically, just like I'm going through phases of playing the game a lot or not at all.

I think it complements SWTOR very well on my gaming menu in that it's completely different - not just because of fantasy vs. sci-fi but also in that its appeal lies very much in the moment-to-moment gameplay/combat, while the story is rather weak, which is pretty much the opposite of how SWTOR works. It's also the game that taught me what it's like to play something casually but still be attached to it. Before that I never truly understood how someone could like an MMO but not want to go all in with it and play it all the time. Neverwinter showed me how that can work.

Star Trek Online

I was pulled into STO by my pet tank and he more or less carried me all the way to the level cap. I wrote a post about it at the time. In hindsight it's a bit surprising to me just how positive that post ended up sounding, because in the end I left the game with a somewhat sour feeling. I seem to remember that it had just had an update, with me once again expecting my pet tank to help me through the new content, but he got distracted by something else, so I eventually just logged off with a sigh... and never came back.

While I liked the setting, I just couldn't abide the combat, whether on the ground or in space. I'd like to say that to me, gameplay doesn't matter as much in an MMO as things like setting, but STO proved me wrong in so far as it showed me that no matter how much I like the setting, if I can't log in and simply have some fun playing, even while on my own, it's just not going to last. The things I actually remember liking the most were the little mini games involved in scanning space anomalies and mining dilithium, flying around searching for good duty officer missions and chasing epohhs on New Romulus, none of which had anything to do with the core game.

Elder Scrolls Online

My relationship with ESO is weird. I have no connection to the Elder Scrolls franchise and had no interest in playing this at first, but a friend gifted me a beta key so I thought I'd give it a try for a weekend so his gift wouldn't feel wasted. And I liked it quite a lot! This was during the period when everyone was bashing it as buggy, boring and uninspired, mind you. Even though I knew that I wasn't going to play it at launch, I vowed to myself that I was going to keep an eye on it.

Some time after it dropped the mandatory subscription and reduced its box price, I bought a copy from Amazon. I didn't actually have enough disk space to install it at the time, but again I told myself that I was going to get around to it eventually.

Finally, after another one and a half years of the game sitting shrink-wrapped next to my desk, I had a chance to install it. By now, people had also changed their minds about it and were praising it as so much better than at launch! I logged in, amused to find myself gifted with a free monkey pet for having participated in the beta more than three years ago, played through the tutorial... and then logged off again, never to return.

I'm still telling myself that I'll get back to it eventually, but I just haven't felt any itch to return to it at all since I actually played the live version. Maybe all that waiting caused me to subconsciously hype it up in my head to expect more from it than it could deliver and that's why I ended up disappointed when I actually logged in again? Sometimes I don't quite understand myself.

Lord of the Rings Online

I wrote about trying out LOTRO earlier this year. We were having a reasonably good time with it, even though it was really showing its age by overwhelming new players with lots of confusing systems. I ended that post by noting that we were going to try the first dungeon next.

That's another funny story actually. Everyone kept telling us not to use the group finder because "nobody uses it". I took this with a grain of salt in the same way that "nobody" uses the group finder to get random ops groups in SWTOR - the experienced players mostly form their groups in chat, but there are people queueing through the interface too. These groups are just rarer and more prone to failure. I really wanted to see whether LOTRO worked the same way, plus I was honestly a bit shy about putting a group together in chat since I knew so little about the different classes and what sort of setup would be desirable.

The problem turned out to be this: We couldn't actually figure out how to use the group finder interface. How silly is that? Our one attempt to use it just ended up teleporting us inside the instance with only the two of us. That didn't go so well. I actually went to reddit afterwards to ask for advice and it turned out that we had used the wrong one of the many tabs of LOTRO's group finder tool. I planned to give it another try later, but then Secret World Legends came out and my pet tank was all over that instead, so LOTRO fell by the wayside. I still want to conquer the Great Barrow some day.

Secret World Legends

I wrote a first impressions post about that one as well, but unlike with LOTRO we've managed to stay surprisingly loyal to it. We don't play every weekend, but we have kept coming back to it and are nearly done with Tokyo now. I have a post in my drafts folder that details my "second impressions" of the game, which I will put up whenever we manage to finish the current storyline.

I think the takeaway from this history of my MMO experiences is that it takes a strong IP as well as social hooks for me to want to try something new, and both friends and fun gameplay to make me want to hang around. I guess with people like me it's not surprising that new games are having a hard time establishing themselves in a crowded market.

Visiting Middle-earth

It's been a while since I've written an "off-topic" post on here to talk about my impressions of a different MMO. In the past there's been Star Trek Online, Neverwinter (twice, until it graduated to its own blog), and the Elder Scrolls Online beta. I guess it was about time I expanded my horizons once more, this time in the form of writing about trying out Lord of the Rings Online.

It's a game that several of my blogger friends play and/or think highly of, so I've certainly thought about trying it before, but in the end I've never felt motivated enough to dedicate any of my limited free time to actually doing so. What changed recently was that my pet tank and I were talking about what other games we could possibly play together - which is actually always a tricky subject as we have somewhat different tastes - and it somehow turned out that we both had an interest in LOTRO. Unsurprisingly, we were both off to install it shortly afterwards.

For me, that was already the first challenge, as the download kept failing at certain points. Fortunately I quickly found a forum thread detailing a workaround - the issue was caused by my particular combination of operating system and antivirus software apparently.

On start-up, the game didn't give the best first impression to be honest. It showed its age by launching in a tiny resolution with terrible graphic settings which I wasn't allowed to change until after character creation, and similarly the theme tune (which is lovely, don't get me wrong) was blasting into my ears at a ridiculous volume by default.

I let my pet tank pick what race we were going to be, so we ended up as elves. Much has been said about the supposed ugliness of LOTRO's character models, but I honestly didn't find them that bad. They could just do with better facial expressions. My own elf for example looks perpetually bored out of her skull for some reason. I guess this is lore-appropriate ("So tired of Middle-earth... must leave it...") but not very appealing.

Speaking of lore, I should probably say up front that I'm not a Tolkien superfan. I did have a love affair with Lord of the Rings back in high school, when I chose it as the subject of my final English paper, and I also liked the films well enough when they came out (in fact, I had a giant poster for each one in my bedroom at the time). But I gave up on the Silmarillion about a third of the way in because I felt that it read like a particularly boring history textbook, and when I tried to watch the first Hobbit film in the cinema I actually literally fell asleep at one point. So I apologise in advance for maybe not understanding things or getting any lore wrong.

Anyway, the game starts you off in a short solo instance that teaches you the most basic of MMO rules, such as how to talk to NPCs and fight enemies, but that was done quickly enough and I was able to join up with my pet tank. True to our favourite archetypes, he chose to roll a guardian tank and I opted for a minstrel healer, also in part because I've never actually gotten to play a bard-type class in an MMO before. It's absolutely hilarious.

"Look at me, I'm playing music at things and they fall over dead!"
"Wow, you're that bad at it?"
"Apparently so!"

Another very deadly attack simply has me shouting at monsters. The amusement value of that is just endless.

The starter zone gave off strong vibes of an old game that doesn't see much fresh blood anymore, as we were on our own for most of it, only running into one other player at the very end. We did see a couple more people once we moved on to the next area though, so maybe it's just another instancing thing.

One mechanic I found very interesting from the start is how loot works. Basically, you don't need to click on the bodies, things just go into a sort of "temporary bag" automatically, from which you can then claim them whenever it's convenient for you (as long as it's within the hour). This is simultaneously very convenient and made me feel kind of robbed, as in every other MMO I've played I usually have a reputation for "chasing after the shinies" and annoying other people by triggering loot-roll prompts in the middle of combat. In LOTRO, that's just not a thing, and it's easy to forget that you're picking up any loot at all. At one point I picked up something like ten (temporary) copies of what was supposed to be a unique quest-starting item because I didn't notice that it was there and the game just kept throwing more at me in an attempt to make me use it already.

This initially lulled me into a false sense of security in terms of bag space, making me think that it would not be a problem, but this turned out to be very wrong very quickly. LOTRO basically does the same thing Neverwinter does to sell bags, which is to fill your bags with loads of stuff that isn't quite crap, but leaves the new player uncertain of what to do. You know that none of it is very valuable, but you're not really sure if it's safe to throw it all away or if you'll just end up regretting that later. I sold a whole load of stuff that I was sure was nothing but vendor trash, just to find out later that there were repeatable quests where those same items could have been handed in for reputation. Conversely, I held on to various crafting materials for a really long time (at least those go into their own separate tab in Neverwinter!), hoping to be able to sell them to other players instead of vendoring them, but then had to learn that free players are not allowed to list things on the auction house.

What I've seen of the F2P model in general so far had me raising my eyebrows a bit. I've never seen an MMO that is quite so pushy in terms of wanting to make you visit its store before. And to think that people accuse SWTOR of nickle and diming! I suppose you could argue that this allows for an "à la carte" experience, with people only paying for the things they'll actually use, but to me it's still a bit annoying to be prompted to go to the store at absolutely every corner. I thought it was telling for example that the riding skill appeared to be something you can only purchase with LOTRO points, not with in-game currency - now, it doesn't actually cost much and the low amount of points required for this is easily earned by doing some deeds in your starter zone, so you don't actually have to pay for it with real money. But it forces you to get comfortable with using the store and pulls you out of the experience repeatedly. As an aside, anyone know why the store insists on opening in an outside web browser? I swear I've seen footage of people browsing it in-game before...

Anyway, back to the game itself. The questing is very old-school, with your character being sent from one mini-hub to the next, where there are usually a bunch of similarly-themed quests to kill X number of mobs, but I can't say that we've minded that so far. My pet tank and I have mostly been pleased that we haven't encountered any issues with doing quests as a group up until now, whether they involve picking up items, talking to an NPC or doing a short little instance. You'd think that ensuring a smooth experience for people playing together would be a given in any MMO these days, but unfortunately I've had to learn not to take that for granted, so LOTRO definitely gets points for that. Every now and then there is also a little cut scene, which I'm sure must have seemed amazing back in 2007.

One overall impression that's very strong however is that the game is very confusing. Considering I seem to remember LOTRO being cited as a pioneer of quest tracking, it doesn't do a very good job at showing you where you need to go, and the maps are only available in a very zoomed out view that makes them hard to read. The game also absolutely bombards you with information about systems and mechanics early on. By level ten we'd already been told about traits (talents), reputation, crafting, deeds, cosmetic gear, dyes and how to use the store, and my minstrel already had more than one action bar full of abilities. There was probably even more stuff that I'm forgetting right now, and it's telling that even as an MMO vet of more than ten years I've been struggling to keep up. It's certainly helped a lot that I've picked up vague references to certain systems from reading other people's blogs about the game. I can only imagine how overwhelming the experience must be for genuinely new players; the game could really do with spacing some of those things out a bit. Also, timing matters! I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the game popping up a big window full of text for me to read when we accidentally triggered a fellowship combo for the first time, something to which I was supposed to react within seconds without ever having seen one before. Who has time to read a tutorial at that point?

Overall, my impression of the first couple of levels has been a somewhat mixed bag. There is a lot to love about LOTRO. The zones look every bit as gorgeous as everyone always says, even in 2017. I could see the gameplay maybe being a bit boring when you're on your own, but in a group it has been very fun. The world is an explorer's dream, and the lore runs deep. But the game's age and sheer amount of systems can give you quite a hard time as a new player. F2P restrictions also keep popping up in odd places. (Hey, check out the wardrobe! No, you're not allowed to use it!) If we do decide to keep adventuring in Middle-earth, I'll probably pony up for a month's subscription - it's only fair. If that happens, I'll likely also make another post about later impressions at some point.

LOTRO-playing friends, feel free to share any tips and advice you'd give to a new player! Also, what's the situation with group content while levelling up? Are traditional levelling dungeons still a thing? I've kind of been struggling to find information on that but keep thinking that it would probably be fun for my pet tank and me to be able to test our tanking and healing skills in a real group environment soon.