Six weeks ago, after a long and hard think, I decided to give World of Warcraft a rest. It it was getting repetitive. Once you've got to level 70, the highest level currently available, it seemed to turn into Groundhog Day for me. I found myself doing the same daily quests all the time, getting rich and having nothing to spend the money on. I spent a lot of time walking through the large expansive land looking at all of the wasted area and pretty scenery knowing that nobody else was around.
I told Blizzard not to renew my WoW subscription and instead went out and bought Age of Conan to see what it was like.
Age of Conan is stunning and beautiful but, and it's a big but, the game is just too buggy for me to take seriously at the moment. I found myself having to sign out and sign back in (which does indeed take a while as it ends up generating some huge checksum for a 26Gb install) four or five times in a two hour gaming session in hope of a quest finally working, and then the game client would crash, or the servers would go down. Not my idea of fun.
What finally did AoC in for me was the fact that FunCom, who manage to ruin any game they touch (they put the 'Anarchy' in Anarchy Online) with their piss-poor infrastructure, started giving away a free days play as a cheap shot at trying to make people stay. I've kept the box and the DVDs and the manuals for now and I'm sure that I'll give it another go in a few months to see if they've managed to make their servers able to support the lush and beautiful living world they're marketing, as well as the people who have bought the game.
I navigated to the World of Warcraft European website, excitedly prodded in my username and password and restarted my subscription, opened the WoW client, logged into the Aerie Peak server and started to have a look around right away.
I found myself in Shattrath City, a neutral capital city with excellent connections and then it struck me, I had nothing to do apart from the same "dailies" - quests which offer reasonable rewards for repetitve work - and this wasn't going to do. I needed to do something else, something fresh and new so I decided to roll (create) a new character and start from the beginning which meant temporarily retiring Hayn. Hayn is my main character, a Level 70 Night Elf Hunter, pictured below overlooking a lake in Zangarmarsh, Outland.
We've had some huge adventures, good times and some bad times. He's snuffed it more times than I can count but has been a terribly robust toon for me to play with and I've nurtured him from level 1 up to the highest 70 becoming more powerful with each passing level. He's two years old, I've matured in the game world with him, helped out new starters, raided huge unending dungeons and, more importantly, had fun.
I rolled a Druid, a Night Elf Druid. I've never played a druid before. He plays on the same Aerie Peak server where Hayn now sleeps (his early life is going to be subsidised by him) and his name is Noobcakes.
I stayed with the same faction and race as before - I like the Night Elf. They've got good dance moves and jump in an amusing way plus they have one of the best looking mounts out there, the Nightsaber.
Of course, I've also got an Elekk too, but that's a different story of dedication to a new faction which is a bit complicated to go into.
Anyway, why a druid? Apart from the positive unfamiliarity with the character (something new!) I thought he'd be an interesting proposition. I found that the Hunter class, while being rock solid, was available in excess at end-level instances so one always felt that all the time one had invested in the creation of such a character left one with nothing but something which was very much surplus to requirements. A druid can be a healer, and there's always space for a healer. But he's a healer who can stand up on his own and stand out in a group.
Noobcakes, pictured above, lacks all the groovy stuff Hayn models. He hasn't earned it yet, after a few hours of playing he's just a level 9 character, one of the countless level 9's pleading for help in the general chat channels who one generally ignores unless bored. Having to group up with those who are essentially UTTER NOOBS is slightly grating at times ("Where is it? "It's at 46,32" "Wha?" "Those are the coordinates. "What is coordinates?" "You need an addon." "Wha?") but I guess we all had to start somewhere.
It's going to be difficult and new, I'm not sure how he works exactly or how I should be playing him or which direction to guide him in but it should be fun finding out.
Wish me luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment