Its been over 6 months since I quit World of Warcraft and I am still to find a game that can hold my interest. A factor to contribute to it is also the fact that I have been mostly stuck with Ubuntu:) and no windows but still. Over the last 6 months I have been thinking of what made me play WOW for over 2 yrs whereas no other game in the past has ever managed to hold my interest for so long. I have played various RPG's and even bought guild wars about the same time as I bought WOW. But my guild wars copy has hardly been played heck I still have my guild wars and it runs under linux too ( via wine ) but somehow i still can't get myself to play it more than an hour before I get bored of it.
What I have realized is
- Wow was fun. Questing in wow/guilds/pvp everything about the game was fun. Heck even farming/finding friends to quest with everything about the game rocked. What wow got right was the community features in the game. Guild wars chat channel is crappy no linking/no auction house/no in game e-mail etc makes the game rather boring.
- Wow had all the features superbly implemented. More importantly the cities were superb hubs to hang around, the characters had well Character..Guild wars characters look lame...all human is so boring! The mobs in WOW were fun, its certainly fun to kill a 2 headed Ogre than a stupid scorpion or something named Charr or a centaur all of them making the same sounds.
- The regions were gorgeous, the shared world was amazing... running around in stranglethorn vale randomly running into enemy faction characters and deciding whether to be nice or gank the guy had a rush of its own or not knowing if you were the one going to get ganked.
- Essentially I am still to find another game that had the capability to involve a player so much as WOW did. I guess thats why its also known as World of Wowcrack!
Enough about wow now to the new games to look forward to!
- Warhammer Online - Now this seems to be similarly themed like Wow but with a more balanced PVP system than WOW. It has a similar setting with shared worlds/realm vs realm combat etc. It remains to be seen if Warhammer will better WOW.
- Tabula Rasa - From the creator of the Ultima Online comes a scifi MMORPG. Its an RPG set in the far future where humans are involved in fighting a war that has lasted for a long long time against a merciless enemy called the Bane. I played the beta a bit though on my crappy laptop and with bad shader support everything was like grey:p. But from the little bit I played the game play didnt seem extraordinary. The screenshots look beautiful but I am not very impressed by the gameplay. Also PVP at this moment is only by consensus that kind of makes the world rather uninteresting for me.
Hellgate London- This is an interesting game coming from the creators of Diablo. For the people who like Gothic Horror Games this would be the best one. It has 6 different classes plays similar to Guildwars where everything is instanced and has a character advancement model similar to Diablo. The only thing that kind of put me off from this game is that its all interior and mostly cityscape as the game storyline is built around London. I don't like playing closed space games for various reasons.
Now onto the other NON RPG genre that I really like and have been looking for a game to play since Warcraft 3.
- Supreme Commander: From the legendary creator of Total Annihilation one of the best RTS games ever comes this beauty. Supreme Commander launched in Feb 2007 and has got rave reviews. The problem its a beast and needs a beast of a machine to run^. Hopefully with my flash new card I should be able to get it to run once I get windows:)
- Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance - Coming this November 2007 is a standalone expansion to Supreme Commander which introduces a new playable race the Seraphim. The AI is supposedly much improved and all the factions are getting new playable units. This would be an interesting game to watch for.
- Universe at War - Similar to Supreme Commander except the game is set on Earth with 3 different funky looking factions. The number of units per faction are less but have a lot of variety and look absolutely gorgeous. The thing that interests me in this game is the Novus faction which has the ability to teleport units around and plays very differently from the other 2 factions. Also the interesting fact in this game is that everything is a resource unlike having specific resource nodes this game allows you to harvest anything and everything in the game for resources.
- World in Conflict - I haven't seen much of this game but it seems to take the concepts of an older game Ground Control 2 and improved upon it. No resources to be harvested but you get more units via a reinforcement model.
Over the next few months I hope to try out a couple of the ones listed above at least one of the Supreme Commander ones or Universe at war. Lets see if RTS genre has improved from Warcraft 3 times and is worth revisiting.
