The best laid plans, a wrench and all that….

So, yeah.

I had originally meant to come back and talk about my final class decision in AoC the very next day after the post.  However, due to a family thing, I have not been home for the last few days.  Indeed, I have either been at work or the taking care of some stuff since then.  Luckily, it looks like everything is going to be back to normal at least semi-soon.

When I left I knew I would not be back for a bit so I grabbed my laptop.  I figured I could get some AoC time in while sitting around at the hospital.  Yeah, that doesn’t work so well.  AoC and my laptop do not mix.  It can run it, albeit with most of the setting turned down, but the keyboard and AoC’s combo system do not play nicely together.  I played for about an hour total and got nothing out of it but frustration.

So, in desperation, I started looking for a game to play temporarily.  After perusing my single-player games, I found nothing I wanted to play. I finished Dragon’s Age.  I finished Oblivion and Fallout 3.  I didn’t especially like Neverwinter Nights 2.  Meh.  Nothing to play on the single player front.

I briefly (very briefly!) flirted with downloading the WoW trial, just to have something, anything to do.  I squashed that pretty quick, I am proud to say!  Good thing I have grown a resistance to that disease over the past year!

Looking through my e-mail, I came across the latest Warhammer Online Newsletter.  I have not played WAR in almost a year and a half now.  Hadn’t even really kept up with the changes in the game.  WAR burnt me so bad that I didn’t even want to hear about it.  This was the MMO to end all MMOs for me.  And it crashed.  And burned.  And insulted me while it did so.

I was a closed beta tester for WAR.  I was in before the keep system was and I saw all the faults and potential problems with the game.  The lack of depth, the poor combat, the poor engine and all the other problems WAR has had since release.  But, it was Mythic, damn it, Mythic!! The company that had produced my favorite MMO of all time, DAoC, they could surely make this game something special.  They did not.  They failed and part of my MMO fandom died with it.

But now I found myself staring at the Newsletter, unable to play AoC, and looking at the free ten day “Welcome Back” promotion.  My laptop could probably handle this, I thought, and I have nothing better to do.  So, I loaded it up and back into WAR I went.

The game has certainly changed.  For one, the performance is eons above what it used to be.  Even on my laptop it runs better than it did in the olden days.  I have since fired it up on my desktop once and not only does it run better, but it looks better too.  Sharper, with more fancy lighting.  I am not sure what they did to it but it doesn’t even look like the same engine.  The graphics in the beta and release days were okay, maybe a tad bit better than WoW, but not much.  The game now looks phenomenal.  Not up to the AoC standards but sharp just the same.

The first thing I noticed was that there were only four servers left.  Four!?!?! There were over 60 at launch!  How could a game falter so much?  How could it falter so much and still be going?  Luckily, the servers that are left are still well-populated.  At least the one I rolled a new character on was popping.  There was no wait time for Scenarios and I was able to jump right in to one immediately.

I imagine I will have so more impressions over the next few days and, no, I have not quit AoC.  Indeed, I played it this morning a bit and am still enjoying it a lot.  I am strongly considering re-rolling on a PvE server in AoC.  There are just too many twinks at low level in AoC and cheaters who rely on that AoC cheat program.  I may look at making AoC my PvE game and WAR my PvP game.  I can still PvP in AoC at endgame and in mini-games.