Friday, January 15, 2010

My return to blogging…

I’ve taken a pretty long and significant break from blogging (I had a mere 5 posts in 2009). It wasn’t really announced as I never really intended to take a break. One day, I just found myself without anything inspiring enough to write about. In hindsight, I can pick out the moment when I lost that inspiration. It was shortly after I gave up on Warhammer.

As an MMO player, I was simply turned off about so many things that were wrong with WoW in Burning Crusade. Wrath was just going to be more of the same, so I (like a lot of people), saw Warhammer as an opportunity to move onto another quality title. One focused primarily on PvP which has always been important to me in gaming.

We all know how that story ended. And when it did, and I found myself playing WoW again. And the inspiration that motivated me to write about MMOs faded as my anger towards WAR slowly died out.

Ironically, my enjoyment from WoW peaked a few months into the new expansion. Many problems still existed, but I’ll credit Blizzard with making the overall game more accessible to people. The net result is that there are lots of things to do in the end-game and the repeatability of a lot of that content held my attention for much longer that I expected.

Ultimately, my prediction that I would play Wrath for a much shorter time than the previous expansions turned out to be true. I quit WoW for the second time in June, after only 7 full months of playtime. The unexpected part is that I enjoyed that time more than I enjoyed any period in the previous 3 or 4 years.

Fast forward to today. I still enjoy MMOs. I still enjoy playing MMOs. I still enjoy reading about MMOs. And I’m not actively playing any MMO. I’m like a desperate single guy looking for a new girlfriend. I don’t want to be single, but I don’t want to date ugly chicks either.

And so, as a homeless MMO gamer, I decided to take the blogging mantle back up. Suprisingly, the long break and detachment from playing any MMO has left me with quite a bit to say about what I want from MMOs. Expect around one post per week from me for the foreseeable future.

2 comments:

SolidState said...

Welcome back to blogging :)

One question though - are you sure it's an MMO you're looking for?

Maybe a single-player game like DA:O would be more to your liking?
Or if you're looking for lighter stuff, I've personally tried both Torchlight and Trine and they are 2 very different but fun (for a while) games. Torchlight if you can get it for 10$ is worth that much at least, IMHO.

sid67 said...

No. Definitely an MMO. Single player games (particularly RPGs) have never been able to hold my attention through an entire game.

I'm a pretty competitive person and what keeps me motivated in a lot of these games is to be better than others. Either by outright killing them in PvP or by performing flawlessly in Co-Op PvE encounters.