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.

Home Sweet Home MMO

With it being the start of a new year, I'm seeing posts all over in which people talk about what MMO content they are excited about in the upcoming year. Almost all of them seem to talk about new releases, with comparatively little thought being given to existing games. Why is it always about the newest shiny? Has everyone who blogs about MMOs become a tourist type?

That's not exactly the subject I want to talk about today though. To be honest, I've been practising a bit of MMO tourism myself this past year. I tried out Neverwinter for about a month and got into Star Trek Online. In the past month I've even been playing a bit of WoW, despite of swearing to myself when I quit that I wasn't going to give Blizzard any money ever again. I suppose it doesn't quite count since someone else gifted me the game time.

It doesn't matter how attached you are to an MMO, there are always going to be lulls. I have to admit that I'm experiencing one with SWTOR right now, mainly for two reasons: One is that my guild has gone kind of quiet, with many people disappearing to play other games, so the social draw to play currently isn't as strong as it has been previously. The other reason is that Galactic Starfighter hasn't really been my cup of tea, so there haven't really been any new content additions to cater to my interests in over three months. I was rather disappointed when I was linked to a forum post which had Eric Musco commenting on what's coming in 2.6, just to see him reply that hey, Galactic Starfighter launches for all players! I think it's pretty cheeky to use staggered access as an excuse to count the same feature as major new patch content twice. Where's the new PvE or regular PvP content? Well, at least the promised class changes for Commandos sound like they'll be good for me...

Anyway, when your interest in your usual MMO is waning (even if temporarily), it's tempting to try something else for a change of pace. And if I can say one thing for the deluge of free to play games available these days, it's that it has certainly lowered the barrier to entry for at least getting to try something different. I mean, I really wasn't keen on trying STO before I had my arm twisted into giving it a go, but seeing how it was free I didn't really have much of an excuse to not even try it, did I? And in the end I did get some enjoyment out of it.

Tonight however I logged into SWTOR once again, after having given it only cursory attention outside of ops nights for a few weeks, and it was a stark reminder that even if I've been trying other things, it still remains my home MMO. There are just so many things that feel different when I'm playing other games. Here are some of the major factors that I've noticed making a difference between my home MMO and one that I'm just checking out as a tourist or casual visitor:

1. In my home MMO, I actually care about playing well.

We've all been in a pug with someone who played amazingly badly and shook our heads at how anyone could be so ignorant of the game's mechanics and conventions. Interestingly, it was STO that made me view this situation in a whole new light. When I hit max level in that game, I realised that I was appallingly bad at it. I didn't even need a damage meter to see that. Yet at the same time, the skill system seemed way too confusing to me, and I realised that if I wanted to get any better I'd have to put some serious effort into figuring out how things worked, finding bridge officers to train the right abilities and so on and so forth. And I realised that I didn't care enough about the game to actually want to put that much work in... so I opted to stay bad and simply stayed out of anything but the easiest group content (so as not to put a burden on others). I think I'll be less judgemental of bad players from now on, because if they are just visiting, I get why they do what they do.

2. In my home MMO I care about engaging with the community.

Again it was STO that highlighted this for me more than anything else, because while I got roped into joining a fleet (guild) and people there seemed nice enough, I didn't have a particular desire to get to know them. In fact, I wanted to be a bit of a loner, because I figured that I don't have time to be really invested in multiple MMOs at the same time, so I didn't want to get too involved. If you don't want to engage with other players, that's a sure sign that you're not making yourself at home.

3. My home MMO is what I've accepted as my personal standard.

When I try another game and it does feature X better than my usual game, I'll go "that's neat (but I could do without it I guess)". However, if it does feature Y worse than my usual game, it'll make me seriously mad. This one has been very apparent for me in WoW. "Geeze, how hard is it to make quest items that you have to loot from the ground shareable among party members? SWTOR has had that feature since launch! If we have to split the party one more time just to do another 'pick thingamabobs off the ground' quest I'm going to go mental!" I've got very used to the more group-friendly game design in SWTOR and find anything less unacceptable now. Yet comparatively the things that WoW does better, don't matter nearly as much to me anymore.

4. My home MMO is fun on my own too.

As an interesting counterpoint to point two, while my home MMO is the place where I like to be social, it's also fun as a game in its own right. Most of my tourism projects have been inspired by other people inviting me to play with them - which is all fine and dandy as long as we're actually having fun together, but if those same other people suddenly aren't available to play and I find myself with zero motivation to fire up the game without them, that's a sure sign that it's not something sticky. When my time with WoW was originally approaching its end, I was also struggling to find anything I wanted to do on my own there - I just wasn't feeling at home anymore.

I guess the lesson to take away for me is that it's fine to try out different things... but there is no place like home. (Cue heel click.)

Trying Out A Different Space MMO

You'll have to excuse me for going off topic for the second time in a year, but just like it was the case with Neverwinter back in May, I found myself trying out another MMO recently and would like to talk about the experience a bit. I certainly wasn't looking for another game to suck up my time, as I know from experience that I don't do well trying to play more than one MMO at once, but my pet tank kept nudging me to try out Star Trek Online, as he had been playing it lately and found it quite fun. Since I apparently value friendship more than my sanity, I eventually gave in, installed the game and created a Trill science officer with a random name. (Won't get too attached to a character with a random name, right?)

My first play session was pretty bad. I found the gameplay clunky and it soon drove me up the wall. I whined and moaned endlessly about the clearly mutual dislike between the game and me... but I kept playing nonetheless, and somewhat to my own surprise, my dear friend eventually managed to drag me all the way to the game's level cap. Since then, it has actually managed to grow on me in some ways despite of my initial bad experiences. 

Setting

One of the first things that struck me was that STO is a lot more combat-heavy than any of the Star Trek TV shows generally tended to be. It's kind of the reverse of SWTOR really, which has more random dialogue and moral dilemmas than the Star Wars films are typically known for. That said, Star Trek Online still manages to hit the spot pretty well when it comes to its source material. The story missions usually engage you in the kind of scenario you would expect to see on TV too, ranging from diplomatic entanglements and conspiracies to alien abductions that eventually end in pit fights à la Captain Kirk in the original series.

Graphics & Sound

One of my first thoughts the first time I moved my character was: "she walks funny". However, I'm noticing that this is something that I tend to think pretty much every time I try out a new game, and I got used to it over time. The interior environments look and sound like you would expect Star Trek to look and sound: whooshing doors and pretty bland backgrounds (because they are not the point). Space doesn't look particularly exciting either, though I quite like the music that wells up during space combat. Some of the environments you explore during your away missions look quite funky as well. All in all, it's nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done and won't be an affront to your eyeballs (or ears).

Gameplay

Star Trek Online basically consists of two parts: space combat (where you "are" your ship) and ground combat, which is more like what you'd typically expect from an MMO, with your character running around and shooting things. At first I honestly found this overwhelming, trying to essentially learn how to play two different games at once, and it didn't help that I didn't take to the space combat portion of the game at all. I could appreciate its uniqueness alright, but it just didn't "click" for me and I found it incredibly tedious. However, it seems that at least part of this was due to the starter ship being extremely weak and slow, so things got a bit better once I was able to upgrade. Now that I've overcome these initial difficulties, I do have to give the game credit for achieving a good split between making you identify with your ship and making you identify with your character, which is very much in line with the Star Trek franchise and how captains and their ships were pretty much equally iconic for each series.

There are also some mini games, most notably the duty officer system, which basically allows you to collect starship crew members with different skills which you can then send out on missions for various rewards. I have to admit that I instantly fell in love with this one. It's actually kind of interesting to hunt down different missions in different areas and to collect the right officers for each particular job. Not to mention that the results of said missions can be unintentionally hilarious: my favourite so far was when Pet Tank sent a large part of his crew on an innocuous mission to perform Hamlet on the holodeck, but due to someone deactivating the security protocols it ended in disaster, with three dead and another three injured. (Didn't expect that, huh?)

What's My Role?

I've never seen Star Trek Online advertised as a game without the classic holy trinity (after all that was supposed to be Guild Wars 2's big thing, right), but from what I've seen so far, roles in STO are pretty fluid. Maybe it's different for hardcore players at endgame, but as far as I can tell the three types of captains (tactical, engineer and science) are only very vaguely specialised, anyone can fly any type of ship, and in any group content that I've seen things mostly seem to come down to everybody blasting away at the enemy and keeping themselves up as well as they can. Occasionally a big zerg can be fun (for example in a Red Alert mission versus the Borg), but in the long run I can't say that I find this kind of gameplay particularly engaging. I've been trying to specialise my own science officer and ship for support and healing, but the toolbox to achieve this seems quite limited compared to what I'm used to.

Social

Back when I tried out Neverwinter, I complained at length about how some of the grouping mechanics in that game were a massive pain in the rear. To be fair, that was right after launch and since the game never took off among my friends like I had hoped, I haven't been back - for all I know, all the problems I complained about could have been fixed by now. Either way, it shows that STO is made by the same people as it suffers from similar issues, even though the game is a couple of years older.

Basically, it seems that the devs have their heart in the right place when it comes to grouping and do want to encourage it - but it feels like they then don't even do the most basic quality control on their features. All my most frustrating experiences with the game so far were caused by failures of the grouping system - such as when I got separated from my group and we couldn't figure out how to reunite because the button to join another person's instance is a small grey bar with no label or tooltip! Good luck figuring that one out. Then there were all the instances where we were beamed into a confined space as a group and one group member ended up stuck in a wall... these are just such basic gameplay obstacles, I can't believe nobody has bothered to fix those. There are also a lot of conversations to click through during some missions, and in a group whoever clicks through them first makes them disappear, whether you've personally had a chance to read them or not. Imagine if in SWTOR you could miss out on entire conversations just because someone else got trigger-happy with their space bar! Not cool.

On the plus side, STO is the first MMO that I've personally played that allows you to match your level to that of your group members, and while down-levelled characters are way overpowered and up-levelled characters remain very weak, it did serve me and my max-level buddy well enough while I was levelling up. The guild or "fleet" system also seems pretty involved. I had planned to stay away from any guilds since I didn't want to get too entangled by the game, but one joke invite later and I was a member of a big coalition. Oops? I have not talked to anyone beyond my initial "hello", but I've been quite impressed by all the features you get access to in a fleet, the most notable one being a personalised star base.

Content

I mostly levelled up through doing the episodic story content, which is very good. I barely got through the first three arcs before hitting max level as well, so there is quite a bit left to do after the level cap. Still, story only takes you so far, what else is there? While I haven't been around much yet, there is plenty to do in space from what I gather, from randomised solo missions to group content for various sizes. Oh, and of course Star Trek Online has its own Foundry of user-generated content as well. It strikes me as a very feature-rich game really... just missing polish in some areas.

Even though I've hit max-level now, I have no idea what endgame is like, nor am I sure that I even want to know. (I've definitely got enough on my plate with SWTOR!) I've paid one visit to the endgame daily area on New Romulus and it gave me curious flashbacks to Vanilla WoW with all the bizarre little bits and bobs that you could collect to hand in here and there with the eventual goal of earning reputation with the Romulans (think Scourgestones, Dark Iron scraps, that kind of thing).

Free To Play

With the game being free to play there was no real barrier to entry for me to give it a try. While levelling up, I found the model to be pretty generous to its free players. I was limited in my bank space, what ships I could get and stuff like that, but I never felt like I was seriously lacking anything that I could only get by paying real money.

It's interesting that the game essentially uses the same virtual currency system as Neverwinter, but I found it a lot less annoying in this game. This is kind of ironic considering that Neverwinter was built to be free to play from the ground up - but I felt that everything store-related was very in-your-face in that game, e.g. store-bought mounts being displayed on the market square, store buttons everywhere and so on and so forth. STO on the other hand was originally a subscription game that was converted, and as such seems a lot more subdued in its monetisation efforts. Yeah, you get stupid lockboxes dropping everywhere, but I soon learned to ignore them and just throw them away now. It also does have a subscription option still, and I did eventually pay up for a month, both since I was having fun with the game and to unlock a couple of subscriber perks such as extra inventory slots.

In Summary

With its strange mix of space and ground combat, Star Trek Online is a slightly different sort of theme park MMO. At first there is a lot to take in, and stupid bugs can be a big turn-off if you're unlucky like me, but if you stick with it through the rough ride at the start you might find that there are quite a few things to love.