One thing I miss the most from the good old days, call me nostalgic, is the downtime. In EQ especially it took me 5 minutes maybe 10 to recover my mana after a nice battle. During that time, I had to pick a safe spot to hide, and I had to watch my butt for that time period or any passerby would pick up a rock and bash me over the head, like a caveman picking a bride, and before I knew it I would have a mob metaphorically dragging me to their cave to make little squishy babies as ugly as sin that cry a lot (when full grown) and hate heavy lifting. To me, the fact that you were vulnerable for an extended amount of time made you think about where to camp yourself (is this place really safe?) and it also added to the feeling of danger you received from playing the game.
Another thing it did, was to give you time in between killing something to turn around and pet your dog, put in a load or laundry, read a few pages from a book, or watch your favorite show. Maybe it is just the attention span issue, but now that the genre has moved away from that style of play I find myself having a hard time playing for extended periods of time. The little things in life keep pulling on me until they can't really be ignored any longer and I have to take a break. In some ways it is better, but there is still a part of me that misses that.
Enter Aion, and their generally dull crafting mechanics. Nothing revolutionary by any stretch, but what are they? TIME CONSUMING AND MINDLESS YAAAAYY!!!! To me this is a direct return to the semi-afk moments from older games, and personally I love it really for that reason only. I never powerlevel my crafting if I would rather be fighting, questing, or PvPing. But on those off moments when I really want to stay in the game, but don't really want to do much of anything...crafting is my very best friend. I have a friend that does it at work because he can't afford the attention it would require to do anything else in game. I do it when I want to tidy up my living area, in the morning when getting ready for work, or as aptly put by a fellow guildie "When there is plenty of beer demanding my attention". Note: this is also the same guildmate that a few days later said "Woah, I really need to stop crafting or I am going to be way too drunk to get up for work tommorow morning". Just thought I would put that in perspective.
Another thing that this semi-afk state does is force me to watch my legion chat and take in the world around me a little more. Since sitting by the computer watching myself craft is very anticlimactic, I actually pay a great deal more attention to the chat windows and I end up talking a great deal more than when I am furiously grinding mobs or questing.
Am I saying Aion has the greatest crafting system in the whole world, HECK NO! But one positive about it is that I do get to catch up on my reading/favorite shows/xbox library. To me, it is probably the last chance I will ever get to chase butteflies in traffic while playing my favorite MMO. And that is very sad, albeit much safer.
I chuckled at the reading whilst crafting, thats exactly what I did and managed to finish a good few books I'd previously overlooked on the ol' bookshelf.
ReplyDeleteOverall Im a bit upset over the way my Aion experience has went as Ive nose dived from having a brilliant time to really not wanting to log on. Its Dragons Age for me although I think I will pop back to check out the patch for Aion at some stage and see what kind of impact it will have on xp grinding.... if however they take forward their plans for 'Captcha' of Aether gathering they can kiss my sub goodbye.
Yeah, I don't like captcha's in gaming in general. Nothing breaks the emersion like having to stop what you are doing to type in a randomly generated sequence.
ReplyDeleteI like Aion a great deal, but when one of the new MMO's comes out I am looking forward to (TOR, Earthrise, FFIV) Aion will have to make some incredible improvements to retain my subscrioption.
Most of them are a good year away though, so NCSoft has nothing really to fear for the time being. I have wasted so much of my life killing myself to be the top dog at a game, that it stops being fun after a while. If I don't feel like logging in I don't.
Hope to see you again in Aion in the future, but would understand if the game is no longer fun for you. Hopefully NCSoft will do something interesting in the near future, as most of the stuff they add to the game just tends to be bug squashing (which isn't bad), but can make the game stale after too long.
I guess I just haven't had the bad experience you guys are having/had. I'm still enjoying the game a lot and can't wait to log on when I get home. Maybe the trick is that I don't get a lot of game time, so I don't burn out as quickly as some folks do. I'm also not into rushing to the top (just not enough game time)which can make it feel like a chore instead of a game. /shrug
ReplyDeleteNo, I love Aion a great deal right now. All of my friends that are playing still love it, so I have people to talk to, and my guild is going strong. I am just worried about the future of the MMO.
ReplyDeletePart of what makes MMO's unique is that they grow and change, which sometimes can take an MMO in a completely different direction (for better or worse). Korean MMO's tend not to grow at nearly the same rate, and are very happy releasing as little content as possible.
NCSoft will HAVE to release enough new content to keep the game feeling like you haven't done this all before. Whether they actually take steps to do this remains to be seen. I am really hoping they keep the game fresh and new, as I really love the world of Atreia.
However, there are several very promising MMO's coming in about a years time, and if by then they have failed to keep the game fresh, it will be a very easy decision to drop my sub. Until that happens they have me hooked, and I am likely to remain so until there are far greater alternatives.