Cycopl

Update goes here:

It's been over a week since I posted. It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but it has.

I resubscribed Asheron's Call. There's kind of a story behind it, but I'll just go ahead and tell you because I need to take up space on this page.

As you all may know, I have been looking for free online games that are fun to play and have depth and blah blah and all of that crap. There's always Neverwinter Nights, which I paid $40 for just to play online, but for some reason I get incredibly intimidated whenever I join a server. It seems like whenever I go out and fight, I get slaughtered. Grouping with players helps, but I don't like depending on other people, and I don't like people depending on me. And then, I also had a subscription for Anarchy Online, which (I'm sad to admit) got old really quick.

I feel bad to say that AO got old, because I went on and on about how good it was when I first started playing it. It was a new experience and it wasn't anything like the abysmal AO beta test. When you start off, it's very easy to move along by yourself, and accumulate some really good xp in the process. Eventually though, stuff gets way harder, and your character development doesn't really catch up with the difficulty of the monsters, so grouping is pretty much required if you want to be doing missions higher than the medium difficulty setting. Like I said before, I'm not a huge fan of grouping. I don't mind talking to other people or trading items with them or socializing or whatever, but I feel that I don't work extremely well in a group, because I always feel like I'm not pulling enough weight around or I'm pulling too much. If I'm not pulling enough weight, people don't like me for taking advantage of them. If I'm pulling too much weight, I should be able to get experience faster by myself.

Have I lost you guys yet?

Anyway, I stumbled across a game called RPG World Online. Here's a screenshot of this beautiful game. So, it's not really the most impressive looking game ever. It's not even impressive at all looking. One would go as far as to say that the game looks like a finely woven basket of shit. But, the difference between this game and the other free game is, that this game has depth. I mean, there is so much stuff to do in this game. You can create the typical character classes: fighter, mage, archer, rogue (kind of). You can also craft stuff out of items that you find, you can set your character up to be a vendor so you can work like a shop and make money while you're gone.

The character creation was very detailed, allowing you to decide exactly what you wanted to specialize in. Four different types of magic (Red, Blue, White, Black), lots of different weapons, trade skills, deception skills, lots of stuff. You also chose how to allocate your stats. Immediately when I saw this, I knew that they completely ripped off the Asheron's Call character creation. I mean, they added some new trade skills, and took out some other skills, but it's basically the same character creation.

When I further played the game, I realized that the magics were almost exactly the same as Asheron's Call. Red magic was the manipulation of player/npc stats and skills, just like creature magic in AC. Blue magic was the manipulation of items, like making a sword do more damage or a shield defend more. White magic was exactly like life magic in AC, where you have heal spells, protects, vulnerabilities, transfer spells (drain), etc. Black magic, obviously was just like war magic, with attack spells.

The graphics and speed of the game was just unbearable though. I tried to enjoy the depth and quality of the actual game than the graphics and speed, but I couldn't. It was almost like playing Asheron's Call, except a much earlier version, much much earlier. Then, I realized that I had a subscription to a game I rarely played anymore, Anarchy Online. So I cancelled the AO account, and resubscribed my AC account, and have been enjoying it for the past few days. Yay!

I heard that Splinter Cell went gold for PC... I'm gonna try to find that, it should be surfacing pretty soon if it really went gold.

Posted by at February 18, 2003 07:44 PM