MMO Roundtable

Star Trek Online or World of Warcraft?? I've played WoW for 5 years off and on. Horde and Alliance, Raids, Dungeons, Solo, Battlegrounds.. Played Star Trek Online for a week less a few days, since it was so mind numbingly boring.

Don't get me wrong, ST:O looks fantastic, ship battles are just the way I hoped they would be. Reminds me a lot of Starship Battles. Ground combat was ok.. I guess it was just that I found myself doing the exact same things over and over.. The grind (tm).. The thing that every MMO has to some degree, and try their best to hide. Once you see that hamster wheel it's never the same again.

But ST:O being from Cryptic is very much like City of Heroes in space to me. I played CoH off and on since launch. And it's fun for awhile, but again very repetitive. And I would probably be still playing if it was $9.95 a month, or even better free like Guild Wars or Dungeons and Dragons Online. I would describe it as MMOLite. Just not enough meat to keep going long term.

But, contrary to all the bitching and moaning that goes on about paying a $15 US monthly sub. MMOs are very cost effective entertainment. Play as much as you want for that 15 bucks. You can hardly eat out once on your own for that. And forgetting about buying a console game for $70 now days, you can't hardly rent one for a week for less $8 or so. But, granted you can usually wrap most games these days in a week if your dedicated enough. And renting 3 games a month and we're back to MMOs being better bang for your buck.

So, I've landed back once again in Azeroth. My last trip didn't last more than 2 weeks before I closed my sub and didn't even log in the last two. I have a bunch of Alliance in the 60s, one in the low 70s and some horde in the 70s and 80.

Cataclysm sounds interesting, and supposedly will launch in November. I'd like to have two level 80s by then. So, I can try and play the next 5 levels from different perspectives. But, last time I had difficulty leveling through the same terrain all over again. And whether it was horde or alliance the difference from 70 to 73 seemed minor. And I was bored.. I didn't expect 74 to 80 to be any more varied.

I'd like to have a DPSer to go alongside my healing toon.. But I find oddly enough, that my two most prospective candidates are both healers. And I'm more bored working up a Mage in the 70s. And until Cataclysm launches I'm certainly not going all the way down down to level 1 again to try a Rogue (For the third time, one level 47 and One level 20 already.. ) Until I can try Worgen out and the new low level stuff.

I did play a fair amount of Lord of the Rings Online. And there is a lot to like about the way they did things. But WoW being out longer, just has more to do as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'll talk about LotrO later.

And the odd duck of the bunch, Star Wars The Old Republic by Bioware I am looking forward to seeing more about. Looking like the MMO to break the MMO mold. And if anyone can do it, I would have said Blizzard. But since, they have WoW who seems to have sharpened and perfected the current EQ style. Bioware would be the next choice to upend the paradigm. But we have upwards of a year or so before we find out.