World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 80 of 139

Media Consumption – Blizzcon 2015 Edition

November 7, 2015 by Belghast

Interesting Day

Last week I had this grand plan of hanging out at home and watching BlizzCon 2015, so I took the day off work. Then as we got closer to the day, it suddenly filled up with other things I needed to do. Our house looked like madness yesterday with three vehicles of the contractors working on the siding and minor renovations, and another truck for the heating and air company. All of this while my wife and I were being forced to park in the next door neighbors driveway. Thankfully they were not here the last few days, otherwise I have no clue what we would be doing for parking. I am sure the neighbors are wondering what manner of insanity we are up to… as at one point yesterday we had a guy stop and gawk for a few minutes without asking anything. I guess that is the benefit of not actually knowing half of your neighbors is that you don’t have to make the same small talk over and over when something like this happens. This morning in honor of BlizzCon however I am going to talk about the things that interested me.

Diablo 3

I am leading off what was I originally thought going to be the big disappointment of the day. Blizzard did what they always do and rolled out everything that was new and shiny in their opening ceremony. The problem being… they said absolutely nothing about Diablo 3 which has turned out to be probably the game in their lineup that I care the most about. I had hoped they would announce another expansion this year, but alas that didn’t happen. However I am completely fine with this because the Diablo 3 panel later in the evening pretty much showed me that the team is quietly doing awesome stuff, in spite of apparently being ignored by Blizzard as a whole. The presentation was essentially a rapid fire series of announcements of new features. The one nearest and dearest to my heart surrounds the season play functionality. They have essentially sorted out that they are going to make seasons three months long, meaning at the end of that three months there will be new content leading into the next season. They said this gives players enough time to really deeply experience it… and also fits players like myself that swoop in… play enough to get the easy rewards and stop playing for a bit.

The biggest announcement as far as I am concerned is the “Rebirth” feature, which will allow you to essentially reboot a previous character and turn it into a new seasonal character. All of the gear that was on the character gets mailed to the account, and that character gets dialed back to level 1… but keeps achievements, hours played etc. It sounded like maybe there would be a special set of achievements for reboots, but essentially it solves the problem I always have of feeling like I have to create something brand new to be able to play along in the season again. They are also adding additional stash space… and the ability to earn slots by completing the seasonal journey on a character, up to 10 slots total. This all honestly would have been enough for me, but they are revising the buff system, changing the way damage is shown… adding a whole item set dungeon functionality where specific dungeons will require you have an item set equipped and then have challenges based on the strength of that set. On top of all of this… new zone and some expanded areas which makes 2.4 pretty damned awesome and it apparently goes up on the PTR next week.

Heroes of the Storm

The highlight of the Heroes discussion is the fact that we are getting Genn Greymane as a playable champion. This is absolutely hands down my favorite Alliance leader… that isn’t given the respect of having his own damned town to govern. I am still a little sore that Gilneas never became someplace we could actually use as a capitol city. I would seriously bank in that town all of the damned time if they allowed me to. All the same however it is awesome to have him as a champion and it looks like the gameplay is going to be based around changing in and out of Worgen form. The other interesting tidbit is that it seems like they are introducing ARAM for Heroes of the Storm. The details were pretty scant and I have not watched any of the panels for Heroes yet… but from the sounds of it, the mode seemed to put a random group of champions against another random group of champions just like “All Random All Middle” mode in League of Legends.

I am honestly all about that because ARAM is probably my favorite mode to play in League. Mostly because it takes all of the pressure off in that if you are getting randomly assigned a champion… no one can complain too much about you not being able to play it terribly well. I’ve found it a great way to get my feet wet and get used to how a champion performs under actual combat situations. The other interesting thing from the show was the introduction of Cho’Gall the two headed ogre. This is a champion that is literally played by two different players. I am assuming that one controls the movement and the other controls the combat at least to some extent. Everyone with a BlizzCon virtual ticket will be getting it added to their account… and then they can play matches with other players to pass the character on. After two matches a player will earn their own copy of Cho’gall and after I think they said four matches the original player gets a sack of gold for spreading the madness. It sounds cool and it is awesome to see this game thriving.

Hearthstone

The highlight of this announcement was awesome new Brann Bronzebeard artwork. Hearthstone is one of those games that I like, but rarely actually boot up to play. I am not sure what it is about the game, but essentially I keep playing the same deck over and over without changing it up much. It is like this game requires too much of me to actually get in and sort out the decks I might want to build. I am happy that it seems to be doing well, and I am happy that it has a meta that is very much alive. That said I felt generally meh when listening to them talk about the gameplay. I feel like maybe if it ran for shit on my iPad I would play it more, but I struggle with this game in the same way that I struggle with so many mobile games. It requires too much of me to pop into it while waiting on something… but it just isn’t sticky enough to make me choose to play it over literally any other game I have installed on my computer or consoles. There just is rarely ever a situation where I am going to pick this over an MMO or a single player game experience. I have so many other games to play… and honestly most of the time too damned many. The hearthstone fans seemed to be really happy, so I am never going to rain on their parade with my own “meh”.

Overwatch

I won’t lie the highlight of the Overwatch presentation for me was seeing just how awesome the Mercy Wings are in Diablo 3. Other than that I loved the Mei reveal, because she was freaking adorable… and also looked like a really fun zone control champion to play. Similarly I thought D.Va was a pretty cool concept, but I doubt I could ever see myself playing her. The boot up sequence of her HUD was awesome, in that it showed a cute bunny icon while it was loading. I really don’t care for the design of her Mech, which is my main problem with her as a champion. There is just something wrong looking about it… I get they were going for a jet with legs after the reboot that allows her to fly… but a Guardian Mode Veritech is a better version of what they were trying to accomplish. Though I think the design they came up with was largely a compromise to save space on the screen.

I have to admit I was largely tempted when they announced this would be coming to PS4. The problem there is that the Xbox and PS4 Blizard games are disconnected from Battle.net. That is my biggest problem with playing Diablo 3 on the PS4 is that I am stuck with only having access to my PSN friends… which are in no way as long of a list of Blizzard fans as the Battle.net account. So even though I am going through a bit of a renaissance of console gaming… I am ultimately going to go with the mouse and keyboard of the PC and essentially have to reacquaint myself with that sort of game play. I agree with Kodra in his belief that playing with a controller on a PC is a trap when it comes to a competitive FPS. There are times I have even considered picking up a XIM4 for my PS4 so I have the option of playing with a keyboard and mouse there as well. The PS4 natively supports USB and Bluetooth keyboards and mice… but very few games actually support that. Mostly right now I just want to get into the Overwatch beta… and I am hoping that will be a thing that happens soon.

Warcraft Movie

I have to admit on this one that before this trailer I had not really given much of a shit about the Warcraft movie. But man… those feels while I watched this. I have just been burned in the past when a franchise that I love was turned into a movie… at least from the gaming side of things. Does anyone remember how horrible the Dungeons and Dragons movie was? or Doom? This however…. looks like it is going to be a really good movie and revitalize the Warcraft franchise for a whole new generation. Maybe it is just the hype I am feeling about Star Wars spilling over into Warcraft… but I am feeling like now is the time to set aside old grudges and just embrace any fandom wholeheartedly. Both Durotar and Lothar were awesome in the trailer, and I think they were probably right to make this a Warcraft movie… and not a World of Warcraft movie. My hope is that along with this we maybe see a rebooted version of the original Warcraft RTS franchise. In any case regardless I know what I will be doing next June… sitting in the theater and watching this movie.

Legion Expansion

Now we finally get to the low point of Blizzcon… which I guess tells you how far my tastes have changed. I was completely amped about most of the above announcements other than maybe Hearthstone. I wholeheartedly love Blizzard games… but I have just reached the point where World of Warcraft is my least favorite of them. The cinematic trailer was nice… but I honestly had hoped that maybe we would have seen Varian die during it… or at least I thought that was what we were going to see for a bit. For years Varian was supposed to be “our thrall” but he has always been this paper thin super one dimensional character. His son on the other hand… Anduin has gone through some actually interesting changes especially during Pandaria. So my hope was that we would see Varian dying during this siege and passing the banner to his son who is more than likely far more capable a leader. The trailer also gave me hope that maybe just maybe they would finally be retiring the tired old shtick of Alliance versus Horde and giving us the ability to play with friends from both factions. Look… it is a dream that I am not going to let go of ever… I hate faction bullshit.

For the most part there is a lot of interesting things at work here… but I lack the faith that they are going to be carried out in a fashion I am going to like. It is my honest hope that I get into the beta testing process so I can see if I like it or not. I big nail in the coffin for Warlords was how badly they made the Deathknights feel… so I guess there are a lot of things that sound good on paper but never quite work right when you put them into practice. I am absolutely willing to give this game a shot, but I want to know that I will actually like it before I plunk down that pre-order. The new zones do look absoultely amazing however. They are pushing this aging engine for every ounce of oomph that it can muster, and I love that. The way WoW looks right now, reminds me of the way late in a generation console games look… when they have really figured out how to make the most of the resources they have to work with. This expansion is a bunch of really good ideas, that just don’t seem to be connected by enough tissue to hold them together. My disappointment largely was that the game didn’t really give me that moment of “fuck yeah!” that I have had in previous expansions. It did however give me a lot of moments of “that sounds cool”, especially when it comes to the non-linear leveling process for the new content. Unfortunately that same level scaling won’t apply to the rest of the world… so we are again creating this walled garden of “good” content and everything older will feel like crap as a result.

MMOs Worth Playing – World of Warcraft

November 6, 2015 by Belghast

Changing Course

When I started this segment of my blog the original intent was to highlight games that are not getting a lot of press and talk about all of the things I like about them. That said since the column is called “MMOs Worth Playing” I knew eventually I would have to get around to talking about some of the bigger names. So as a result I am going to have a momentary lapse of purpose here… and go with serendipity. Today’s is coming on the morning that BlizzCon 2015 starts, and as a result it just felt natural to talk about World of Warcraft. There was never a point where I would not ultimately end up covering the game, given that in many of the discussions I end up talking about it. So here we go… my attempt to create an overly positive discussion about the benefits of World of Warcraft.

The Standard

In every industry there is a leader that for the most part everyone gets compared to. In the MMO world this leader is World of Warcraft. Even though this has become the stuff of internet memes… it is by no means the first MMO, or in truth did it invent many of the things that folks attribute to it. That said it did manage to take the model that was burgeoning at the time of its release… knock off the rough spots and sand it to a mirror shine. Blizzard is really good at making games that appeal to the masses, and World of Warcraft is no exception. The problem is… the “appealing to the masses” has been a moving target causing the game to shift and dodge numerous times along the path. Each time it has changed course it has created a set of fans nostalgic for their imagined version of “the way things used to be”. So here we are today, with a legion of fan… some joyous, some in denial, and some begrudgingly along for the ride. Everyone has a World of Warcraft story, and if they don’t… they should. Every so often a questionnaire circulates through the community asking what game you would suggest a person with zero experience in MMOs should play… and the only actual answer you can give is in fact World of Warcraft.

This is the game that takes the complex concepts of an MMO and feeds it to players in bite sized chunks at just the right times to convert them from a MMO gaming neophyte to a seasoned veteran. The problem is that we have seen is that Warcraft is really good at creating Warcraft players, because many of these gamers never really venture out into other games. This is in many ways a failing of the other companies to embrace the same sort of low level educational campaign that Warcraft has. Sure to us long time players we see the Cataclysm revamp of the newbie zones as a travesty, but in each case they just work better… when you view them through the eyes of someone who has zero ancestral knowledge into the way that these games work. Each blatant breadcrumb, or cheese quest designed only to deliver you to the next quest hub… is honestly not for us, but instead for the players that NEED those clear indicators of what they should be doing next. We recently saw the subscription numbers for Warcraft and in part that number is due to the fact that a decade later they can still manage to induct brand new players into the tribe of WoW.

The Paradox

I am naming this section the Paradox because it highlights something odd in the game. When people leave Warcraft it is generally stated that they are leaving because they have “run out of things to do”. The problem that a game like WoW creates is that in order to keep the front edge of players happy, they have to keep cranking out content… something that Blizzard has proven to find difficult in the massive lags between end of expansion patches and the new expansion. The paradox comes in that one of the big reasons why I would suggest this game is that there is so damned much content to experience. Sure it might not be anything a veteran player wants to do… but for a brand new player this is a smorgasbord of brand new experiences and over a decade worth of sights and vistas to experience. World of Warcraft is by no means a gorgeous game at this point, because it feels a decade old at times… but there are still moments that are breath taking, like the first time you roll into Booty Bay and see the giant Goblin statue, or the first time you look down from the top of Thunderbluff onto the valleys below. These are important experiences that I feel like no one should rob themselves of.

So many of my good memories of this game however come from the interaction with the people. Part of my nostalgic chagrin however is realizing that so many of those players are no longer playing the game. Many of my best memories are tied to specific moments in the games history that will never come back. That however is not to say that each and every night new memories are not being made. People are still loving this game with all of their heart, and I have stated this before that I am more than a little jealous of them. I miss the types of experiences I used to have in World of Warcraft, but since many of those were tied to my “first time” doing this or that… I realize those are experiences I will never be able to have again. This is a game I was utterly devoted to for over half of that decade, and still have pangs of remorse when I think about those things I have lost. This game is powerful, and the experiences you have through it are equally powerful. Which is why I feel like everyone should step foot in the game and find their own version of those “first times”.

The Model

As I said many of those moments were because of the other players, but one of the benefits about starting World of Warcraft at this point… is that essentially everything is available to you as a solo player. That is not to say that I do not suggest that you find your way into a really good guild, because guilds make the entire experience better regardless of the game. However there really should be nothing locked from you because you did not bring a legion of friends into it. The game itself is subscription based, but you can get a free trial account to start and dip your toes into the water. If you end up liking it, the base game is $19.99 and will carry you through level 90, with the latest expansion Warlords of Draenor costing $49.99 on top of that. The later comes with a free boost to 90… which I highly suggest you don’t use at least not for your first character. There is a bunch of really awesome content to experience, and part of my frustration in the past is that it feels like these boosts cheapen the older content. Some of the best content in the game, is well below the level cap… so to skip over a Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, or Dire Maul would be a travesty. Then to maintain your account it is an older monthly subscription model of $14.99.

Over the years I have said a lot of hurtful things on this blog about Blizzard and World of Warcraft, and in many case those were about specific problems I had… that most players would never even care about. If I were creating a Facebook profile about my relationship with Warcraft… the only thing I could possibly pick is “complicated”. Similar to my feelings about Star Wars, with all of the hype and disappointment… I also hold in my heart a lot of frustration and disappointment with all of the possibility that was squandered. I’ve also come to realize that I wholeheartedly love Blizzard as a company, it is just one of there franchises that I have some issue with. Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm are both amazing… and what I have played of Starcraft 2 was really fun… even though I am not really an RTS player. I anxiously look forward to Overwatch and seeing how it does… and occasionally I break out a Hearthstone game even though that is not a regular occurrence. With World of Warcraft… I know that eventually I will go back and resubscribe because I always do. This game has a hold on my heart that even though I have tried to purge it so many times… it stays there clinging tightly. No matter what my current feelings are for the game, that power cannot be denied. So regardless of what the current hype cycle thinks… this is a great game and has so many excellent experiences that you would be robbing yourself of it you did not experience them. That is not to say that I don’t also think there are so many other amazing games out there… but when creating a column called “MMOs Worth Playing”… Warcraft had to be included among that number.

The Mission System

October 15, 2015 by Belghast

Angst and Frustration

Yesterday World of Warcraft released an announcement about patch 6.2.3 and the twitters collectively lost their shit. Essentially the patch felt like a thinly veiled batch of carrots to try and string players along for a few more months. It also sent the sign that maybe just maybe Legion beta would not be ready for Blizzcon, and more than likely players are going to see another significant lag between expansions. I even joined in the frustration for a bit until I realized… that it no longer effects me. World of Warcraft is like a bad breakup, that you can still get upset over years after the fact. I am not playing the game any more, so honestly while I still have “disappointed parent” moments over the game that has not really lived up to its true potential in years… in no longer actually has any effect on my play time unless I let it. All of that said… it did start me thinking about a problem that most MMOs have. When a game gets to be as old as World of Warcraft it has just silly amounts of content available to the players, but most of it is largely invisible to players. I’ve talked about in the past how MMOs are horrible at telling players how to get to new content, but they do an even worse job of directing players towards “old” content.

Unless you have been playing since November 2004 and have been a rabid completion-ist… chances are there is still a lot of old content that you have never seen in the game. The problem being that there is no real way of notifying players other than the achievement system that this or that area of the world exists… and might be worth looking at. Additionally most companies have this problem of trying to pretend that the past is behind them, and that only the new and fresh parts of the game matter. If this were not the case we wouldn’t see quite so many “boost to level cap” schemes out there. The problem I see with this is at least in the case of World of Warcraft… their best content is ALL from the past as far as I am concerned. Trying to till it under to plant new seeds does a great disservice to the awesome experiences that could be had doing past content. The problem once again is there is no really good way of letting players know what they are missing.

Exposing Old Content

There are some games out there that try really hard to wrap systems around this. For example in Rift you have the Instant Adventure system, which will port you to somewhere in the world, scale your level down, and give you a mini quest chain to follow along with a bunch of other players. This is an insanely enjoyable way to level, and they even introduced a version of this that allows for the exploration of raid content. It is something less like LFR and more like a world event that just happens to take place in a raid zone, and the bit of it I have played has been ridiculously fun. That said… this system is super limited in scope and still misses out on some of the quest content that happens in these zones and other things to do. Essentially we have all of these systems around grouping, but no real time has been devoted to helping players come up with things when they aren’t grouping. Sure you have facebook game like systems of the Garrison or the Shipyard, but eventually you reach a point where you realize that you are only playing the game to log in and fiddle with your house for a few moments before logging out again.

What I propose is a new kind of system that essentially takes a look at all of the content a player has completed and then suggests something that they haven’t. No game on the market does not have a robust system of tracking player achievements and most of them even go to the finite level of tracking every single kill the player has gotten… and occasionally even what they have gotten as drops. What I am proposing is a join between the list of “what is available in the game” and “what the player has completed” and then packaging and presenting literally anything the player has not done… in a quest form. Now I remember a time when there were threads on the Blizzard forums that you could post your profile, and someone would “assign” you an achievement that you had not completed to go and work on. What I am essentially suggesting is creating a formalized system for just that. Now since Blizzard still does not have a level scaling system, that is going to harm some of the enjoyment… because in a perfect situation it would scale you down to a level equivalent to the content. My idea would be to have a series of checkboxes in the UI allowing players to particularly avoid things like PVP, Raid or Crafting items if they don’t want to do those.

Interesting Baubles

The really important thing about this however is that players need to feel like there is a reason. Ultimately I think that is what players are saying when they say there is “nothing to do”. At least for me when I say these words what I really mean is “nothing I want to do, that has any bearing on my modern game play experience”. There are ALWAYS things you can do, that has never been the problem, but there are often times a loss of things that you want to do that give you some sort of reward that you actually care enough to chase. The itemization of this “Mission” system would need to be right, and my theory is that we could do something like a loot bag upon completing the mission. Maybe even make it so that when you get a mission, it is being given to you by one of the old world factions relevant for the content you are being asked to do. The loot bag would contain rewards equivalent to the sort of achievement you are being asked to do… and most likely for 90% of the bags opened would just be a little pocket money and maybe some consumables or crafting materials. However there would need to be the chance of obtaining some ultra rare items, like mounts or cosmetic items in order to make it worth the players time.

Sure it is rehashed content, and there is no denying it. It does however give players a way to essentially mine more enjoyment out of content they have not completed… and get rewards for doing it. Largely this idea hit me while thinking about the events of yesterday, and the problem of having a decade worth of content but no real way of getting players to go back and consume it. Additionally I have been playing a lot of Destiny, and that game is the master of giving me little mini-quest sand events, largely in the form of patrol missions that give purpose to what is otherwise a bunch of wandering around the shooting random shit. It struck me how much more enjoyable for me it is to kill a dozen Vex when I have a quest asking me to collect items from them, than it is just to kill a dozen Vex on my own. The act is the same, but in one case I have a false sense of purpose. Ultimately I think that is what most unhappy customers lack, is a feeling of purpose in the things they do. After all you can only log in for so long without doing something meaningful without realizing that you are essentially paying for an expensive chat client. I am not saying this is a system to stop games from hemorrhaging players, but it is something. I absolutely think I would use something like this because I would know I am working toward two things. Firstly I would be slowly inching up my achievement score, which give me a bit of a false sense of satisfaction. Secondly I would know that maybe just maybe there is a chance that upon completing one of these many missions I would get awarded something really awesome and special.

Better Faction Systems

September 29, 2015 by Belghast

Loss of Nuance

I had this topic that I wanted to talk about this morning, and jotted it down so that I would not forget. Then last night I suffered from a bout of insomnia. So my hope is that even without much sleep I can still make this topic work, and devote the amount of attention it deserves. For years I have talked about my dislike of the faction wall system that was first popularized by Dark Age of Camelot, and then carried forth into the modern genre of MMOs thanks to World of Warcraft adopting it. For many players they know nothing different than picking a red versus blue faction and living their entire gaming life’s within the confines of it. I think I struggle against this concept because I remember a time when this wasn’t necessarily the case. Lately I have been spending a lot of time playing my smuggler in Star Wars the Old Republic, and yes I realize that game is a very faction locked experience. However if you think of the Smuggler itself in the Star Wars mythos, it has always been a character that skirted the lines trying to exist in Republic, Imperial and Hutt space at the same time, carving their own path balancing between them all.

The problem is, other than the original Everquest no game really supports this notion. You cannot live between the faction lines making your own choices, instead you are asked to choose an allegiance that is about the most impersonal experience imaginable. The problem is that I feel no personal responsibility for choosing Horde or Alliance or in many cases Red or Blue. They don’t represent me as a person, and as such I have no real loyalty tied to them. However in Everquest you were assigned essentially a default template of allegiances based on your racial choice… but from that point on you could blur the lines at will. I remember spending copious amounts of time hunting Kobolds in the Warrens off of Toxxulia Forest, for the purpose of gaining faction in the otherwise aggressive city of Paineel. Why did I do this? Honestly for no real reason other than I could, and that I thought the city of Paineel was extremely cool in its layout. Sure I could have simply banked and quested at the far end of Toxxulia Forest in the already friendly city of Erudin, but instead I made the conscious choice to hang out with the Necromancers.

Sapping Creative Expression

The problem with the faction wall system is that it forces all of the players to essentially be the same person. Later games started throwing in optional faction grinds, but those grinds are always connected to “things”. Gain this much reputation with this faction and you will get a nifty sword, or a pretty mount… but otherwise once the current expansion is over they will be utterly meaningless from that point on. The problem here is that these tertiary faction choices don’t actually effect the players game experience. They don’t unlock new areas of the world, or more so close off other areas that the player did have access to. Granted in the early days of World of Warcraft they did manage to create a few of these Factions that did actually do interesting things. Namely I am talking about the back and forth seesaw of the Bloodsail Buccaneers and the assorted Goblin factions. If you were truly insane you could skirt a thin line between gaining faction with the Bloodsails but also doing faction repair work with the Goblins to make sure you were not ever hitting “Kill On Sight” status.

The problem here is… this was an isolated example that granted players access to a handful of boats in the ass end of the world. This area was made immediately irrelevant as soon as the Burning Crusade and subsequent expansions released. Instead as an Alliance player I always wanted to figure out a way to gain factions with the Tauren. They were the only Horde race that seemed to cling to any ideals I could get behind, and I thought it would have been so interesting to be able to gain faction in a way that would allow you to enter the town and do commerce there. Things are never completely black and white, and even in the lore there are characters that skirt the lines managing to be friendly to two different groups at the same time. The entire World of Warcraft experience would have been so much richer if it allowed players through sheer will to grind out their own niche that lay somewhere between the predetermined choices. I think it would have been interesting to allow players to create the ultimate “diplomat” that was friendly to essentially ALL of the races.

Fear for the Future

The problem with games being iterative is that once a feature set becomes common, it essentially stays there forever. This past weekend when we talked about Tron 2.0 in our AggroChat Game Club show, one of the lines of discussion was how the cultural norms for shooters have changed over the years. What used to be representative of most of the shooters that were out in 2003, is no longer recognizable through the lens of the basic feature set that we now have come to expect. World of Warcraft borrowed heavily from the games that came before it, and since it chose to go with a walled off faction system, games that have borrowed from it have essentially followed that mold. Red and Blue factions with their own walled off areas of play have become the template for how to build a game, and right now the only real evolution has been a return to three factions instead of just two. Sure games like Rift have torn down the wall and made faction into “fiction” but they have not really gone anywhere in the struggle of making faction a personal choice.

Now going back to the original thing that spurred this topic, Star Wars the Old Republic. How much more rich would the smuggler have been if you quite literally could have been a freelancer in action and not just name. The game does a decent job of making you feel like you live somewhere between the red and blue lines, and then when the second chapter happens it essentially rips all of that forcing you to align to the Republic faction. Sure you can still play a dark side Smuggler, but these aren’t “real” decisions with any sense of “real” lasting consequences. You can’t decide to say screw the republic and opt to live entirely in Hutt space or Imperial space. You can’t decide to say on Alderaan or Balmorra and improve your faction with one of the leaders, opening up new questing opportunities that are unavailable to the average player. Everquest is a game that I could never really play again, because I just can’t handle the essentially “primative” game client. There however are still things that the game got right, that no other game that I have played have really tried to copy. The problem is… right now I cannot see a game adopting a more real world faction system, without somehow turning it into a marketing focus and losing sight of all of the other things that have to be in place to make a game enjoyable. Essentially I want real factions… but still be able to keep all of the things that I have come to expect from an MMO to this point. Unfortunately I fear that the era of MMO experimental-ism is over… and at this point our feature set is locked in place just like the feature set of shooter is locked as well. In the meantime however… I will still carry a rose colored torch for this features that I wish I could have in modern games.