My MMO existential crisis

[Talgurin]

I only really have time to play p99, but I'm trying to figure out if there are any MMOs out there that I can poke out of my little bubble and try out. Can any MMO exist to match the glory of taking down a dragon with 70 other players and winning a piece of loot that, if RMT was allowed, would probably be worth hundreds of dollars? Yeah, people complain a lot about P99 but that's still some glorious shit that I'm not sure anyone else can duplicate.

Archeage

I heard good things about Archeage being a "sandbox". Installed it and quickly found myself following an incoherent story to solve quest, after quest, after quest--with mobs that are so easy to dispatch I just yawn my way through it. I also discovered about zero player interaction. I don't see how there can be any glory here. Uninstall.

Black Desert Online

So I was told if you didn't like Archeage, try out BDO instead, another so-called "sandbox". What I found was another Korean mis-translation-fest and lots of people in general chat going "kekekekke ^_______^" who are probably not Koreans but white kids pretending to be Koreans.

Actually, firstly the graphics are way better. Yes, it's some Korean kid's fantasy of big titted wizard women, but they look really damn good. The combat system was superior to Archeage, although still a lot of button mashing. The world seemed decent. Also you can pay like $10 for full access to the game and no monthly subscription or pressure to pay to win, so far so good.

Quickly discovered some of the same issues, though. 1.) No player interaction, 2.) As I approached level 20, I still never lost more than 5% health from ANY fight. In other words, easy to a point of being DUMB. 3.) An incoherent quest-based system, where instead of exploring the world and making your own adventure and storyline (as 'sandbox' should be), you follow an uninteresting series of plot points that I can't even figure out, involving NPCs I don't give a rats ass about.

I finally talked to another player who informed me, "This game is just questing and button mashing until you're level 50, when it becomes more interesting and harder, and you have to work with other players for some of the content." There's a lot of people who put time into houses and trading and caravans and all that kind of shit, but the existential crisis quickly returned as I thought "What's the point of it all?". Maybe the PvP is pretty good later on, but I don't want to endure dumb quest after dumb quest with absurdly easy encounters just to decide if I like the game or not. Uninstall.

Guild Wars 2

I heard Guild Wars 2 didn't use a questing system but a "waypoint" system, so it's more focused on world exploration. Sounds interesting.

Quickly found myself actually interacting with other players in the little tutorial fight. As I entered my newbie town, I encountered a bunch of players in their underwear rolling around on top of each other as they performed an in-game "orgy". Okay, so far things seem interesting.

Going out into the countryside, I found the Waypoint system a lot better than the prior two MMOs and their shitty, incoherent, badly translated quests. You can just sort of go out and kill things and find adventure. And grouping with other players is as easy as just walking up and helping them kill things. This is so far more "sandboxy" (e.g.: EverQuest-like) than the last two.

Definitely the winner so far, but some issues: The fights are also easy to a point of being dumb. Like, where's the challenge when everything just dies in a couple clicks? What happened to being afraid of skeletons and bats?

Leaving it installed for now.

Mortal Online


The opposite extreme. I've gone back and forth a lot with MO. It's basically first-person Ultima Online circa 1999. That means insane PvP with fully lootable corpses. You get thrown into a city with no idea what to do, with limited guides or resources available online. It really is a "sandbox" for better or worse.

Dungeons are dark and scary (I don't know the extent of PvE but I am impressed by what I see). You need a team to survive, and you WILL die a lot.

The problem is like any game such as this one, it's you vs. players who devote their lives to PvP. It's the same reason I don't last long on classic Ultima Online shards. It's kind of like being thrown into prison, going up against lifers who've been there for 25 years already ahead of you. Good luck getting ahead.

So it's just dying a lot from PKs ultimately. A lot. And also a weird system of needing to pay for multiple accounts / mules to build a character up to being even partially playable.

If MO was more PvE focused it might be perfect. But I don't feel like the slaughter, so I never keep playing it.

Elder Scrolls Online

I didn't bother shelling out $60 for this. At first I was pretty excited since like many I love Skyrim / Oblivion. Then I read some answers on the ESO Reddit about what the game is like.

So it has a level scaling system. All the content is immediately scaled for your level, at all times. A player said "Because of this, there are no easy or difficult zones, it all stays the same, essentially."

WTF? That's the MMO equivalent of a communist country. As someone who's actually been to North Korea, I'm not excited to recreate it in Tamriel.

To be fair, regular ES games scale for your level, too. But it's not quite the same... there are still the weaker monsters running around, and the earlier content is leftover, but by higher levels dragons and things start swooping down, so it's a nice blend. Apparently, ESO is setup so that there isn't really progression that you can notice, it's more like an endless treadmill. In other words, you can't go back and kill mobs from your old newbie zones, because you live in a phantom version of those areas, disconnected from the other players as you fight high level monsters instead.

I was also told players hardly interact with each other, for most ESO is a single player experience. Hooray.

Consensus

Back to leveling my alt on p99 and waiting for Pantheon.