Levelling The Land, Revisited
So, some of you may be wondering what I decided about the wonderful world of Warcrack. Some of you, on the other hand, already know, or have some idea.
One word: Gnoooooooome.
Well, also a Night Elf.
But mostly gnoooooome.
*ahem* So in case you hadn't worked it out, yes, I got World of Warcraft. There are things about it that I like better than FFXI. There are things about FFXI that I vastly preferred.
Ways In Which FFXI Is Vastly Superior to WoW
- City Maps. Or, more to the point, labelled fucking shops, okay? I do not see why I have to mouse over every single one of the chatty little fuckers just to find out where I can sell all the crap I've been collecting from beating toxic slime to death!
- Item Sales. To wit: the interface sucks arse. I ended up buying back a whole bunch of my crap by total accident at a premium and I am a little bit annoyed by this. FFXI at least had an intuitive interface.
- Aggro potential in mobs. Look, I get 'fast-paced game' or whatever the hell, but it's a little bit difficult to try to manage soloing when wherever you go, whatever you do, there's a whole pack of mobs who will gang up on you roaming around the place. I get that you're going to get attacked in these games. I do not see the fun potential in trying to complete a kill quest and getting dogpiled by a bunch of troggs or whatever the hell I was fighting.
- No acclimatisation time whatsoever. In FFXI, I spawned as little tiny Taru and got approached gently by some Mithra criminal and nudged. Gently. In a way that more or less said, "There's plot somewhere, if you want it, but it'll find you eventually; don't worry. Go out and nuke shit." In WoW? I find myself in the middle of a makeshift infirmary fighting ... well, members of my own race who had apparently gone nuts or something, I don't even know, but one thing was abundantly clear: "YOU HAVE SPAWNED DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF PLOT! ENJOY NOT HAVING A GODS-DAMNED CLUE!"
- The 'srs bzns' factor. For FFXI, it is easy to find free, comprehensive and very helpful guides to how to get started and similar. I went looking for those when I started WoW. Mostly I got adverts. Apparently, people want help with this game so badly that they're willing to pay for it. SRS BZNS. *headdesk* And the Brady guide is shit. So I feel like I'm floundering and I can't even turn to the internet for help without having to pay for it.
Ways In Which WoW is Vastly Superior To FFXI
- Windowed Play. In FFXI, it is against the Terms of Service to play a windowed mode, though there is a hack for it. Basically, if you try to swap between FFXI and something else (say, Firefox or AIM or something), your game will crash. Which means that if you happen to have forgotten to switch off Trillian and one of your friends who has a habit of 'talking' to your Away message to leave a comment for you to come back to later, AIM window pops up, and entire game crashes and burns. Cue the screaming, the flailing, and the coming back to find your entire party either pissed off beyond all recognition, or slain (and pissed off beyond all recognition).
- Background music. Seriously, the shit they play in FFXI is annoying.
- Griffons! Man, that beats the almighty shit out of chocobos.
- The whole 'walking back to your corpse' thing. Okay, this is a ... really weird thing, but provided you're not too far from a graveyard, it's useful to be able to amble back to your corpse and not have to start back up all the way from ... well, wherever your last save point was.
- Travel in general. There are towns and outposts and safe places. There are roads to them that are not crawling with evil. You can walk from point A to point B without having something big and ugly eat your face at lower levels! This is awesome!
- The new patch download system. I used to spend hours waiting for patches and updates and things to load and install before I could play the stupid game. Now, Warcrack has a system whereby this stuff can, beyond a certain point, be downloaded and installed while you're playing. I just ... that's just ten different shades of awesome.
Things I'm Not So Sure About Yet:
- Interface. It's a lot like DA, but without a pause button. I end up losing valuable beastie-killing time (not to mention HP) because I instinctively hit the space bar to pause and end up jumping instead. (Why is there a need to jump in this game anyway?) I also miss my macro keys.
- Character speech capability. I get a feeling that the catch-phrases when you click on a merchant or take your leave of one are going to get really old, really fast. And there's no Esc key fast-forward here.
- Graphics and layout. Some of it is phenomenally pretty. Some of it is as cheesy as anything. Some of it's both. I'm having a hard time deciding.
I don't think I'm going to get as invested in this game as I did in FFXI. Which is a good thing, because really my plans for Warcrack involve blundering around the place and beating on things when I'm in a mood, probably multi-tasking with chatting to people and possibly switching off the music entirely in favour of something a little more to my liking. But you never know; maybe I'll have more fun with it when I crawl out of the single-digit levels.
On the subject of levelling up, I've been working on a Seeking for my Cultist of Ecstasy over on Chicago. (Seeking, for those of you who don't know, is a process by which one's Mage gets the Boot To The Head of Enlightenment and is thus permitted to take a higher level of Arete, which means more raw magical ability.) For one reason or another, I've been working on said Seeking, from request to execution, since March. Now I'm at the crux of it, apparently, and have made my response to the ST and I can't find out whether I screwed it up or not until tomorrow. *whimper* Still, I guess this beats unholy hell out of waiting until June, or having to grab Jessiah at anywhere after 2am my time and not be able to think straight by the time we get to the crux of the matter. All the same, play-by-forums-private-message is always going to be a little agitating when something one is spending XP for actually rides on whether your answer makes sense and there's a (very understandable; poor sod must have been exhausted after the day he put in) delay in getting the response to that FPM. Apparently it'll likely be wrapped up by Saturday. Sometimes the Arete/Seeking/putting your character's power level and personal enlightenment into someone else's hands thing is really frustrating. (And has been since March. I admit it.)
I want a day off. Hell, I need a day off. Not 'I am too ill to be out of bed', not 'I have a doctor's appointment'; just ... I do not have to be anywhere and can sleep in guilt-free. Surely I can do that, right?
One word: Gnoooooooome.
Well, also a Night Elf.
But mostly gnoooooome.
*ahem* So in case you hadn't worked it out, yes, I got World of Warcraft. There are things about it that I like better than FFXI. There are things about FFXI that I vastly preferred.
Ways In Which FFXI Is Vastly Superior to WoW
- City Maps. Or, more to the point, labelled fucking shops, okay? I do not see why I have to mouse over every single one of the chatty little fuckers just to find out where I can sell all the crap I've been collecting from beating toxic slime to death!
- Item Sales. To wit: the interface sucks arse. I ended up buying back a whole bunch of my crap by total accident at a premium and I am a little bit annoyed by this. FFXI at least had an intuitive interface.
- Aggro potential in mobs. Look, I get 'fast-paced game' or whatever the hell, but it's a little bit difficult to try to manage soloing when wherever you go, whatever you do, there's a whole pack of mobs who will gang up on you roaming around the place. I get that you're going to get attacked in these games. I do not see the fun potential in trying to complete a kill quest and getting dogpiled by a bunch of troggs or whatever the hell I was fighting.
- No acclimatisation time whatsoever. In FFXI, I spawned as little tiny Taru and got approached gently by some Mithra criminal and nudged. Gently. In a way that more or less said, "There's plot somewhere, if you want it, but it'll find you eventually; don't worry. Go out and nuke shit." In WoW? I find myself in the middle of a makeshift infirmary fighting ... well, members of my own race who had apparently gone nuts or something, I don't even know, but one thing was abundantly clear: "YOU HAVE SPAWNED DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF PLOT! ENJOY NOT HAVING A GODS-DAMNED CLUE!"
- The 'srs bzns' factor. For FFXI, it is easy to find free, comprehensive and very helpful guides to how to get started and similar. I went looking for those when I started WoW. Mostly I got adverts. Apparently, people want help with this game so badly that they're willing to pay for it. SRS BZNS. *headdesk* And the Brady guide is shit. So I feel like I'm floundering and I can't even turn to the internet for help without having to pay for it.
Ways In Which WoW is Vastly Superior To FFXI
- Windowed Play. In FFXI, it is against the Terms of Service to play a windowed mode, though there is a hack for it. Basically, if you try to swap between FFXI and something else (say, Firefox or AIM or something), your game will crash. Which means that if you happen to have forgotten to switch off Trillian and one of your friends who has a habit of 'talking' to your Away message to leave a comment for you to come back to later, AIM window pops up, and entire game crashes and burns. Cue the screaming, the flailing, and the coming back to find your entire party either pissed off beyond all recognition, or slain (and pissed off beyond all recognition).
- Background music. Seriously, the shit they play in FFXI is annoying.
- Griffons! Man, that beats the almighty shit out of chocobos.
- The whole 'walking back to your corpse' thing. Okay, this is a ... really weird thing, but provided you're not too far from a graveyard, it's useful to be able to amble back to your corpse and not have to start back up all the way from ... well, wherever your last save point was.
- Travel in general. There are towns and outposts and safe places. There are roads to them that are not crawling with evil. You can walk from point A to point B without having something big and ugly eat your face at lower levels! This is awesome!
- The new patch download system. I used to spend hours waiting for patches and updates and things to load and install before I could play the stupid game. Now, Warcrack has a system whereby this stuff can, beyond a certain point, be downloaded and installed while you're playing. I just ... that's just ten different shades of awesome.
Things I'm Not So Sure About Yet:
- Interface. It's a lot like DA, but without a pause button. I end up losing valuable beastie-killing time (not to mention HP) because I instinctively hit the space bar to pause and end up jumping instead. (Why is there a need to jump in this game anyway?) I also miss my macro keys.
- Character speech capability. I get a feeling that the catch-phrases when you click on a merchant or take your leave of one are going to get really old, really fast. And there's no Esc key fast-forward here.
- Graphics and layout. Some of it is phenomenally pretty. Some of it is as cheesy as anything. Some of it's both. I'm having a hard time deciding.
I don't think I'm going to get as invested in this game as I did in FFXI. Which is a good thing, because really my plans for Warcrack involve blundering around the place and beating on things when I'm in a mood, probably multi-tasking with chatting to people and possibly switching off the music entirely in favour of something a little more to my liking. But you never know; maybe I'll have more fun with it when I crawl out of the single-digit levels.
On the subject of levelling up, I've been working on a Seeking for my Cultist of Ecstasy over on Chicago. (Seeking, for those of you who don't know, is a process by which one's Mage gets the Boot To The Head of Enlightenment and is thus permitted to take a higher level of Arete, which means more raw magical ability.) For one reason or another, I've been working on said Seeking, from request to execution, since March. Now I'm at the crux of it, apparently, and have made my response to the ST and I can't find out whether I screwed it up or not until tomorrow. *whimper* Still, I guess this beats unholy hell out of waiting until June, or having to grab Jessiah at anywhere after 2am my time and not be able to think straight by the time we get to the crux of the matter. All the same, play-by-forums-private-message is always going to be a little agitating when something one is spending XP for actually rides on whether your answer makes sense and there's a (very understandable; poor sod must have been exhausted after the day he put in) delay in getting the response to that FPM. Apparently it'll likely be wrapped up by Saturday. Sometimes the Arete/Seeking/putting your character's power level and personal enlightenment into someone else's hands thing is really frustrating. (And has been since March. I admit it.)
I want a day off. Hell, I need a day off. Not 'I am too ill to be out of bed', not 'I have a doctor's appointment'; just ... I do not have to be anywhere and can sleep in guilt-free. Surely I can do that, right?