WAR: Reminiscing

Oh WAR, how you broke my heart. All the fond memories, and all the wasted potential. I loved you WAR. Deep inside, I still do. I will find myself staring out my window thinking about all the cool times we had together. The strolls on the beach, the picnics on the hills, the wipes in the last boss in ToVL, those Darkpromise boots you didn't want to get for me... We were an item, WAR, we were a thing. But I felt like you didn't care. Like my feelings didn't matter to you. I loved you and you played with me when I should've been the one playing you.

Seriously now, I was looking through my screenshots and all these feelings came rushing back. WAR had this flavour, see. It left a gritty flavor on your tongue, like you'd actueally been riding on the back of a Cold One  in the dirt for hours. There would be dozens of us, defying the laws of real men; dozens of us occupying the same coordinates, keeping our Orcs quiet while we laid an ambush behind a rock or inside a tent. We would be so patient, so generous with our time. And, sure enough, they'd start pouring from the hillside or across the bridge, ripe and ready for us to deploy our forces on their flanks and rear. It's a wonderful feeling, seeing enemy characters you know are controlled by real people run for their lifes or giving in to the inevitability of your supremacy.

Hi Hun! ^_^

But that (PvP) wasn't everything I loved. I even loved the PvE, Maker forgive me. Running dungeons was easy and most times rewarding. I liked kiting the 2nd ToVL boss. I was good at it. And the other bosses were entertaining if not entirely bug-free. It was a good change of pace; we would have this scripted encounters to test builds and tactics for more unscripted ones.

But who am I kidding, PvP was what WAR was all about. The yells and screams of tanks and healers alike succumbing to the unrelenting bombing of a Wizard-centric Warband; the throngs of half dead characters spawning on healers in the back lines of a keep take. These things I haven't seen since. These things, this frenetic pace, this sense of urgency, that whatever it is you can contribute with you better do it quick, I miss. I'm not saying there aren't other games out there that can provide similar feelings and adventures but WAR was it for me. It was my first, my one and only. The game that made me feel like I had something to tell the world. And now it's little more than a painful reminder of happier times.

You learned to respect some names, some groups in the battlefield and you learned to disregard others. You knew who was who not because of trolling or other forms of epeen stroking but through their skill and efficiency. At least that was true for me. I was never into that whole forum thing.

Ah, WAR... If only you'd listened to us. If only you'd done it sooner. I feel like coming back, I really, genuinely do. But the part where I said WAR broke my heart was no joke. It's somewhat disheartening loading up a character you've spent years loving to find it's near to useless. I couldn't play a rr75ish healer against... anything without dying a gruesome death within the first few seconds of an encounter.

I don't know what the future holds for WAR and for me. I just miss it's epicness, the feeling of hundreds of people focusing on one goal, one ideal, one sentence: "Red is dead."