Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Life in MMOs For The Financially Impaired

What am I doing sneaking in at this hour of the night? Let's just say my mind and soul have been... entangled in other more... draining endeavors. Or some such. Oh, let's just not go there lest I begin to blush.

While employment seems a far-off chance in a place with 35% of so-called youngsters being unemployed, I turned my attention to F2P models. The fruits of the labor of so many that decide to share their worlds with us for (seemingly) nothing at all is particularly appealing, specially now that I blew the last of my savings on pre-ordering Mass Effect 3. I played the demo, giggled an obscene amount of times, tested the voice-activation, frowned at the amount of hugs I was denied from party members and promptly decided I could wait no longer. And so it was that I turned my attention to the world of "Free to Play"s


The first I decided to try was Star Trek Online. I'd heard interesting things about the game and I do like space, or the idea of space at least. I figured I might as well give it a whirl if the only thing they were charging was disk space. And so I rolled a healing type character which ended up meaning a support-type ship most of the time. I honestly hadn't expected the bulk of the game to revolve around my ship and that may be the reason why I haven't picked it up again. You see, I am terrible at navigation and seeing as I can neither swim, ride a bike, drive a car or stand up straight in roller-blades, one can say I'm not terribly good at basic locomotion either. Maneuvering a ship on a three-dimensional space while taking care not to blow up and attempting to shoot things down all at the same time proved to be a bit too draining. Plus, going through all that alone ended up not being as satisfying as I'd hoped.


I remembered I brought a copy of GuildWars with me from my previous life and thought that, since that one was already paid for, I might occupy my time with that. Also, I have heard of interesting things about GW2s three-faction open world WvWvW (read PvP) and this could be a good opportunity to re-acclimate to the environment and feel of the developers. Sadly, GuildWars demands I recall the name of one of my characters to be able to log in. I laughed hard, thought harder and then laughed a bit more. No, that wasn't going to happen.

I had also heard there was this new closed beta up of something called Tribes: Ascend. I had no idea what it was but I thought I had the time and the will to try something new and shiny and free. So, after some hardship, I successfully downloaded the game and it sits there still, untouched. I'm not sure if I'm afraid of outright sucking at a PC shooter or if I'm just too drained to configure my G13 to yet another experiment.

Then I heard Aion was also going F2P and, at the behest of a very compelling third-party, I decided to go try that one next. Unfortunately the F2P version has been announced, has been tested, is all but ready but not out yet. So I am down 30 gigabytes of disk space for yet no good reason.

So, at the moment, I'm waiting for Rift to finish patching since I heard they have a free trial now. Maybe that'll keep my thirst for healing sated until tomorrow. See, Wrath of Heroes' closed beta is up again tomorrow and, despite all its faults, I end up having a good time with it and with an F2P, that's all you really want, right?

2 comments:

  1. Think I mentioned this already, but another upcoming free to play game you might be interested in is Firefall. I'm defo going to try it out :) http://www.firefallthegame.com/home

    Biggest fan of your blog signing out ! Rock on sistah ! WOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh Aggro. I can never think of you without thinking of the horse with the tragic demise.
    Thanks for reading all my nonsense. :)

    ReplyDelete