MMO Gamers

     I’d recently tried Tabula Rasa and am still trying to a lesser degree Pirates of the Burning Sea.  Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both of these games and think they’re pretty good, but I tired of them quickly.  For a subscription based game, the developers can’t afford for players to tire of a game within the first 30 days.  Tabula Rasa I played for six weeks but only because there was nothing to move on to.  Once Pirates released I jumped ship, pardon the pun, and played that instead.  Now I know what I don’t like about Pirates.  There’s just too many boring bits.  Too much monotonous travel and too many load screens.  And if I focus on ship combat then that feels like a grind.

     Tabula Rasa on the other hand is a fast paced action game.  But sadly, for me anyway, it got boring too.  Why?  Grouping.  PUGs were usually terrible and after a while I was reluctant to join them.  But that’s not the only reason.  There was no need to group.  Sure, the classes fell into the classic tank/healer/dps variety, but all classes could solo and you could do the instance dungeons in a group of any class.  Five tanks could finish the instance, or five healers.  The classes aren’t dependant on each other.  Now this might not be true in the end game, with the addition of RAID instances, but the journey to the upper levels felt like a solo game.

     We as gamers always criticise developers for pumping out the same old stuff.  We ask for next generation games but the ones that are different enough from the classic mold don’t necessarily do well.