Several years ago... like... five, or something, my husband and I dipped our toes into the wonderful world of online gaming. We blame it on South Park. We had been watching the World of Warcraft episode, and both of us were like, "Hey... we should try that out. We can play it for free." So, we downloaded it onto our equally ancient computers, and gave it a whirl.
And, then we promptly got totally addicted, got ourselves monthly subscriptions and dove in. We started out as Alliance (because we didn't know any better) and made the mistake of choosing the recommended server (Vashj) which just so happened to be a PvP server which meant nothing to us at the time because we were absolutely MMORPG noobs. I know, I know. Only super badasses can play on a PvP server! Whatever, man, I am shit at PvP and I have no trouble admitting that. I hate PvP.
We actually both started off with Night Elf Druids. How that happened, I will never know. That was back when the newest expansion was Burning Crusade and not long before Lich King was released. Anyway, we played as Alliance for a while. I think we got our Druids to around the level 50 or so mark. Then Lich King dropped and we immediately made Death Knights because reasons, which both of us promptly leveled up to 80. We were super proud of having level 80 characters, even though we'd only worked for less than thirty of those levels (oops). We raided a bit. Went through several guilds, but raiding ended up just not being for us. It was too time consuming, for one thing. If you had any sort of normal schedule you were fucked. There was all this pressure to put out THE MOST DPS EVAAAAAR and constantly check your DPS output and tweak things and change gear and talent trees and hot bar rotations and OH MY GOD IT WAS LIKE A SECOND JOB.
So... we dispensed with that. Then, WoW said we could change factions, so we swapped to Horde side and never looked back. Thinks had gotten a little stale by the time Panda Party Express Mists of Pandaria came out, but we hadn't been able to find any other MMOs that filled the void of WoW. We gave Rift a half-hearted try, but were mostly disappointed. However, that had a lot more to do with the fact that neither one of our laptops (yeah laptops - eat me) wanted to run it worth a damn and moving five feet took ten minutes than with the game itself. So, back to WoW we went.
Then, a friend of mine suggested that we try out Guild Wars, which I was immediately sort of turned off to because the name is stupid, but he's a pretty solid gamer, so I downloaded a trial version of the original game. Apparently, Guild Wars 2 had either just come out or was coming out - something, I don't know. Anyway, Guild Wars was... okay, judging solely by the trial (which apparently isn't much to go on, from what I hear). During all of this, I remember hearing about a Star Wars MMO and thinking that would be bad ass, but there was no demo, and I was not about to pay money to download a game that I may or may not actually want to play.
So, Star Wars: The Old Republic got sidelined and back to WoW we went. Then, we discovered DC Universe Online, which is actually a pretty fucking cool game, especially if you're a fan of the DC Universe. It's free to download/play, and you pay like.. $10.00+/- for add ons. For example, I bought the Green Lantern expansion (so I could play as a green or yellow lantern) for $10.00 which was pretty ballin'. DC was really cool, but I kept getting drawn back to WoW. Mists of Pandaria came out and I looked at is as an opportunity to get my one maxed character (I'm an alt whore, I freely admit) to 90 and make a panda (the latter of which ended up being way less fun that anticipated).
Visually, I thought MoP was stunning, so hats off to Blizzard for that. However, after a while, I was bored again. We didn't have time to raid. Rep grind was really the only thing left for me to do (with the exception of the occasional Sha of Anger run with random groups) and I just wasn't into it. I was paying $15.00 a month to basically never play, and that was crap.
Then, someone told me that SWTOR had offered up a demo. Holy shit awesome. I was all over that. I downloaded it and immediately made a Sith Inquisitor (who I've since deleted) and then a Jedi Knight (who I've also since deleted). Of course, on the free-to-play, you start getting less XP when you hit level 10 and you don't have access to a lot of things like Sprint (which makes your toon run faster) and the Fleet Pass (although you can buy it at the Cartel Market). Still, I played it for probably a grand total of two days and had to have it. HAD TO.
I suspended my WoW subscription, something I had never done before, and immediately subscribed to SWTOR. I have never looked back. To me, personally, SWTOR (for the time being) is the superior game. The story driven quest chains are fantastic, and the fact that every class has it's own story line and that stories are influenced by your choices as you quest (Dark Side, Light Side, etc.) is super cool. I've actually made one of each class (and a few duplicates) and enjoy all of them. I seriously have not found a class that I don't like. My favorites are my Smuggler, my Imperial Agent and my Sith Warrior, but I also dig my Trooper, my Jedi Consular... all of them, really.
Graphically, too, I was way more impressed with SWTOR. Also, I really enjoy flashpoints and heroic questing, among other things. We've been subscribers to SWTOR for about two or three months now and, so far, I have no intention of crawling back to WoW. At least, not for a long time.
SWTOR definitely recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment