And thus ends our longest storyline ever…maybe. Yeah it’s done.

(Edit by Virus – It would be done, if it was actually done. But it ain’t, so it ain’t. Just having a hard time making drawings happen. Bloxxored. It happens. Come back Saturday. In the meantime, back to Lothar:)

And I’m back for the update this week, and for my topic I’ve decided to write why I think MMORPGs are one of the least enjoyable genre of games available today.

But before that, we have two new pieces of fan art. Or two old pieces that we never mentioned on the front page, which is probably more like. Virus, Lothar and Blasphemy make friends in this picture by Drew Gilbert, and Lothar stands around look evil in this picture by Kevin Leffler. Thanks people.

I suppose the main reason why I don’t enjoy MMORPGs is because I find them Dull. That’s dull with a capital D. They are so incredibly, mind-bogglingly Dull that I simply cannot stand them. I’d rather read Mein Kampf, in the original German, backwards than subject myself to the sheer tedium that is MMORPG game designs I have played three MMORPGs within the last year and I got bored with them all in about a week.

The actual gameplay for one is dull and repetitive. You go to an NPC, get a mission which usually involved hitting things. Then return to the NPC to finish the mission. Now repeat that 40,000 times, but make the monsters harder to kill each time and that’s the entire game. But throw in the odd time where you have to travel to another city or town for 20 FUCKING MINUTES to acquire a new set of mission, where you, again, run off and hit things. Whoop-de-fuck. This is incredibly apparent in City of Heroes where you do NOTHING but fight.

But that everything you do in other games like WoW and EQ is geared towards these missions where you run around and hit things. Sure you can learn to craft leather and make armour out of it, but to what end? So you can make yourself some decent leather to make hitting things easier (up until a certain point, when you’ll need stronger armour so demon-wolf-things won’t rape you). But also, so you can earn money to buy things that will make your ability to hit things stronger. And why do you need your “hit things” ability to be better? So you can hit other things that are stronger and even more likely to kill you.

Everything you collect enables you to hit things better. Oh sure, you may get your agility increased, your health regeneration ability works quicker but they are all enabling to hit things better. While playing WoW I got this “Silver Axe of the Whalebone” or whatever, which said something like “+2 two handed ability”. Why didn’t it just say “this makes you better at hitting things”?

Then there’s the fact no matter how good you are at hitting things, there’s always something out there better at hitting you than you are at hitting it. I’m sure that WoW players who are level 60 and gone with a 10 man party to attack that King Devilsaur monster thing can support that statement. Spending half and hour trying to kill a huge T-Rex, only to die when you’ve got him down to two-thirds his health may seem fun to you, but I hypothesis that beating yourself over the head with a sledgehammer may be fun to other people. When I played WoW, I spent as much time running away from enemies as I did running towards them. And in both cases I would die and have to find my frigging corpse.

I suppose if the actual mechanics of combat were decent it’d be fun, but no. You press a button and wait for your attack to happen. Then you press the same button, and watch the same animation, over and over and over again. I mean, I’m not a huge fan of beat-em’-up games but at least the combat is fast, frantic and when you press a button the onscreen action is immediate. Imagine Tekken but when you press a button is takes 1-3 seconds for an action to happen on-screen and you get a decent idea what playing an MMORPG is like.

Then there are the people who take these things seriously, and are complete pricks. “Look at me I’m level 50! Like fuck am I going to tell you how to check your messages in game, or how to send a party invite. I killed DRAGONS for this helmet boy, DRAGONS. Oh sure it makes me look like a penis, but it gives me +2 to my charisma!” Somebody is obviously operating under a different definition of “charisma” than I am. Games about social interaction my arse. If I wanted social interaction like this, I’d go back to school.

The fact you have to pay a monthly fee for these Dull games annoys me somewhat. Ok sure, I pay £40 a year for my Xbox Live account (well…no I don’t actually the most I pay is £30) but that lets me play EVERY SINGLE Xbox Live game. Except Phantasy Star Online which, surprise surprise, is a fucking MMORPG. For Wow, you pay 6.99 a month, or what? £30 for a 6 month subscription? Fucking rip off if you ask me, especially if you play more than one of these things at a time.

Back next week, if I can be arsed.