If it wasn't for fantasy football season and a heavy schedule at work (and lets not forget the JoeUser community the opportunity to put up a few articles), I'd probably be bored to tears, at least in the entertainment area.
Sure, I still love my television and the entertainment it brings me -- including Prison Break, Lost, Desperate Housewives {even with it's sophomore slump} and a host of other shows -- but I'm bored in the gaming area. Bored enough in fact to accept the bribes that SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) is offering for pre-purchasers of the coming expansion for their Star Wars Galaxies - An Empire Divided MMORPG (Massively Morphing Online Role-Playing Game).
I joined SWG over two years ago (I honestly couldn't tell you how long ago had it not been for the fact that I was able to claim a "two year" player reward in the game), but pretty much abandoned the game soon after WoW (World of Warcraft) came out.
I loved the old Diablo series, though had been very frustrated by the PKs (Player Killers) that infested the game if one tried to be somewhat social and play with others (public games, not private ones with friends). I hung on through the Diablo II for a long time, and was one of the last of the group of friends that had been assembled via the game to stop playing with everyone else. There were a few people from the crowd left, but the original gang had jumped ship well before I did. Some had moved on to Star Wars Galaxies, and along the way a few (and a few of the same) also went to the final fantasy MMORPG as well.
When WoW came out, a bunch of the older folks jumped right in. Many of the original gang had even been beta testers for the game, and were well familiar with it. It felt a lot like old times, with everyone playing Diablo II, and the old friends all together in the same place for a while.
Unfortunately, as our group of friends does every so often, we had problems for everyone in the game. Our power gamers flew through the game quickly and were able to offer tips for others, but because of how grouping works in WoW, you pretty much have to group with others of your own level to accomplish quests and level up, and it let personality clashes to become more apparent when our group became one of haves and another of have-nots. We couldn't get groups together for lower levels to get them up with higher levels, and those stuck in the middle were pretty much left to solo, feeling squeezed out on either end.
Anyway, after a few months of playing WoW, and with a big family vacation looming, I terminated my account just before one of the more recent flame ups among my friends over guild (not a traditional guild, but more a lose circle of friends that use the guild structures to keep in touch with friends) politics. Even in the last few days there's been a long string of message traffic at the forums my old friends use with lots of hand-wringing over he-said, they-said type issues, and a loss of guild status for several players that had moved on in the game.
To get back on track a bit, and come back to current status, I did -- as noted -- fire back up my old SWG account again so I could kick the tires a bit in the coming expansion. I had left the game before the SWG developers implemented their "combat upgrade" and basically completely changed the game. I had been through several minor versions of such over-hauls in the game, including seeing the Creature Handler profession switched from all powerful to pretty much all lame. I had seen in-game professions like my original favorite and starter choice Commando nerfed (defanged, wimped out, reworked so it wouldn't be a superman type profession, etc.) to hell. And I saw the race to get Jedi characters run off a lot of my friends who had gotten bored with the game themselves, again partly because the power gamers had been there and done that through much of the game and were bored with the repetitive nature of the game in general.
Back to now, the post combat upgrade SWG account, and I find myself I'm pretty much confused back to the point of noob (new player) status. The developers and player community haven't done a great job of giving any sort of transitional instructions that I could find online. I have no real idea of what some of the changes were, since I didn't play in the period leading up, and soon after the changes went into effect. Most of the players I was playing with have also abandoned the game, and I'm sort of stuck figuring things out on my own.
I tried pulling out some of my creature handler pets and get stupid messages that my creatures are broken, click here to fix, only to find the fix doesn't work at all. Apparently still a few bugs in the old SWG environment.
Which takes me (finally, right?) back to the issue at hand -- boredom with current games. Not that I'm the power gamer some of my friends are, but I do get frustrated when games are too easy, or too repetitive. Even in playing around with SWG again, I can see I would be bored by the game fairly soon. Yes, players that pay to play MMORPGs can look forward to some new content occassionally, but it's usually just more of the same. Early adopters like myself and my friends had been through enough early on to really get bored easily in the game now.
I suspect if I had purchased a subscription to SWG now and was starting from scratch with all modules and expansions in effect I'd find it would take me a while to get bored. But because I was in the game early, and beta tested the space expansion a bit before hand, that even when the space expansion came out I found myself bored with it fairly soon.
I hope that the new expansion does well, and hope it adds more fun to the game. In a few more expansions and few more years, SWG might be one heckuva game to play. But for now, it just seems to be leaving me bored, and too many people have cycled through and left to keep a good community online and playing, which doesn't bode that well for a long term future for the game.
Meanwhile, there's about one month left now (just under actually) until the Xbox 360 hits. I have one on pre-order. I'm looking forward to several games for it, but expect I'll get bored with them after a while too. Hopefully I'll get my money's worth, given the increased price tag ($59 for most games on it, versus $49 for most on the original Xbox, $39 for most on the PSP handheld, etc.) for the games and the high initial price for the console itself. $399 for the most useful bundle for early adopters. Ouch.
The initial game reviews are that everything is awesome. Wow. Impressive. Unbelievable. Phenomenal. And on and on. I sure hope so. Because the wait is killing me (not literally, just figuratively) and the search for games which won't bore me to tears is going slowly in the meantime.
