To MMO .. or not to MMO…

I have recently been having the urge to play an MMO. Have always been curious about them but I think my interest was piqued when I started watching The Guild recently. For anyone not familiar with this web series I strongly urge you to check it out. Its a fictional web series about a group of MMO players and their (mis)adventures.

I started checking out some of the more popular ones. I am specifically looking at the more traditional sword and sorcery type ones. I started with Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. This game is visually very impressive and for the most part plays ok. It takes a while getting used to the combat with the directional attacks etc and I really struggled to find a control scheme that was comfortable for me. Eventually I settled on using the Xbox 360 controller configured with custom button mappings using Xpadder. Anyone using the Xbox controller on a PC should check out Xpadder as it allows you to do some pretty cool key mappings to the controller… including multiple mappings per button and macros too. So far this has been the easiest way for me to play this game. As far as the game goes I am not that far into it yet but having fun with it so far. Consensus seems to be that this game is dying though although they just released a massive 2.2gb update for it. Time will tell I guess.

The next game I tried was World of Warcraft. I signed up for the 10 day trial and downloaded the client. After playing Age of Conan the combat in WoW is really simple and kinda less stressful. Looks wise the game doesnt come close the Age of Conan though with more “cartoony” graphics. I really didnt spend too much time with WoW cause my trial was up before I actually got to play it much.

Lastly I looked at Guild Wars. Guild Wars also has a trial which gives you 10 hours worth of gameplay time. I have done about 4 up till now but have really enjoyed myself so far. Visually the game looks really good. I am running it at 1680x1050 with all detail maxed out and 4xAA and it really looks good. Gameplay seems to be more WoW than Age of Conan with the combat being more of the click to attack kind than the active combat style of Conan. I definitely want to spend some more time with Guild Wars and promply ordered the Complete Guild Wars collection which includes the original game plus all the additional campaign released so far (Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North) all in one box. Another reason why I prefer Guild Wars over the others is of course that there are no monthly fees to play.

Are there any other good MMO’s that I am forgetting about? Yes there must be tons but I either don’t know about them or just haven’t tried them. For now I’ll spend some time with Guild Wars and see how it goes. Look me up in Guild Wars sometime.