Games of the Week: Fetch Questing Edition

My EVE Online trial came to an end this week and suffice it to say that I wasn’t exactly sad to see this day come. I just wasn’t able to get into EVE enough to enjoy it, let alone like it enough to pay for it monthly. As I have said, I certainly see the appeal behind spacefaring and really wanted to get into it, but problems that I had with the tutorial and the community made certain to separate me from the experience. I will say, unequivocally, that I should not have started my MMO experience with a game as complex as EVE, which seems to be a game made near exclusively for experienced MMORPG players looking for an environment where they completely liberated to do whatever they want. Anyhow, EVE has come and gone and I am now moving on to, hopefully, greener pastures. My friends and I have decided to try the World of Warcraft 10-day trial and I am hoping that even if I dislike WoW more than EVE that having friends playing with me will make up for the experience.


OK, well I downloaded the WoW trial on Friday night (it’s been about 22 hours as of this writing) and I can say without a doubt that I am having a better experience than I did with EVE. I have heard that WoW is notorious for being user-friendly and having a lot of casual appeal so it comes to no surprise (maybe it’s a placebo effect) that I’m adjusting better to controlling my WoW avatar. The UI is much less cluttered and easier to work with. Also, the way WoW starts off is that, depending on what race you chose, you start in a small village with basic tutorial missions that move you to bigger and bigger areas, eventually getting to cities and whatnot. In EVE, you start at a space station but you aren’t progressively moved to larger spaces and the game doesn’t hold your hand until you get to the big leagues. From the first minute out of a space station you are free to move about the entire universe and it’s far too overwhelming to a complete greenhorn like me to handle.



Another part of the problem for me has been the skill progression system in EVE. I was raised off of JRPGs, and I enjoy grinding to level up and learn new skills and buff my stats. In EVE, you progress skills over time and nothing you do will let you learn a skill faster than the set time, thus eliminating the point of level grinding which is, for me, a lot of the fun in an RPG. I’m not going to say what the goal is in EVE because I still don’t really know what it is; when I played I had no clue about what I was supposed to do, what I could do or what I wanted to do. Combat was lame by my standards, involving no more than locking on and pressing the F1 key once. I didn’t play enough to see if there were buffs to cast for attack or defense. I didn’t like that I could only improve my ship and my weapons by mining for hours to earn enough money. Granted, I still felt like I earned it but I literally worked for it, giving my time in exchange for currency and spending that to improve my resources so that I get more money every time I go out to mine so I can eventually get enough money to buy a huge freighter so I can mine even more…it got to a point where I just didn’t see the point and realized I was essentially working.

A more cosmetic problem that I had was that I never really saw the avatar that I created. In EVE I was never the character and I always felt that I was just the ship and the notion of controlling an inanimate spaceship helplessly kept me from bonding to the character. I begin to feel like the character I made is truly worthless in every sense of the word, with his presence almost as meaningless as mine. At least in WoW I see the character every minute of playtime and develop and sentimental attachment to the person that I am controlling, not the giant hunk of metal hurtling through the galaxy.
Umm, as for WoW I like it much more than I thought I would, and that’s mostly because it is similar in structure, at least in the early stages, to RPGs that I like. The most recent fantasy RPG that I played was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which I loved, and I see some parallels in character development between the two. My biggest problem with WoW so far is that it is nothing but fetch quests. There is not a damn thing that I have done that is not a fetch quest. Go collect 6 cougar claws and 5 bird gizzards. Done with that? Ok, go and kill 14 of these dwarves. Done with that? Ok, go and get 2 water stones and 2 acorns so I can make a totem, but this time you get to run a well and hold a button down for a second. Done with that? Ok, go and find the horn of some big animal. Done wi- OH MY GOD STOP THIS S**T! In Oblivion there were a lot of quests to do, some of them fetch quests, but sometimes you would go into an artist’s painting and save him from the trolls he created or you would solve the mystery of a haunted house. I am sorely lacking variety in activity and sincerely hope that things become more diverse later on.

All in all I am having an enjoyable time with WoW. My level 11 Tauran Druid just learned the Bear Form which is a fun novelty that should hold me over for a few more hours, but I honestly don’t know how much longer I can keep doing these accursed fetch quests.