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Other Games Shock!

Seeing as I’m currently in a non-World of Warcraft frame of mind (and my Warcraft subscription runs out later this afternoon) I’ve been playing various other games.

One of those games has been Call of Duty 4, which I’ve been totally and unexpectedly impressed by. I was expecting a formulaic, fun but predictable shooter, but it really wasn’t at all. The story is actually pretty decent and the shocks used generally did shock me and surprise me. It genuinely affected me, which is something almost no FPS has ever managed (except Bioshock/System Shock).

The only negative I can see for CoD 4 is that the single-player campaign is much too short. I completed it in 2 sittings, if it wasn’t for the excellent multi-player it would be a tad overpriced.

Other than CoD, I’ve been playing a fair bit of OpenTTD, Transport Tycoon Deluxe is one of my favourite games even though I’m really not that good at it. OpenTTD is an open-source update that enhances and improves on the original in many ways. From multi-platform support through to pre-signals and trams, there is a lot of new stuff in OpenTTD. Plus it keeps a classic alive.

Tags: Call of Duty, CoD4, openttd, wow

Grinding Just Too Much?

Both myself and Joanne have been discussing WoW a bit these last few days due to our subscription running out at a time when we can’t purchase time-cards immediately.

Mostly this has involved us considering whether WoW is really worth paying for at this point. I thought I’d give my thoughts here, it’d be interesting if Joanne blogged her thoughts or commented too.

Okay, my main, Twigleaf, has been a lot of fun and being my first level 70 (having only gotten Ryliana to 67 on Silvermoon-EU) I have quite an attachment to her. Being unable to find a guild not full of illiterate, moronic children (or illiterate, moronic self-absorbed adults) on Burning Steppes-EU means she is left doing mostly solo/small group stuff with Olyk (Joanne’s main). Our group of two has done a fair bit of PvP, although still not enough to have all welfare epics, and is currently grinding daily quests to obtain our epic flyer.

The thing we’ve been thinking about is, what are we going to do once we have our epic flyer?

For my part, I’m currently just logging on, doing as many dailies as I can before I get ganked to death and then logging off.

Am I enjoying doing the dailies? Sort of, is the easy answer, some of the dailies are great fun, I love doing the Skettis bombing daily, and most of the Quel’Danas dailies. They are just fun to do. But at the moment pretty much all the dailies feel like a chore, they are all quite easy and you just go through the motions. They are easy money but it’s feeling more and more like a job I guess.

But I’m not doing anything else when I log on, I’m not compelled to level an alt or do the PvP grind. It seems I’d sooner log out when the dailies are done and browse or play OpenTTD than play with one of my other alts. Even though I have one of each class at or almost at 20.

Once Twiggers has her epic mount, what then? She could continue the honour grind to get the rest of her welfare epics, but grinding away in Alterac Valley in the Nightfall battlegroup is painful, and ultimately is still as much of a grind as getting gold for the epic flyer is, except you have to deal with all the “know-it-all” experts and whiners to boot. She could max out leatherworking, but once she has her epic flyer what would she REALLY spend the proceeds on.

It feels like Twiggers has kind of hit the end of the road with stuff to do, without “normal” people to group with, the amount of content open to solo or small group players is tiny really. Maybe the reason I’m reluctant to level an alt is because they face the same future once at 70.

I love the game, I truly do, but I’m beginning to question whether I love it enough to “pay” to complete dailies each day.

Tags: burning steppes, dailies, openttd, silvermoon, twiggers, wow