Five hugely successful and influential games – that I’ve never played

As you can see it’s “Introduce Yourself Week” in Blaugustland, formerly known as “Getting To Know You Week” if I remember correctly. Since I’ve already introduced myself in the past and you can dig up those posts at any time if you’re so inclined I’m gonna use this opportunity to talk about something more specific that’s been on my mind lately instead.

This one hasn’t aged well enough to be on this list I’m afraid

I guess we have all missed out on some games that seemingly everybody and their mums have played and that are widely considered to be masterpieces any person who likes video games should have experienced.

Obviously there can be a multitude of reasons for not having done so. Maybe a particular title just came out at an inopportune moment, and once you would’ve had the time to play it any kind of momentum was gone. Or you had a specific reason for not wanting to play it, and no amount of rave reviews was enough to change your mind. Of course some games are just not your cup of tea, and that’s that.

Without further ado, here’s my (by no means complete) list of highly successful and beloved games that I’ve never played.

• • Skyrim

My history with the Elder Scrolls franchise starts with 1996’s Daggerfall. I’d read about it in a PC gaming magazine and liked what I saw very much. I bought it shortly after release, played the hell out of and absolutely loved every minute of it. Given the game’s enormous scope I never finished it though, I seem to remember that I ran out of steam about two thirds through.

In 2002 I bought and played its sequel, Morrowind, without any hesitation. However, this time around I lost interest a lot sooner. Sure, it looked much better, but somehow felt very lifeless and sterile to me, which killed my immersion rather quickly. I wasn’t really happy with the combat and progression systems either, although I’d quite liked those in Daggerfall. Oblivion I didn’t even buy, but still checked it out for a bit (ahem). It felt pretty much the same to me, if anything it seemed to be even more lifeless and sterile. I didn’t like it at all, is what I’m saying.

Hence I’ve never felt even the slightest urge to play Skyrim. I’m sure that it’s a much better game overall than its predecessors, but what I’ve heard and seen points to the “Elder Scrolls Formula” still being in there, and all of the above suggests that I just don’t enjoy that – or at least not its 21th century incarnation.

• • Mass Effect

Oh boy, this one I really regret. I’m a huge science fiction buff, I like to play RPGs a lot and gamers worldwide seem to agree that this trilogy tells one of the best stories video gaming has ever seen.

For me this falls squarely in the “came out at the wrong time” category. The original Mass Effect and Everquest II’s Rise of Kunark expansion launched pretty much simultaneously, and at that time I’d really dug my teeth into the latter, including raiding and everything. As it would turn out, playing anything else wasn’t going to happen for another year or so.

I don’t remember at which point in time I first contemplated finally playing Mass Effect with any seriousness, but somehow…well…the moment seemed to have come and gone.

That being said, the “Legendary Edition”, including all three games and countless DLCs, was discounted to 15 bucks on Steam a while ago, and I pulled the trigger – this is actually what gave me the idea for this post – so at least I now have the somewhat serious intention to finally play them. We’ll see how that goes…

• • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I don’t really have one specific reason for not having played this, and I’m pretty sure that I’d love it if I started playing today. The thing with sprawling single player RPGs that take ages to complete is…I don’t feel that I have the time to play this kind of game.

Which is, of course, a load of bollocks. When I can play MMORPGs for hundreds (or thousands) of hours, surely I can spare one or two hundred for a masterpiece like this, right?

Only that, ever since I started to play MMOs, investing that kind of time into games that are not meant to be played “forever” somehow doesn’t feel right to me. Knowing that all the cool sword skills, magic tricks and whatnot, as well as relationships and reputation I’ve built – in short, that everything I’ve worked for will basically cease to exist as soon as I hit the end credits makes me very reluctant to even start. It’s silly, I know, but that’s how I feel.

It’s much different when I know that a game is only like 15-20 hours long – stuff like the Uncharted series comes to mind. Those I can finish in less than a week without even taking a break from my current “main game”. Titles of somewhat average length, let’s say 50 hours or so, require a bit more commitment, but can still work for me if the time is right. 100 hours and beyond though…I’d rather not. Which, I guess, is yet another reason for Skyrim also being on this list.

• • Elden Ring

By far the most recent game I’m mentioning here, but at this point it seems already safe to say that it’s one of the all-time greats too. However, I’m fairly certain that I’m not going to ever play it.

The thing is, I play video games for a variety of reasons – a desire to overcome big challenges is not one of them.

It’s not that I only play games that are as easy as pie, mind you. As I’ve said earlier I’ve even raided and stuff, so I can definitely enjoy playing difficult content – as long as I do it with friends. When we’re talking single-player games though beating my head against tough as nails bosses (or even normal enemies), having to learn and master intricate dances of attacking, blocking, dodging and all that jazz – to me that’s pretty much the polar opposite of fun.

From Software’s worldbuilding may be the best in the industry, and I’d most likely love all of their games in that regard, but I’m just not willing to submit myself to the frustration that would go along with it.

• • World of Warcraft

I wrote a whole post about why I’ve never played the world’s most successful MMORPG during my first Blaugust participation (jeez, that was five years ago today!?), so I’ll keep this short.

Everquest II and WoW launched pretty much at the same time, and a friend of mine convinced me to play the former. While the game initially had too much forced grouping for my taste it turned out really great by the second expansion, which is when I got into it big-time and never looked back (see above). It easily ranks among my favourite games of all time.

Also, although Blizzard as a whole was still widely regarded as a top-notch development studio at the time, looking in from the outside I never felt that they were doing a particularly good job with WoW, considering the huge piles of money they were making with it. Much fewer expansions, races and classes than EQII, inferior crafting, no housing, the list goes on. Due to this it’s the one game on this list that I’ve never played at least in part because I felt – and still feel – that they didn’t deserve my support and money.

And there you have it. Which all-time classics did you never play?

Blaugust 2023 post count: 2

An outsider’s view on WoW Classic

WoW Classic has been live for just shy of two weeks now and a couple of our friends, this corner of the blogosphere and pretty much the MMORPG community as a whole are all abuzz with excitement and joy.

About a year ago I talked about my reasons for never having played the game. I still haven’t played it, and I’m not going to. Nevertheless I’m really happy about what I’m hearing and reading right now because it gives me some hope – just a teeny, tiny bit, but that’s better than nothing – that the gaming industry might take notice and learn one or two lessons from it.

Here are some examples of what folks have to say about their experiences up to now.

SynCaine writes:

It’s obviously very early, but playing just felt right. […] there is a sense that all of this content was created with a passion, and that passion shows in all of the little details that bring the zone together. […]

Classic being enjoyable, for me at least, isn’t just about the nostalgia, its mostly about the fact that Vanilla WoW was a really fun MMO to play.

Bhagpuss notes:

I’m not claiming it’s intrinsically “better” than either WoW Retail or any other game in the genre. I am saying that it has a coherency and throughline of design that later development, both for WoW and most of its progeny, has lost. And that’s a big part of why I’m playing it and enjoying it when I wasn’t expecting to find all that much to hold my attention.

Syp has an example of good design that has been scrapped from the game later on, namely talent trees (I wholeheartedly second his stance on this, by the way):

Mapping out your character’s growth is one of the most fulfilling parts of RPGs (at least for me), and this system provides a visible means for those plans. We’re given lots of choices. We’re given the opportunity to differentiate ourselves from others. We can specialize or hybrid ourselves as much as we like.

Pretty much everyone agrees that playing Classic feels by orders of magnitude more like being part of a living, breathing world than any later version of the game or any of the countless wannabe-WoW-killers that came after it. Some even say it’s actually not a full-on themepark, but rather a sandpark (i.e. a themepark with a lot of sandbox elements, or vice versa). This really surprised me, and I find it extremely ironic considering that a great many people, myself included, were under the impression that WoW always was the mother of all themeparks and the main culprit for the major shift in game design we saw following its huge success.

Which makes me wonder if game designers at that time, including the development-staff of WoW themselves, had a hard look at that success and drew the completely wrong conclusions about why people actually liked this game so much.

It seems like a fair assumption, because whenever people aren’t talking about the experience as a whole and instead describe what they’re actually doing in the game, they tell stories about how they need to be on their toes to not pull unwanted adds, how they are scrapping together the few silver they have for their new skills, how satisfactory it is to make their own 6-slot bags or find a grey yet good piece of gear, how they embark on long and dangerous journeys, or how they just watch some NPCs doing their thing for a while.

Nabbed this from Bhagpuss. I hope you don’t mind, mate

You know what nobody is talking about? How they need to get to revered with faction x. How they need to do their dailies. How they got a new piece of gear that they need to equip because of its gearscore, but that actually makes their character worse to play because it rolled the wrong titanforge stats (or whatever).

These are things I’ve read all the time when folks talked about BfA. Incidentally these are also things that almost every MMORPG that came after WoW has in one form or another.

Now, I’m not saying these are inherently bad. Some people really like doing their dailies, others can’t have enough factions to raise their standing with. But I think that even those players wouldn’t argue that any of that feels like having an adventure or like living in a virtual world. MMORPGs can have these features, maybe they even need them to an extent, but they are not what makes these games great.

Don’t give us chores, give us what it says on the box: Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games!

Of course it’s a bit early to call WoW Classic a huge success, but should it in fact become one this is the lesson that I really hope some people in the industry will learn from it.

Why I’ve never played World of Warcraft

I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs over the years. Some became my virtual home for long stretches of time, others…didn’t. That’s just the way things go. Yet I’ve never even tried out this juggernaut of the industry, the one MMO basically everyone and their grandma have played.

Quite literally…

I do not think that it’s a bad game. On the contrary, I’m sure it’s a highly polished experience that plays very well and is lots of fun. You know, like pretty much every game Blizzard have ever made.

So why not play it?

One reason is timing. WoW and Everquest II were released within a month (on November 23rd and November 8th 2004, respectively), and a friend of mine had convinced me to play Everquest II, which turned out to be, for me, one of the greatest MMORPGs ever and would become my main MMO for about seven years (with breaks in between).

Another reason is that the Warcraft-franchise doesn’t interest me at all lorewise. While I quite like many places’ names – Alterac, Lordaeron, Khaz Modan all sound pretty badass to me – I didn’t care for any of the races and characters in Warcraft II and III. I didn’t have the slightest emotional connection to their stories and fates. Which is strange because with Starcraft it’s the polar opposite.

The by far biggest reason though is…let’s call it defiance on my part. I don’t like what Blizzard has done (or not done) with the game during these almost 14 years, and I don’t want to give them my support. Simple as that.

I know this might be rather difficult to comprehend for big fans of the game, but I can only shake my head in sadness when I think about what they could have done with this behemoth but didn’t, or what they shouldn’t have done but did anyway.

I mean, they made pretty much all the money with their smash hit of a game. And how much of that went back into expanding and improving it? 20%? 10%? Even less? Of course I don’t actually know. But when I compare some numbers (6, soon 7 expansions to EQII’s 14, soon 15) or features (no player housing to EQII’s, which is as good as they come; 13 races and 11 classes to EQII’s 20 races and 26 classes…), I can’t help but be underwhelmed by WoW’s content- and gameplay-options.

I have to admit that it’s a bit unfair to compare any other game to Everquest II because the crew behind that game has pumped out boatloads of content from day one and didn’t ever slow down. I’ve got no idea how they did it with the comparably low funds they must have had during all that time.

On the other hand, why not hold all game developers to the highest of standards? Especially when they make so much money with their game?

I also don’t like that every expansion seems to drastically tinker with classes, gear, zones, pretty much everything. I’m a creature of habit, and while I’m of course fine with a class I play getting more options or just becoming stronger, I can’t stand a character I’ve played for dozens or hundreds of hours and whose playstyle I really like being completely turned on it’s head. I mean, if I didn’t like the playstyle just the way it was I wouldn’t have spent so many hours playing it, would I?

Finally, there’s Blizzard’s arrogance that rubs me the wrong way. The you think you do, but you don’t-speech by WoW’s executive producer when asked by a fan about classic servers is infamous by now, and rightly so. While I don’t think that he’s completely wrong with that assessment when applied to the majority of the playerbase, it’s still incredibly arrogant and condescending to say something like that right to a player’s (and now probably ex-fan’s) face. Just now pretty much everybody is up in arms about the recent story events, and Blizzard’s reaction is, again, the political correct version of we know, you don’t, stfu already.

The gist of statements like that (and most of my other complaints as well I guess) is this: they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want with this game and still make a fortune, and they know it damn well.

It’s their game, of course they can do whatever they want with it, right? Yeah, sure. Meanwhile I’ll do whatever I want with my own time and money, which is to give them to someone else.