At the moment, I am playing Eve Online and World of Warcraft. I admit that the latter is a pointless clause: of course I play WoW. It's a default position for MMO gamers and you only need to make reference to that one if you are opting out, to say that you don't play the game.
But WoW has been losing some of it's power over me recently, so I interviewed three other games. An ancillary reason for doing this is that I see the need to have something else to do during the population explosion which will follow the Burning Crusade expansion for WoW in a few months' time. That will not be a pretty experience, and I have no wish to be committed to spending my days sitting in queues, waiting to access a server behind 18 months' worth of resubs. There will be new servers, of course - I'd be unsurprised by a 25% increase in the Euro server numbers - but everyone will be one of the two new races. I may join one just to play a human or a Tauren, out of a sense of perversity.
Anyway, I tried three other games: Eve Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and City of Heroes. Eve Online, obviously, I have already discussed. It made the cut. The others didn't, and I unsubbed from each, for different reasons.
Dungeons and Dragons Online was, for me, the greater disappointment. I've hinted at the source of my dissatisfaction already, as well as writing about some fairly positive experiences. But in retrospect the game has flaws that happen to mesh with my own idiosyncracies.
The game needs grouping. You will not be able to play past the intro section of D&DO if you don't like grouping. I don't just solo: duo plenty, but I tend to dislike grouping with the same people again and again. I am anti-social that way: it means small talk and downtime. I am the person that doesn't mind pick-up groups. But I lack the social will to place myself in positions where I have to respond to socialising. I prefer guild chat where I can slip in and out of the discussion as and when it interests me.
D&DO didn't let me start adventuring as soon as I logged on the way WoW does. there was always that barrier of finding a group, and it could take ages.
I disliked the controls and interface for D&DO a lot. Most people found it counter-intuitive. You may wonder how I can be so sweeping, but you just need to stand in a tavern in D&DO to see people trying to use the right mouse button to intereact with people and things, and instead swiping with their sword. There is a lot of slashing and cutting going on.
So with crappy controls and a substantial block to enjoyment in the only-adequate grouping mechanics, I dropped D&DO. The world was nice, the graphics rather good, the physics fun, but 'll wait togo back until they have fixed the annoyances and padded out some solo stuff.
City of Heroes was the opposite experience. A short and well-structured tutorial got me into the game. I always felt like there was something I could do immediately. Character design was awesome, the control system unexceptional but unobtrusive, the world a bit weird but hey: how do you design a normal-seeming world with hundreds of superheroes running around.
The internal comic-based fictions were well-maintained, even down to things like patches being issues. The sidekick system was a stroke of genius. There was no real block to getting into the action except or some rather annoying running around town, which could at least be punctuated by punching bad guys. Missions were fully instanced, which I liked.
But I dropped CoH like a stone, within ten days of starting. Pretty much because it was boring. The gameplay is so incredibly repetitive. The textures for the instances are well done, but there are only half a dozen types: you were in a warehouse, a lab, an office or a few others and each was just a semi-random variation on the same building blocks. Great for low-cost random content generation, but I needed more variety.
It was also very, very easy. I'm not claiming to be Ian M. Banks' Player of Games, though I know how to build a viable character with a quick scan of the system. All the same, I have no idea what death looks like in CoH. Never been close. The same goes for Eve Online, I admit, but that is because it is so ridiculously easy to die there that I take huge care all the time not to do dumb stuff.
The only time it got harder was when I grouped with someone else of my level. The instances scale to your party, which I dislike here just as I do in Oblivion. It is immersion-breaking. Worse, it punishes you for grouping, just as it does for putting preparatory work in by doing "side-quests". Of course, in scaling difficulty, all the diku-Muds punish achievement, but asking for help from a mate shouldn't see a magical and sudden increase of greater than 100% in the resources of your enemies.
I suppose if you want a semi-turn-based bash-em-up with an endless procession of baddies then CoH is the game for you. It bored me senseless.