Monday, February 13, 2012

Time to stop blogging about MMORPGs?

Today I read a post by Wolfshead about SWTOR, and I agreed with most of what he said. I think that is a sure sign that I should stop blogging about MMORPGs.

While I am still far away from the burning hate that Wolfshead feels about every single commercial MMORPG out there, I agree that a AAA+ MMORPG of 2011/2012 plays pretty much exactly as one 5 years ago, and that most of the changes in the last 5 years have been cosmetic. And thus I am increasingly losing interest.

This weekend I spent 80% of my free time writing an adventure for pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons, and the remaining 20% were spent mostly with a single-player game, Jagged Alliance: Back to Action, and a bit of Facebook. Although I have an active SWTOR subscription, I had no desire whatsoever to play this or any other MMORPG.

Unlike Wolfshead and others, I don't put all the blame on the games. Game companies produce the kind of games that sell, and that is how it should be. If I could wipe my memory from a decade of MMORPG experience, I would probably love WoW and SWTOR right now. As it is I probably have around 10,000 hours of MMORPG played overall (of which 6,000 hours are WoW), and now I got bored of the same old, same old. If there is anything surprising about that, it is how long it took me to get bored.

A blog is driven by enthusiasm of its author. You can make a blog because you are enthusiastic about games, or (like Wolfshead) because you hate them with a passion. You can't make a good blog about a subject matter you are bored of. I want to write about the things that interest me, not get constrained by the subject matter in the title of the blog. Maybe I should just change that title to "Tobold's Blog" and move on. What do you think?

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