That brings up a larger point, really, about MMOs. What’s your goal? If you have a goal, you can work toward it, feel happy at making progress. Eventually all the goals in EQ1 seemed like pointless ones. Another 400 AAs to match my 800? Another boring raid on content I’d done for two years already? Another night of no groups as people logged on their cleric alts — or pickup groups on lower level content with idiots?

Having been bitten with EQ1 and FFXI, I am really shy about starting another MMO. EQ2 is better than EQ1 about always having there be SOMETHING fun to do by yourself.

Now those few hours I spent on VG beta, I was distressed by the harvesting/crafting (seemed pointlessly hard for an activity I use to relax), wrote a couple songs for my bard (nice!), ran to a place where they were showing off their ships and mounts, including flying ones, and then I logged off and never played again.

Why didn’t it grab me?

Well, for a brand new player, it didn’t tell me much about the game. There were some quests, but they were all go into this field next to me and kill some stuff. Yeah, the first thing they had me do was GRIND MOBS and after that, I got to DELIVER SOMETHING TO SOMEONE.

So I decided against doing any more quests and went exploring, but everywhere looked just like EQ2 to me.

I know pretty much every MMO starts you off the same way, and that’s just it in a nutshell. VG was supposed to be cool and in the end it was just like every MMO.

That’s the part I hope they change.

Honestly, I’m not that demanding a gamer. Unlike most, I’m not tired of the fantasy genre in MMORPGS. I don’t need a radical departure from what’s come before–just SOME new elements and significant differences distinguishing one game from the next–a few gentle pushes up the MMORPG evolutionary ladder to hook me in without sighing, throwing my hands in the air, and proclaiming, “Been there, done that.” I felt that Vanguard’s initial problem was equating difficulty with game mechanics that have been improved upon and streamlined since EQ. Make a game challenging and with a certain amount of “risk” but do it in a creative way that doesn’t boil down to monotonous repetition and timesinks. I am giving V:SoH another shot this winter and I have to say it’s due primarily to what I’ve glossed from their community from sites like Jaye’s and Troy’s Voyages of Vanguard podcast more than the game itself.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m looking forward to WAR much in the way I look forward to a console game. It looks like it will be a ton of fun, but I’m betting it will be very easy button-oriented and not provide me with that immersive, obsessive, living, breathing experience that I love to get from being hung up on an MMORPG for several years.

What got me about LotRO was going to each new zone and being asked to do the same things, again and again. I went to Trollshaws and the very first quest I got there was to kill more bears.

Think of that for a moment. Would Tolkien have actually written a story where the hero was a bear killer, and was known for going throughout Middle Earth and slaughtering hundreds and thousands of bears, pigs, wolves, birds…? Calling *every* *single* *one* of these creatures servants of Mordor, better off dead, makes me believe Middle Earth is corrupt to the core — if evil is that prevalent.

But no, I didn’t leave for ideological reasons or even because all the quests seemed meaningless. It was because a billing error unsubscribed me, and I didn’t love the game enough to see to fixing it, so I went back to EQ2.

That’s LotRO’s misstep, in my opinion of course. It’s just not *different* enough from other games. It’s a little different, and is innovative in some ways and certainly has one of the best newbie experiences of any MMO out there, but it’s just not different enough. You get the same sort of gameplay experience with it at the end of the day as you do with WoW, EQ2, DAoC, etc, so if you already play one of those games, and especially if you liked the PvP aspect of those games, you might wonder why you would want to switch to LotRO.

But then, I was eventually bored in LotRO as well, even though I had no problem finding people with whom to do the group quests. Grouping was not a problem. It was just the sameness.

I sure hope that by the time I decide to give Vanguard another shot, they have found a way to make it different, special. If I thought it was the game for me at the moment, I’d be playing it right now :)