As of late, my gaming has been between two games, Final Fantasy XIV and the supremely wonderful and amazing Xenoblade Chronicles; or three games if you count Jet ‘n Guns, but that’s horrid and way too hard, hate it…
Xenoblade is a singleplayer JRPG on the Wii, graphically it’s probably one of the best games on the system, which isn’t saying much in today’s world of 1080p HD whizzbangery, but with those graphics, they’ve created a supremely interesting world to explore, seriously, it’s set on 2 absolutely-bloody-ginormous robots that had a battle years ago. From that bit alone, it’s more imaginative than every MMO ever. I play MMOs to explore, I want to see new things, and if the game developers want me to go exploring, they’d best populate the world with reasons to explore. Currently, this is not the case.
EQ2 is full of fields, even when they added the expansions with floating islands in the sky, they were just fields, in the sky! Rift, for all it’s awesomeness, is just fields, forests and deserts. Warhammer Online, fields, full of corpses, which is a bit morbid, but yep, fields! Final Fantasy XIV… yep, fields… nice looking fields, but still fields.
Below is a video of Xenoblade’s environments. If you get past the lower resolution textures, I think you’ll find a rather interesting landscape indeed. The game actually rewards your exploration with valuable EXP, but it simply isn’t needed.
MMO Designers have the power to sculpt truly amazing locales for us to run around in, but they seem to prefer the mundane, I don’t know if it’s because “The “New” scares shareholders! Make it “normal”!”, “People like realistic and gritty, look at Call of Duty!” or maybe just for practical concerns, I imagine a world like Xenoblades would be full of people getting annoyed at falling off things, but I really want to say “Wow!” when get round a mountain, or pass through a cave.
Can you MMO Designers please make the worlds we escape to in MMOs, more of an escape from the real world please?
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I've been playing a fair bit of Xenoblade these days, it truly is a fantastic JRPG.
Hi,
My name is Ken and I happened upon your site a little while ago and was really impressed by the quality of your content. I would love a chance to contribute to your site. Please contact me if that's something you would be interested in.
Hi Ken, feel free to register on the site (link above) and we'll add you as an author so you can start creating articles. We'll add you as a guest blogger.
What MMO's do you play generally?
Thanks that sounds awesome. I play a lot of games but the only MMO's I've ever played are WOW, Ragnarok, and Maple Story.
That's a good start, we're not big WoW fans and I we haven't played those other two that much from what I can remember of the other guys mmo history, so feel free to post what you like about your experiences
Do you just write about game experiences mostly?
Experiences, thoughts, what you would like to see in the game. All sorts really, Yeti likes to talk about his game experiences, Wodge is about what comes up and things that irk him. I've started posting about games I'm trying out.
If you don't mind, I would love to talk about game aesthetics and design.
Sounds like a plan, go for it
I've bumped you to contributor, so you should be able to, create/edit/delete your own blog posts, we'll have to review/publish them for you I believe.
Fill in your bio in your profile page on this site
Look forward to seeing your posts