why me?

i've not played world of warcraft enough to get to a level 60 character. hell, i haven't even made level 20. i have a level 16 and a level 13 character and to be brutally and bluntly honest, i don't think i'll be continuing long enough to make 20 let alone 60.

see, i love the animation. i love the smooth feel of the game. the scenery does get a bit boring, though and begins to look a little too much like those old cartoon episodes of the smurfs. i love the way this orc swings his axe, and i really dig those shoulder things. but, i find, i'm just bored.

i'm so bored bored bored.

every quest is something like, run out and kill these furry animals. twenty of them. then come back and get a paltry few coppers for the ten years it took to do that.

the map is ridiculous and stupid. nothing's marked on it. i had a hard time finding stuff in the city unless it was something the guards knew about. and i know there's all kinds of funky addon thingies to make maps easier, but why should i need those? i guess i was spoilt by oblivion (best game EVER), which you could click on your quest and it would pop a flag on your map telling you where you needed to go rather than spending an hour running around a general area on the map hoping to stumble onto some small crate hidden under some crap. boring! i spent most of my levelling up time jogging through empty wastelands with nothing to look at.

there's much made of the costume design. you can customize everything, says everyone. but, the problem with this kind of game is you can only do that when you get to level 100 or some nonsense. unless you can afford a lot more than a newbie unsocial unguilded guy like me can. everyone's wandering around in their jumped up gear, but i find it's not so easy to get such things when you're a simpleton who just wants to go out into the wilderness and hit stuff on the head with an axe.

i guess what i'm saying is, i'm really sick and tired of being forced into collecting absurd amounds of gold in order to make myself look funky. whnat's wrong with picking the colour of my armour off the rack? i want green, dammit, i don't want this stupid grey crap. why make me buy it?

the game tends to rely on your social skills. to get through the cool bits, you have to join up now and then - and i find this a pain in the butt because the kinds of people who tend to infest the place really aren't much fun to play with in the first place.

the verbal fighting that goes on, with twelve yr old kids calling each other names, attempting to outdo each other with vague generic insults is just plain annoying and distracting when you're attempting to skulk through a darkened cave in pursuit of evil.

and what was more annoying was how you skulked down the cave, splatted everything in need of splatting and then some kid shows up running out of nowhere, splats the main boss, swipes the treasure and disappears without a thankyou after i've cleaned the whole frikken cave. then i have to stand about like a loser for the stupid badguy or magic chest or whatever to respawn so i can kill\loot before fighting my way back out the cave now everything else has respawned with it. totally shat me that, because it was such a common occurance.

all the quests, too, were just plain boring. nothing new. nothing interesting. boring.

again, i was spoilt by oblivion, i think, which had some genuinely interesting quests. the assassin quests alone made the game worthwhile, with some rather neat and often surprisingly humorous quests. you'd think there were only so many ways you could make an assassin-style quest, but i think the writers of oblivion deserve all the ranting i can write. now, if some of these other games took a leaf out of their book...

but i'm going to leave that rant for my swipe at ddo.

yes, basically - i love the graphics. love the technical aspects. love the concept.

just can't get into the character, though. there isn't any character. there's no flow. there's no real freedom. just an endless boring trudge through the wastelands in search of bits of animals.

boring.

i don't care if, at level 50, i can finally move on from animals to mad cultists and intriguing dungeons. i don't care about then. i care about now. and i'm sick of fighting animals. boring boring boring.

i mean, really. jogging across some stupid hills like a moron to get such a meagre amount of treasure - i'd be lucky to buy a health potion with it, really.

big yawn-o-rama.