What Was I Saying...?

Last night, my brain demanded recreation of some kind, any kind. As I've been in a recurrent mood for bright, flashy fantasy lately, I went back to WoW; as I've become rather bored with my blue space goat wizard, I started both a wargen warlock, and a pandaren fighter.

I AM A CLICHÉ.

Some things I noticed: first of all, both the wargen and the pandaren starting areas are way more interesting than the blue space goats'. Presumably this is because they were made later, in a post-grind-as-content environment that actually tries to have some story. I heartily applaud this.

Second, the two starting areas feel very different from each other; it's almost like playing two different games. The wargen starting area reminds me of Van Helsing, somewhere between Hollywood's version of Transylvania and 19th century Austria full of darkness and fog; the pandaren starting area is a Kung Fu vision of mythic china crossed with The Shire, full of cheerful toony panda-folk being very polite and going on about food.

That's just neat. :)

The net result of all this is that I stayed up past 3 a.m. happily leveling up multiple characters in a game which I had previously believed to be little more than a grind-fest. (I REGRET NOTHING!) Turns out the class/race combo you choose makes a big difference!

Mind you, the staying up past 3 a.m. part is not entirely because WoW was so exciting. I just needed the downtime. I could have easily been up that late reading a book or playing solitaire. But given that I was doomed to be up 'til the Whee! hours, I'm glad I was using the time to do something more fun than killing 10 rats.

-The Gneech

As a general rule, I like my fantasy played very straight; so when I'm in the mood to step into a virtual fantasy setting, my setting of choice is Lord of the Rings Online, which for the most part does a very good job of visualizing Middle Earth's "the real world (specifically Europe) in some forgotten pre-historic epoch" setting.

However, there are times when I'm in a mood for something a little more fantastical, with blasty wizards and glowy swords and blue hair and people riding around on shimmering frilled lizards. Then I play Star Wars. I created Lachwen in LotRO to fill that void, but the problem is that she's not really at home in that setting. So, since World of Warcraft is FTP up to level 20 and I knew sirfox was a WoW player, I downloaded it and created a Draenei mage, named Akijo.



She's a perty thing. :) I got her up to level 9 (I think it was) before deciding I'd had enough for the night. It was fun, pretty standard click-and-pointy stuff, and certainly very colorful. :D I can't really say if I enjoyed it enough to make it worth paying for once it stops being FTP. I have a paid lifetime account on LotRO and I don't play that as much as I used to these days. On the other hand, it was just different enough to be an enjoyable diversion. (Plus there was a pirate cook named Cookie McWeaksauce, that was good for a chuckle.)

It's definitely candy to LotRO steak, but sometimes candy is what you want. :)

-The Gneech