Today I want to talk about a balance that I seem to require in gaming. When I was little Steve, knee-high to a carnie, I played the usual console games. I had great times playing things like Final Fantasy, Zelda and any action game I could get my hands on. But nothing was as sweet as when a friend would come over and try to best me at Street Fighter 2. Fighting games, for the longest time, were my only way to go head to head with a human opponent in gaming. Time went on and more fighting games were released. I was never super fond of the Mortal Kombat series, but I thoroughly enjoyed 2D fighters like Guilty Gear and any of the Capcom or SNK games as well as 3D fighters like Tekken and Soul Calibur. When I finally got into PC Gaming in the late 90’s, a new world was opened to me, namely First Person Shooters. Now, I had played Godeneye on the Nintendo 64 with friends before, but this didn’t compare to playing games like Quake, Unreal, or Jedi Knight. It was personally as if I was a gaming virgin before, and I was making sweet sweet love for the first time with the PC.

I still play shooters quite a bit (by the way, we play TF2 every Monday at 9, join us on Steam!). Even though the controls and graphics have taken massive leaps on console shooters, I feel that they, Real Time Strategy games, and MMO’s are still what make PC gaming unique.

When I started playing Everquest, I fell in love with a new style of gaming; MMO’s. It wasn’t that “first time” experience like I had with the FPS’s, but it did things the other games didn’t, and it felt good. After the first few months in EQ, I began to wonder why there wasn’t a better implementation of PvP in the game. The game seemed to be made for it what with the factions all hating each other and all. Once I began to question this, it started to act as a cancer for my love of the game. I enjoyed what was made, but I felt like I wasn’t showing my abilities as a player by simply crawling through a dungeon with a group. Being someone who was raised on fighting games rather than Dungeons and Dragons, I didn’t fully “get it”. Eventually Dark Age of Camelot was released and showed me what I was missing. It was every bit as great on the game play side as Everquest was, but now with RvR! DAoC was great, but eventually the game changed enough from what I loved about it, that I had to move on.

Since that game, I’ve played numerous other MMO’s, and nothing has really offered me exactly what I want. Currently, I’m playing Lord of the Rings Online. I have yet to check out the Monster Play feature, but I knew going into the game, that it wasn’t touted as having the end all PvP experience. Only reason I have not checked out Monster Play yet, is because I’m having such a damn fine time playing my Warden. But I still have this desire to best others in combat, so what do I do? I play Team Fortress 2 and Uncharted 2 multiplayer to quench my thirst. I can remember doing this in my EQ and WoW days as well. There wasn’t enough of a PvP experience for me, so I balanced my gaming diet with the shooter food group.  Looking back at Warhammer Online, I didn’t play a lot of other games while I was subbed. Sure, WAR had…er, has problems, but for me it was a full game. It was the whole meal, but the problem was the long term health effects it had.

A lot of us in the Multiplaying group are in a rough spot with MMO’s right now. As Brian put it last night in chat, “this is a really weird time for MMO’s”. At least for a lot of us, he’s right. There’s so many titles out right now that do most of what we want, but they aren’t the whole meal. For me, it’s the lack of good PvP. For others it might be that the game doesn’t offer a good leveling experience, or the combat system, controls, graphics or classes offered simply aren’t up your alley. As unique as people are, so are their issues with each title.

For now though, I’ll just keep trucking on LotRO, try out other MMO’s (damn you Shannon) as trials pop up, and keep my eyes open for a three course meal of an MMO that won’t give me a belly ache.

Question for the reader: What are you missing from your current MMO?