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I have made no attempt to disguise my love/hate relationship with MMORPG's. I love the concept, I love the idea of a massive world to explore and ever changing content to keep things fresh. However, I hate the levelling treadmill, and I hate paying a monthly fee. I just noticed that Dark Age of Camelot is literally begging players to come back. In fact, they are even offering former players a free 14 day re-trial. I think I might take them up on it, just as I took Anarchy Online up on the offer when they presented a similar deal a while ago. I expect that I will end up doing the exact same thing, however, and maybe only renew my subscription for a month.
The funny thing is that with more and more great things being said about City of Heroes I have been tempted to give it a try. Once again, though, I have a hard time shelling out the $60 for a game that I know will just end up costing me money and eventually be worth absolutely nothing.
I think that's what scares me the most about MMORPG's, actually. I am a bit of a collector when it comes to video games. I keep all the original packaging and manuals and have them all stacked on shelves or stuffed into boxes. Every so often I like to crack open a golden oldie and revisit what made me think it was such a great game in the first place. Sometimes I find that the game doesn't hold up to the image I have in my rather foggy memory (most of the Might and Magic series, Seaman, Seaman.... What the hell was I thinking?), and occasionally I find that the game is actually every bit as great as I remembered (StarCraft, X-Com, Carnage Heart, almost any Capcom game for NES). But five years from now the MMORPG's I have on my shelves won't even be playable, there will be no servers for them, and even if there are servers for them, am I going to want to dust off my credit card for a touch of nostalgia? I doubt it. I don't like the idea of games that are so completely disposable, it frightens me a little, both as a gamer and a developer.
As a developer it must be doubly frightening. It's always nice to be able to show stuff off to people, or to look back on the things that you have made. Once they shut down the servers on some of these games that option is gone. If I were a carpenter I would love showing off the chairs that I had built, but it would suck if one day everyone's asses fell off and the government decided to burn all the chairs. I know, I know, terrible analogy, but even still, it sucks that your entire body of work could be rendered unplayable by an accountant.
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