I’ve been playing MMORPGs for a long time. I started the year Everquest came out, and save for the occassional break between games, I’ve pretty much always been active on one or another.

In all of these years, I’ve never once hit the level cap.

Oh sure, I came close on World of Warcraft (67 priest I think) and I often wonder why I’ve never once accomplished this dubious honor. Well, after much meditation on this subject (minutes and minutes, in fact) I think I came to the conclusion. Instead of blaming my own resolve, I think I’ll do instead what comes instinctively to humans as a species: I’ll blame someone else. MMORPG developers, all of you, pull the old bait and switch on your consumers. At first you mask grinding with quests and other shit but by the time you’re painfully close to the level cap all pretext of distraction is removed. Fuck you, you’re grinding. I suspect the reason they do this is because they reason they already have you paying, and you’re already that close, so you’ll surely endure those last few levels of pain because the glory of a maxed character is forever.
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Continuing with my vaguely vitriolic rantings that might interest perhaps a handful of people: Xenosaga.

For some reason I was incredibly excited when Xenosaga was announced. I was in high school at that time, going through that phase where yes, bizarre esoteric philosophy really is the bomb (I was a nerd if you couldn’t already tell). Looking back on this I’ll be damned if I can figure out why, because the spiritual forebearer to this game, Xenogears, was arguably the most convoluted game I have ever played, both game play- and story-wise.

But that’s not my point. My point is Xenosaga. Going into it I probably knew immediately something was amiss. Why is that? Well, allow me to answer my own question with a question. Successful stories tend to make sense, don’t they? Because it’s about two hours in and I STILL HAVE NO CLUE WHAT IS HAPPENING. All I know is people are saying words (most are made up, I later checked) about… Something. I guess it was supposed to sound like a bunch of scientists in the future talking about future-stuff, but all it accomplished was confusing the hell out of me.

That’s pretty much par for the course of the entire game, though. Lots and lots of references to the Zohar and stuff like that, which even one glance of the associated Wikipedia page can tell that it’s definitely not something I want to even hear from, really.
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THQ should feel bad. Really bad. They had their act together with Dark Crusade– but Soulstorm just started bad. This coming from a huge fan of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000– I even made excuses for why Shadow of the Horned Rat is a really good game, and anyone familiar with that intolerable dog turd of a game should know that basically seals my fan boy status.

I’ll preface (can you be a paragraph in and still count it as a preface?) this by saying I am not an RTS guru. Hell, I’m not even much of a fan. I played Starcraft religiously in 1998 along with half the world, but I don’t think that counts. Soulstorm, though not technically an expansion as it is a stand alone game, when combined with the other parts of the Dawn of War franchise do not, as I first suspected, form the giant fighting robot Warhammeron. Instead, it forms an ungainly abomination with eight playable races.

Anyone familiar with the fine tuning of Starcraft should see where I’m going with this.
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