Record of Motion

I’ve had TES3: Morrowind for several years. Got the GOTY edition. I finally figured out why I like it better than my recently-acquired Fallout 3. I’ve always been a fallout fan. Always. I cannot begin to describe the excitement I felt when I read the announcement of it’s developer. But playing through it several times reveals something: I liked Morrowind better. Chock it up to familiarity or memories of playing it on my first computer or whatever else, but I really do like it better. I finally figured out why: it places no emphasis on the main plot. F3 throws you into the main quest, Morrowind throws you into a town in the middle of nowhere and gives you a vague recommendation to head to Balmora (first thought: “Where the heck is that?”). Also, Morrowind changes your character depending on how you play. If you start out using Long swords and decide you like bows better, pick up a bow and start shooting things. Eventually you will be better with a bow than with a long sword. Fallout 3 also lets you do pretty much anything no matter your skills (aside from Terminals and Locked doors), but depends on you to increase the skills when you level, opposite from Morrowind, which depends on you to increase your skills to level.

Just my 2 cents.

It just hit me today. Shadowbane is gone. For good. I can’t go back and play it again. Ever. At least until the SBEmu project gets done. It feels strange, thinking that tomorrow morning, instead of getting up to pwn in PvP at a siege, I’ll be blasting experiments on Anarchy Online or role-playing on Morrowind (which, IMO, is far superior to Oblivion). Even the website for ShadowBane (chronicle.ubi.com) is gone now. It redirects to the Ubisoft home page.

I’ve also discovered what turned me off to AO in the first place. The combat is slow. Seriously, the only ones who deal any major damage until lvl 100 are the Enforcers. Everyone else is stuff with some pretty crappy dps. At about lvl 100, Agents can one-hit-kill most mobs, but only once every 2.5 minutes. In Shadowbane, combat was fast. And for me, the measuring rod for all MMORPGs is ShadowBane.

Today, in my boredom from AOs slow combat, I finished my Fallout 3 mod, Vault 113 (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4569), while waiting on the combat in AO. If the combat is that slow, you have a problem. Even WoWs combat speed in raids is about on par with the standard AO speed. And for those that dont know, raid mobs take between 1 minute and 5 minutes each. Alright, so not that slow, but it feals the same. Not a whole lot is going on to watch during combat.  Even though AO is now officially the most tweak-heavy MMORPG still running, without good combat, it’s doomed. It’s on the way there already

Not all is lost though, I still have Morrowind, and I’ve been having waaaaaaaaaaaaay to much fun on it.