Am I jaded?

First of all I wanted to apologize for missing a blog day yesterday. I got distracted by a bunch of things I had going on, and just completely forgot. So I decided to do a post today to make up for it.

So here we go:

For some reason I find myself getting bored of these F2P games after about 1 week of playing. Actually, 

Dragon's Nest I played for about one day and already got sick of it...

What's my deal? Is it me? I'm so sick of quest grinding... That's all Dragon's Nest has been. That, and the fact that the dungeon's aren't random, so I ended up running the same one four or five times just to finish the damn quests. They're short too, so there's no real sense of exploration. Granted I was only level 6, so I have no idea how the game is later... but I'm ALREADY super sick of it. Spiral Knights too. 

For some reason that game is slightly more entertaining even though the combat is much more simple. Could be that the dungeons change constantly. What I'm not a fan of though, is the fact that I have to spend $10 just to craft my Tier 5 set. I know, I know... I'm complaining about $10 for a F2P game... But still, there's no way around it. 

I can spend the $10 of Crystal Energy to craft my suit of armor, and just run off mist energy to dungeon crawl... but then I'm only playing for about 20 minutes per day... not very involving. 

So once I figured that out I basically gave up on that. Because even if I just grind out the crowns (Spiral Knights currency) to buy the item itself, I'm still going to spend a ton to get into the dungeons themselves. 

Basically in order to get my gear and play as much as I would have liked, I'd be spending more than $15 in one month. Suddenly this F2P game is more expensive then the worlds most popular MMO.

Can't stand quest grinding at all anymore. Doesn't matter what the game is. I'm just fed up with "Go to <place> and gather x of <item> for me and come back." I realize not ALL quests are like that. For example there are actually quite a few quests that are fun in WoW... but they're just drowned in the amount of meaningless tasks you have to do to find them while leveling.

I just feel like I can't do quest grinding anymore. Even Borderlands is boring to me now, and it's FPS.

Hell, the quests in EverQuest were more involving and were mainly there for you to get gear. They were actually fun. Gathering tons of different and exotic items up from different places throughout Norrath. Not even the epic quests in WoW have the same feeling as EverQuest's did. Hell the quest line to get Crafted Armor for my warrior was a blast. Not even really sure why. Like I said, could be me.

Maybe I'm jaded... Maybe the gaming industry needs something new as far as MMO's though. I don't really know. Bioware is claiming their quests are a lot more involving and draw you in. Based on what I've read they're doing a pretty good job of it. 

I sure hope so... Because if I find myself playing another MMO where almost every quest has the exact same gathering objective with nothing to really back up why I'm doing it... probably gonna punch something. Get your own damn berries, and kill your own damn wolves... And why do only half of these stupid birds have feathers? I need eight feathers, and I've killed 20 *#&%ing birds! WHY!?

Dragon's Nest

Since we were on the topic recently of free rpg type games, I figured I'd talk about Dragon's Nest, since it's new enough.

My brother pointed me out to this game a couple days ago, and I was a bit skeptical about it at first. Another Nexon game... Maple Story got old pretty quickly, and I'm kind of over the whole Korean F2P MMO deal. I tried it out anyway, because really, there's no reason not to try out a free game.

I gotta say the combat is a fresh twist. Live action. Fast paced. I'm liking it so far. I'll admit I've only done the first quest, but it was pretty sweet taking out those groups of goblins. I like the fact that there's normal attacks, special attacks, AND abilities. Lets me chain together my own combos.


Taking a look at the classes, there's class branching (which I'm a fan of), and one of them is a Swordsman. Yeah that's got me written all over it. Greatswords and gauntlets? I've got a thing for both.

I'm pretty stoked to see how this goes. So far it's pretty awesome. There's micro-transactions obviously, but from what I've read and heard they're not required to advance like Spiral Knights. Don't get me wrong, I still like Spiral Knights, but I'm not a fan of the idea of having to spend about $10 whether I farm crowns or craft the gear myself, just to get full tier 5.

I know, I know... it's a one time deal, but that's on top of buying energy so I can play for more than what seems like 20 minutes per day.

Hopefully Dragon's Nest will kick my skepticism in the nuts. So far it seems like it's going to do just that.

Click here if you want to check it out for yourself. It's pretty sweet. Wish the characters were a bit less chibi though.