Oblivion (and Skyrim!)

[nacho]

So I always do the brute force, easily frustrated, ADHD thing with these sort of games.  It's the drawback of the massive open environment which, strangely, I crave more than anything.  I really want Morrowind in space.  My secret dream is a game where you don't have to fight people but you can fly around with a cargo ship and mine planets, hang out in towns, whatever.  I'm so gay.

In Morrowind, I played a straight-up fighter with secondary mage skills.  Early on, I stumbled across that slow healing cloak and mega hammer of death that added +5 feather and, pretty much, stuck with that until I got up to 100 on blunt weapons and switched to one of those special quest super swords.  So I pounded my way through everything in a frenzy of screeching, running, blood-spraying direct force.

What to be in Oblivion?  Someone a little bit softer?  A little more reserved?  I'm seriously thinking of waiting about a year for all the cool mods to come out.  I must admit that, if I had waited in Morrowind for a few essential mods, it would have been a far better experience my first time around.

But...I'm being called to the game.  So much so that I'm going to upgrade the year old, unreliable Dell currently clicking away as it downloads whatever shit I'll never have time to watch today.

[Tatertots]

My secret dream is a game where you don't have to fight people but you can fly around with a cargo ship and mine planets, hang out in towns, whatever.  I'm so gay.

EV Nova. The Escape Velocity series kept me occupied for, like, my entire jr. high career.

In EV, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Sounds like you'll do the trading thing, hanging out in bars and hitting on 10 year-old alien children...

[nacho]

So EV is a smarter, less attractive version of Freelancer with a few more options and no zillion factions attacking you constantly?

[Tatertots]

Yeah. The graphics really aren't all that bad. The gameplay is absolute tops, though. Download the demo.

[nacho]

Freelancer exhausted me quickly.  Running whatever shit from faraway system to faraway system, having someone hack the gates and drop me out of warp or whatever, no goal in sight except a big ship to make money with, no dynamic economic system... And fighting.  Those missions.  Cookie cutter shoot-em-ups.  Only about a dozen secret little treasure places where you could get a few interesting guns but, mostly, blah cargo. 

I'll grab the demo tonight.

[Nubbins]

See... if you were that into Morrowind, I can't believe that you never upgraded your PC to play World of Warcraft or City of Heroes.  They've got most of the shit Morrowind has with a massive online presence.  Granted, you've got to deal with a bunch of pre-pubescent retards up past their bedtimes, but plotting out a character and fucking with people who are actually real instead of just a computer is kinda fun.

I never got into WoW because I had dial-up and a shitty laptop that wouldn't have run it.  Maybe I will now, I dunno... since my roommate has an Xbox360, I've got my Live fix and probably won't play computer games as much... I'm still going to have to upgrade the computer.

Can Oblivion be played online?  If so, could I play on a 360 and play with people using PC's or Macs?

[nacho]

I avoid those MMORPGS.  I can't stand playing with other people, really.  Maybe, like, a small group of friends.  But it's those pre-pubescent retards -- even just the slightest thought of them -- that bugs the hell out of me.

Oblivion is just single player.

[Tatertots]

Isn't World of Warcraft pretty much full of furries? Like, 30 year-old men playing as 13 year-old female furry things?

That shit creeps the fuck out of me.

[nacho]

Isn't World of Warcraft pretty much full of furries? Like, 30 year-old men playing as 13 year-old female furry things?

That shit creeps the fuck out of me.

Every online game has that shit.  Look, I like masturbation.  I want to go set up a colony of rejects next to some mountainside ore and leave them to fuck around while I go fly around a dust belt looking for the lost escape pod of doom then, failing that, but discovering a useless rock ripe for atomic testing, I want to fly back to my colony and walk around the streets and sit in the tavern and pick up ore.  Drop it off, make money, buy bombs, fly back to the useless rock and spend about three hours before I go to bed hurling bombs at it.

[Nubbins]

Isn't World of Warcraft pretty much full of furries? Like, 30 year-old men playing as 13 year-old female furry things?

That shit creeps the fuck out of me.

Yeah, I think there's a significant contingent of weirdos on all those games.

That's the big downside to online gaming these days.  No matter how much you love a game or play it or think that you're good at it, there will always be that group of people who do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but play that game and beat the everloving shit out of you whenever you try to play.  It gets old fast.

[nacho]

Single player massive worlds are fine for me.  Morrowind had dead stupid NPC's and it wasn't a problem.  There was so much to the world, and so many places and cool quests that it was fine.  I seriously played that game for years and I feel like I only scratched the surface.  I didn't do all the guild quests, I didn't do the legion stuff or the Dark Brotherhood, I haven't even gotten around to the expansion packs.  Or played the House quests. 

If I'm going to play an online game, give me Avalon!

[Nubbins]

If I'm going to play an online game, give me Avalon!

Or Spore... I like the idea of a massive online game, but it would be much better if it was a 50/50 kind of thing and you could spend time developing your game by yourself before you played online.

[nacho]

That's even worse.  You versus the poop-socks who have spent their entire lives without another poop sock kicking their ass making a mega character.

[Matt]

When I crack open the hatch on WoW this summer (oh, my cock will hate me; he won't get any use) I'm totally going as a Night-Elf female so I can slut myself out for gold and shit. Unless my friends that I've heard can pimp me out with some good armor and weapons.

Seriously, Nacho, you should start off with Diablo II, work your way into WoW.

[nacho]

I always wanted to play Diablo II.  That was all the rage when I was in school (or was that the first one?), but I never had the computer for it.  No -- more RAM and Oblivion.  That'll be my April gift to myself.