Day 1: I Have a Game I Cannot Stop Paying For
Sometime back in, oh, April, I got an MMO to review.
"Huh," I thought in my continuously running inner monologue, "an MMO. I've never played one of those before." I pondered this. What about the other players? What were they like? Would I be competent? Would I be accepted? Would I be bitterly shunned and scorned from prestigious raids, or would I finally transcend into gaming nirvana with the aid of players from around the world? Curious, I installed it and booted it up for the first time. It didn't work. "Damn," I sulked. "All of those good adjectives wasted".
A month went by, and I was billed for my subscription.
"What is this?!" I demanded. "I'm a journalist, I don't pay for things!" Irate in my sense of self-entitlement, I scoured the website for a link that would aid me in explaining why I shouldn't have to pay for my subscription. I found none. Eventually, I forgot about it. Except when reviewing my bank statement, and somehow sorting stuff out with Codemasters sank to the bottom of my to-do list. Then my computer died, and all of my cloudy aspirations were cast into the darkness of uncertainty that is a hard drive failure, being billed all the while through PayPal for a game I could not run.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, after waging a 3 month war with two replaced hard drives, I had finally beaten the machine elves back into satisfactory submission. Finally possessing a working computer was weird, and I spent a good portion of my day running diagnostic programs compulsively to make sure that there wasn't something icky that had slipped through the radar. Having run full system scans for literally the 23rd time that day, I cautiously started installing programs. First simple stuff, like Firefox. I saw that it ran, and it was good. Then I installed more complex things, like iTunes. I saw that this also worked, and it was good. Delighted, I picked up the closest game at hand that I hadn't played and installed it. It ran.
Its name was RF Online.
And it was good.
Day 2: The Beautiful People
The next day after "real" work I back to my abode to kick back, relax, and sort through this new game. I dredged up my old account information, installed patches, and logged on to the water server. It was time to create a new character.
I had three choices for races. The Bellato, a diminutive race with white hair. They were good at a little bit of magic, a little bit of physical prowess, and a ton of mechanical skills. Also, some of them piloted robots. Robots were cool, but I wasn't sure I wanted to use one. The Accretia were cyborg-y tough genderless Spartan things, and although they were pretty powerful I thought they were ugly. So that was out. That left the Cora, the ueber-religious elf-types who are characterized by their spell-casters. Spells were good. And the Cora are pretty. So I went with Cora.
There are also a couple different classes within each race. The Cora have Rangers, Spiritualists, Specialists, and Warriors. I created Dora, a female Ranger character (bows and guns, light on defense, heavy on HP), and set out to explore(a).
Moving around in Cora Headquarters was confusing. There were all kinds of flashy lights and swirling portals and pretty colors. Sort of like a Tolkien stoner trip. I had just begun to wrap my head around all the clicky system when I was accosted by one of the top 30 ranked Cora players on my server.
"DORA!!!!!!!!!" He screamed. "TAKE ME ON A MAGICAL ADVENTURE!!!!!!"
...Say what now?
I was totally floored. I had been putzing around n00bville for five minutes and I was already being called upon as a guide, and in all caps. Huh. I edged away, not really wanting to get into a "magical adventure" with somebody I didn't know. Said player followed me around, insisting on an adventure.
"But I am a shameless n00b. I don't know where anything is." I half-pleaded.
"You're the explorer!" He asserted. "You lead the way!"
I finally agreed, and after a few false starts of running up and down ramps that really led nowhere I managed to lead my party of two out into a forest. Hey, this was sweet. I found the monsters! In ROSE Online, only easy monsters were to be found for miles around, so I should be fine just wandering into the woods, right? I was fairly self-assured as I headed towards a monster titled "Lizard".
Wrong.
Lizard dealt me 450+ hit points of damage in one fell swoop. For a level one, that’s 1.5x instant death. Dora jerked backwards, sagged, and finally face planted in the dirt, the camera lazily drifting around her corpse. What the hell was that? I wondered. I was dead and I hadn't even had time to use my dinky little bow. After watching Dora's remains rotate for a while I clicked revive.
I arrived back at the portal, sans my party member. I couldn't find my way over to the pots dealer, much less find a non-NPC. There was no in-game reference for me to use to figure out how to find a player, follow, shout, or add friends, among other things. In desperation I began going through the entire alphabet of backslash commands and was somewhere around /j when I sat back in my chair and sighed.
"That wasn't a very good adventure." My erstwhile party member messaged.
Since I hadn't figured out how to use private messaging yet either, I could only nod moodily to myself and contemplate my initial, dismal failure.
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