This morning I started up a car to move it, and the radio kicked on The Free Beer and Hot Wings morning show. Right before I turned it off I heard that after the break they would be talking about World of Warcraft and how it caused some dude to lose his job. This was the first time that I can think of that I heard something game related on the radio, so of course I had to stick around to check it out. Tyler showed up and was smoking so I cranked up the radio so he could get a laugh too.
They were talking about WoW like it was some new hot thing that was just “so addicting”. The amazing thing was that these dudes on the radio somehow didn’t know crap about the game. Like they’d never even heard of it. They did the worst job of trying to describe what type of game it was too, and compared it to a match of Ghost Recon that just never ended. Amazing.
The best part tho had to be when one of them said “This sounds like that Everquest game”, which immediately made me think of the many conversations Jeff and I have had. Sounds like Everquest? It fucking IS Everquest. WoW along with damn near every other MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) is nothing but an altered version of EQ. I will admit that WoW is the better of all the EQ wannabe games I have played, but the fact still remains that there has yet to be a single game that has even tried to be similar to what my friends and I will always consider to be the greatest game ever. Ultima Online.
Jeff eventually decided that this was due to the fact that back when it was just UO and EQ, PC gaming was becoming a lot more popular and everyone was beefing up their computers to play more graphic intensive games that were out at the time. So when it came down to which MMO they would try out the majority of people chose EQ because it had nicer pictures on the back of the boxes, because it was a far better looking game, that along with the fact that the cover of EQ had a chic with a huge rack on it. Everyone just spent all that money upgrading their PC to have nice graphics, why wouldn’t they choose the better looking game?
This along with what will always be known as the downfall of UO, Trammel, proved EQ to be the more successful of the two and apparently became the mold for future MMO’s to come. If you’ve played one, you’ve played them all. And my friends and I have damn near played them all, and almost all of them have the same bitter EQ aftertaste to them. But we have still yet to find one that is anywhere even close to being considered UO influenced.
I guess the hardest part for me to understand is why no developers ever picked up the Ultima Online model and did anything else with it. UO was still extremely popular and successful. For a very long time UO and EQ were very close in subscription numbers. Hell look at all the Diablo clones that have popped up in the past few years. But I can’t even think of a single game that even uses the skill based non-leveling type system that UO had.
It turned out that dude on the radio almost lost his job due to WoW’s addictiveness. The following calls for the rest of the show were equally unimpressive. Nothing like the dude that murdered his friend in real life over a fucking sword in EQ back in the day. I quit my job and broke up with my girlfriend in my UO prime just to squeeze in more time. But this dude was so addicted that he almost lost his job, and didn’t hang out with his friends as much. boo fucking hoo.
I hope he is looted clean.
Oh right, you can’t do that in Warcraft.
Gay.
