Fair Warning: World of Star Wars

Like many people in the WoW blogosphere, I'm currently trying out Star Wars: The Old Republic. For me this is a big step though, because unlike many other bloggers, I've never really tried out any MMO other than WoW. To be honest, none of them ever looked interesting enough to me to make me want to play them, and none of them looked like worlds I'd want to immerse myself in. Observing various MMO launches over the years and seeing pretty much every single game go from the hyped up Next Big Thing to just another small fish in a big pond hasn't really enthused me towards trying something new either.

SWTOR has been different for me however. I wasn't interested in it at all initially, but the closer it came to release, the more I learned about it that had me really intrigued. Now I even ended up in the early access for preorders, and I'm positively hooked. People are already nitpicking about all kinds of little things, and I can't honestly say that they are wrong, but a lot of it strikes me as akin to criticising a painting for the brand of colours the artist used and completely missing the actual picture. I imagine that very few people ever quit their MMO of choice because the chat window wasn't in their favourite place or the crafting system felt a bit bloated. And TOR's big picture is great in my personal opinion. In fact, I'm very much reminded of WoW the way it was when I first started playing: a beautifully stylised world, vibrant and teeming with activity; general chat full of people looking for groups, answering questions and sharing their thoughts on the experience. Group content that can actually kill you; elites out in the world that you have to keep a watchful eye on. People bonding in guild groups where nobody minds if one member gets lost on the way and takes a while to actually arrive. And to spice things up, some comparatively minor new features like more interactive quests and companion crafting.

Anyway, before anyone feels sickened by my gushing, let it be said that I won't be doing any more blogging about TOR on here. This was always meant to be a blog about WoW, and that's what it's going to stay. I think I'll be happy just enjoying TOR "blindly" for a while, without overthinking any of it, but if I do eventually feel the urge to talk about it more, I'll make a new blog for that.

To be honest, I initially expected to cancel my WoW sub by the end of this month. I still think that it's a great game in many ways, but over the years it has changed too much for my taste - the only issue was that I wanted to continue playing an MMO and until now there wasn't anything that looked even remotely like a viable alternative to me.

The only "problem" that remains are that social ties are hard to sever. I still owe someone a Sulfuron Hammer for which I need to grind Molten Core trash every now and then. My rated battleground team is still ace. For these things alone I'll stay subscribed to WoW for now. But I expect that I'll be playing a lot less, and as a result this blog might become quiet as well, as I'll have nothing much to talk about.

In the meantime, I hope that we can all continue to have fun in the game(s) of our choice.