With my folks being away for 8 days I’ve had nothing but a bad weekend followed by a terrible week. Having to rush between my apartment and their house taking care of the lawn, flowers, greenhouse, strawberries, cat and over-energetic dog has made it difficult to keep up with my job and impossible to keep up with my games. For some reason, not playing games for a week, in fact not sitting by a computer much for a week, has strengthen my urge to play a MMO(RPG) again!!! I used to be a massive MMO gamer, starting back in 1999. I’ve played, or at least tested, a very wide range of MMOs over the years but the ones I spent the most time with were Anarchy Online, Neocron and especially Dark Age of Camelot. I never got hooked by World of Warcraft, maybe because I was busy with other games at the time of its release, but to be frank, World of Warcraft brought nothing new to the table.

I quit playing MMOs around two years ago and haven’t touched one since. I know what MMOs can do to you, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I’ve skipped several games that I had been following the development of, such as Warhammer, Darkfall and Age of Conan. As I like being in from the start the game I am looking at right now is Aion, due for release in western territories in September. Aion pulls at me for several reasons - it is being released soon, it is visually stunning (for an MMO anyway), it has been out in Korea since November last year so plenty of patches will have gone in already.

While still undecided I’ve tried to make a mini list of pros and cons for playing an MMO.

Pros

• MMOs can be a lot of fun and very social…
  As long as you’ve got the right attitude and play your own game MMOs are a lot fun and if nothing else I’m sure to meet a lot of new people, and quite possibly run into some old friends from old and forgotten games.
• I will save money!
  Now you’re calling me dimwit because Aion, like most MMOs, is subscription based, but the thing is that when you’re playing an MMO you play less other games, which would make me buy less new games.
• I haven’t got a wife that can leave me!
  Or maybe this one should be on the other list, just rephrased…?

Cons

• Risk of getting too suckered in…
  Been there, done that. It’s easy to end up spending too many hours per day in an MMO, letting it affect other parts of your life, such as work and your health. Heck, there are even clinics these days exclusively for treating people with videogame addition. This is the only real con on my list, but it’s a big one that bundles so many things together.
• I already sit at the PC a lot…
  As I work at a PC for most of the day I already spend quite a few hours per day in front of a screen, playing an MMO sure won’t help.

I hope that I am older and wiser now, and able to better control how much I’d play an MMO if I got hooked. Can you think of other pros and cons with playing an MMO? The 5th closed BETA event for Aion starts tomorrow, July 31st, and it looks like I’ll jump on that to get a better look.

-Daniel Lindberg

Tags: Aion, community, MMO, MMORPG, online games

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