Come for the games, stay for the drama.
I was playing around with Google Trends last week, trying to see how a few MMOs compared to each on the ‘Trends. It was fun and all, but I missed a lot of games and I just thought it would be so much better if I could just compare EVERY MMO, past and present, automatically!
Google Trends just catalogs the searches people would do for a game, but I figured that had to have at least a loose correlation to popularity, right?
Well, it was an… interesting journey, to be sure.
That… isn’t actually their tagline (old folks know that it was EverQuest’s), but it seems like what this social MMO is going for. An idyllic world where you can relax with friends. The trailer shows players building their own homes and communities, but is that all there is?
So, I listened to the DCUO livestream the other day, where they showed a preview of the House of Legends episode, packed to the rafters with quality-of-life changes and new content. I was listening, fascinated, until they mentioned that House of Legends was currently LIVE ON THE TEST SERVER.
So, I, um, quit the livestream and installed the test version of DCUO and went to have a look for myself.
I don’t play every MMO that comes out — not by a longshot. But, I follow a lot of gamers, streamers, and game developers, and between me and them, I see a lot of discussion about the new MMOs that come down the pike.
Crowfall was released a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. And then, suddenly everyone was not. What did it all mean? I asked Google Trends to help me analyze searches for a dozen or so MMOs to help understand what all was going on with MMOs today.
I like my main character, Teal Green, just fine. Well, most of the time. She started out as a hard light controller — a deputy of the Green Lantern corp. But I soured on all the constant comboing and didn’t feel I contributed much DPS. With wild abandon, I tried a few different DPS options, finally settling on Munitions when it came out. I later changed over to become an electricity-based healer, and that is where I am today. My DPS is … reasonable. Team Spode (the league I belong to) is usually at the tops of the DPS charts, and I’m usually third or fourth behind Lord Spode’s ice tank and Stingheal’s sorcery healer.