J.A. Pitts

For the love of all that is holy… missing MMORPGs and creating story

I gave up on the Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games a few years ago. It really came down to gaming or writing. Writing won out, and things are moving along at a pretty fine pace.

Unfortunately, every now and again, I get the bug to role play. It goes back to my need for story, and the strong desire to be part of said story. When I first discovered Everquest shortly after it opened to the public I was hooked. I played that game for several years, through many expansions, across several servers and even a few guilds. I actually a guild on the Lanys Tyv’l server for a while — Ivory Order. It was great fun. Then the company who makes the game decided the best way to increase subscribers was to make things easier. Take out some of the hassles like dying, and travelling. Soon, there was almost no risk in the game.

There was a time when you were hesitant to explore too far from the city guards, because if you died, you would respawn in the city and have to run naked to pick up the gear from your dead body. That added a HUGE risk factor and kept the adrenaline pumping on those especially dangerous cross-country runs.

I miss that. I quit playing EQ when it became clear that the 20 hours a week I was putting in was not enough to actually accomplish anything. The game was being geared more and more towards the high-end game, with uber-guilds and long raiding windows. Soon, you had to be on for a couple hours at a time to accomplish anything. Soloing, or just picking up quests on your own became harder and harder to find.

The game just quit being fun.

I tried playing Star Wars Galaxies, but that grew very old, very quickly. Several other MMOs came and went from my computer when I was finally lulled back with Everquest 2. I wanted to recapture that feel of adventure, that thrill as I discovered new territory, met new challanges, uncovered new story.

But again, it fell to the need to raid… to sink huge amounts of time in game just to make any headway.

Finally I purged it all from my machines and went back to the place I could enjoy story and have some say in the way the adventure unfolded. I stepped up my writing and really began to get serious. It took me a while to get over that craving to log on and visit friends, to run through a make-believe world and be dazzled by the wonder of it all; but I managed to remain firm with my decision.

Now I have a real shot with this whole writing craziness. I’m selling short stories, and I now have this incredible deal with Tor Books. While I’m not in any danger of quitting my day job, I find this whole experience refreshing and rejuvenating in a way I haven’t felt since my early days as a bard running through the frozen tundra of the barbarian homeland, praying I could get back to the guards before the polar bears and ice spiders turned me into a corpsicle.

Ah, nostalgia.

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