Gaming

It all began september 2004 with a free 10 (or was it 14?) day trial for Star Wars: Galaxies. Starting in a time now called as PRE CU or post publish 10, my roommate, another RL friend and myself started playing the greatest saga ever told in a galaxy far far away, our own.

For close to one and a half year SW:G became like a second part of my life, I met dozens of new people from all across the world and add to that, that you got to know them twice, once IC or "in character" and once OOC, as in "out of character". I was a Master Squad Leader - Master Carbineer. I survived together with my guild the CU and we went on exploring each our own saga in the Star Wars universe.

Ingame, the game was rich, promising and fast but technically or game mechanic wise, it was more like a huge construction site where somebody with a great vision started to work but didn't get the time to finish it. Still with patience and time and maybe a bit more money, I was, as we all were, hopefull and having faith that the development one day would finish all these visions to their completion. At one point I even had to chance to contribute to it, by taking the chance to become a correspondent representing the carbineer profession on the official forums, gathering and forwarding issues and wishes from the community toward the developers, still hoping that they would take our input and ideas and implement them.

Then the NGE hit and there has been realy said enough about it. The server I played on - Ahazi - took a hard hit, but my guild managed to survive the loss on players. As correspondent, renamed to senator, but now without a task or a community to represent, I held on to the game to see and experience the new direction of the game.

They realy tried to fix the game, but they lost their vision and above all the changes totally forget to preserve the ingame achievements of all players and so I left.

In the time after the SW:G, all "normal" computer games became boring. I was used to play together with friends and so I tried Dark Age Of Camelot, though it felt to small on "just" a german server. I got a Dungeons and Dragons Online beta access but the box I call computer didn't run it. Then came Eve Online but the lack of player interaction I percieved made it boring. It felt like a single player game, there was no real motivation to interact with anybody or I must have done something completly wrong. Now I'm looking at Dark and Light and it's free prequel Settlers of Ganareth. A world bigger as all other MMO worlds, as they like to advertise it, and with that an immersion beyond anything I have seen so far. It looks very promising, but at the same time is that what you can see in SoG so far away from what DnL should be that you start to doubt the release in April.

"So what? No online game anymore so go out and play IRL!" you might say, but it's not the game I miss, it's all those people who I met during the time I played. Luckily I got hold of a lot of them but wherever we go, it will never be the same again.