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I finally enjoy first person shooters – but an MMO?

Well, it took a little while but I’m finally having fun playing online multiplayer for an FPS. That’s actually the main reason for my absence yesterday. A little bit of history might help explain the situation a little bit.

My history with First Person Shooters goes back to the days of Doom. I loved that game. It offered something no other game at the time (that I knew of) offered. I spent countless hours on it, killing demons without remorse.

Then came the Nintendo 64 and my first experiences with a multiplayer FPS. Goldeneye 64. James Bond. Greatness. The game was wonderful. My friends and I would set the difficulty on one-shot kill and have at it, gleefully sniping each other off wherever we could. Unlike modern day shooters, this game didn’t utilize the internet in any way (this was before the days of consoles with Ethernet ports).

Then it all went downhill.

I’d tried Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the computer a while back, and enjoyed the single player campaign quite a bit, but found myself dying within second whenever I’d attempt multiplayer. That got old pretty quick, so I went back to my current MMO and forgot about it.

After that, I steered clear of FPS’s, until Battlefield 1943 hit Xbox Live Arcade. I was hesitant at first but I decided to make a leap based on group of glowing reviews. Same thing. I died within seconds, repeatedly. I finally gave up after en enemy decided to camp our spawn point with a tank. Again, I went back to my MMO of choice and forgot about it.

The game kept on popping up in my mind, though. I’d hear my coworkers talk about all the fun they were having with it and I felt sure that I was missing something. So, I tried it again the other day.

This time, I stuck with it. It took a while, hours, but eventually I started getting to know the terrain and what class I liked best. I still died a lot but I managed to get a few kills in myself before being taken down. Before I knew it, I’d disappear into the matches and not notice how much time was going by. Occasionally, I’d realize I should probably get up and do something else but I kept on allowing myself “one more match.”

When I finally walked away, I stepped back and realized that I’d been having a lot of fun! I hadn’t had that much excitement in a game in ages. It had my heart beating fast and, with the destructible environments, the sheer destruction made the experience chaotic and nothing short of epic.

I decided then and there that I was going to get Battlefield: Bad Company. When I returned with it later that day, I spent the remainder of the evening engrossed in it. There were more maps, more weapons, more buildings to blow the walls off from. It was a hell of a time. Actually, it was enough fun that I was tempted into picking up an Xbox version of World at War. I decided to wait though. I don’t feel good about dropping $60 on a game that will be outdated when Modern Warfare 2 drops in November.

When I surfaced, I found out that there’s been a bunch of stuff in the MMO world I’ve missed out on. One of these is the new FPSMMO from CCP, the makers of Eve Online, Dusk 514. I’ve never played Eve but I can say that, honestly, I would never have given a second thought to even trying this game if I hadn’t sat down and devoted that bit of time to Battlefield 1943.

The game itself might prove to be fun. Yet, as an MMO I wonder how it will function. Will there be an economy and other staples of typical MMOs? Most importantly, can the game deliver an experience that will equally satisfy MMO fans and FPS fans? If not, the game is likely to fall short on both ends. As a bigger MMO fan than most FPS’ers, I think there’s cause for concern unless they manage to pull of something really new and awesome.

I’ll comment more on the rest of the new stuff happening in the MMO world soon (like Guild Wars 2 and the recent draft of “OMG Champions sux!” reviews). Tonight though, I need to rest my eyes and thumbs. I’m unplugging, sitting back with my wife, a good book, and Law and Order: SVU droning on in the background. Tomorrow, I’m plugged back in to go through my 500+ new posts on Google Reader.

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