“I’ve heard of DPS queues, but this is ridiculous.”
Imagine that being said while I tap on a fat cigar and waggle my bushy eyebrows. Or adjust the tie around my collar. Or as some clearly unwashed Twitch streamer shouting at you; I don’t know who people consider comedians anymore. The point being that my time in Blade & Soul NEO for this week’s travel report did not close out the way I would have wanted, as I was basically told to not enter a dungeon – and the one I did get into was infested with bots.
I will open up with the admission that this past weekend’s activity wasn’t what I’d call strenuous, mostly because I was trying to find some dungeon parties on a couple of different times – or at least times that I had presumed would be prime time for people to want to do stuff. Yet every time I was opening up the party finder tool, there was either nobody looking for the dungeons that I had available to me (Blackram Narrows and Plague Hollow for the record), or the one time there was a party open I was being denied entry every time.
I was pretty crestfallen until I decided to run into the entrance to the Blackram Narrows by myself because I had almost forgotten that that’s a thing you can do, and sure enough I was able to get inside and continue on with the storyline as well as maybe see what was inside. And what was inside pretty much killed my interest to play.
Once I had gotten through the story beats that finally revealed Namsoyoo as the turncoat she was, I decided to head back to Blackram in order to finish up a couple of side and main objectives. Each time I entered, the instance was absolutely coated in bots that were just moving in swarms to slaughter the few enemies that were spawning – enemies I needed as a quest option, by the way.
Now I’m obviously not new to bots running rampant in MMORPGs, whether they’re the smaller fries or the big fish. That’s just part of the agony of this genre. But for some reason, seeing these copypaste character charge around on pre-determined paths to lay waste to enemies really just got under my skin. I’m perhaps going to chalk it up to some pretty threadbare western interest in B&S NEO to begin with, but this really knocked me out of wanting to play any more.
So I closed the game and decided to stew on my thoughts, then come to my desk to type here.
I wondered aloud earlier whom B&S NEO was really made for, and I still don’t have an answer to that question now. I guess about the only thing that I can assume is that the streamlined progression bits and somewhat prettier visuals were enough to have old vets come back for another go, to say nothing of the eventual progression that the server will open up. There’s something to be said for the allure of that kind of revisit, I guess.
But then I have to ask: How many of those kinds of players are there? Not to suggest that B&S is a failure or something, but it doesn’t really strike me as a population that is hankering for NEO.
I also have to consider my own feeling about progression servers or classic servers or revisits in MMOs. I’m reminded of a conversation MOP’s Bree and I were having in work chat about this sort of thing, in which she said something about EverQuest that was really bang-on and relevant to my time in NEO. “It was never the content; it was how they felt, and they want it back,” she wrote.
Perhaps it’s because I’m really good at looking at the next new shiny thing like a cat distracted by a bunch of sparkly strings on a stick, or maybe I just know when to say goodbye, but I will almost never understand the appeal of these kinds of servers or of trying to revisit an old game that marked a time in my MMO life. You might recall that I’ve only reaffirmed those thoughts over the course of doing this column over the last many years. Final Fantasy XI – my first “real” MMORPG – held nothing of value for me, and I find it very hard to play City of Heroes: Homecoming even if it’s officially real simply because I genuinely feel as if I said goodbye years ago.
Now this isn’t to suggest that I think these kinds of servers should be removed or that I think people who play on them are big smelly dumdums. If this sort of experience brings you joy – a joy that has nothing to do with attempting to recapture a sensation that has long gone over time because the new things don’t capture you – then so be it. Play the heck out of that game. And that goes for any fans of Blade & Soul NEO that might be reading this. I’m not one of you, but I’m glad this exists for people like you.
As for me, I will be moving on from this one. All I’ve been given is confusion and a shoulder ache from shrugging them so often over the course of this guided playthrough. Naturally, that means it’s time for us to lock down the next game to visit as we move into April. Here’s what I’m thinking this time around.
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Polling will wrap up at their usual time and date, which is 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, March 28th. In the meantime, I’m going to ruefully expel Purple from my system’s disk drive and consider where we’re going to go next as the poll bars fill up. And I’m going to try to make a mental note of other MMOs that I’ve already said farewells to in order to not make myself feel this way again. Because this feeling kind of sucks, y’all.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
