A Personal Observation of Play Style

It seems that I go through a phase every couple of months where no matter what game I go to, it doesn't keep me occupied for very long and I'm not sure why. When I fell in love with my first MMO (EverQuest) back in 1998/1999, I would play it every day for as long as I could and that lasted for years. The feeling of "fun" never left that whole time, even if I just spent the afternoon standing out in EC watching the auction spam fly by.

Those days are long gone, but my addiction remains. I have played just about every MMO on the market for some period of time only to find myself getting bored within months (at the best) or even just days or hours. Most recently, I spent some time playing Vanguard and leveling up a necromancer, finding him a nice guild, and getting him suited up to do some of the upcoming raid content, but something is missing. I don't know what that something is, but sometimes it just feels like a chore to log in and "play".

The feeling got so bad that I did something I swore I would never do - reactivate my WoW account for the 10-day trial of the Burning Crusade expansion. While PvPing and killing people is fun every once and awhile, there is really no depth to the game, so (within hours) I find myself bored already.

I think that I compare every new game to the feeling that I got during my first few years of playing MMO's, and that seems to be a problem. No matter how big a game world is, no matter how intricate the mechanics, no matter how many friends I can make - nothing compares. If I were rich, I suppose I could subscribe to every MMO on the market and play a different one every day of the week, but honestly, how fulfilling would that be? I want what I felt in EQ. I want to feel accomplished, cherished by friends, and most of all, I want to have fun.

While I still see myself "game hopping" when something new hits the market, I really think I'm done doing it with what's on the shelves right now. I think I might buy into SoE's Station Access plan and go back to playing EQ, EQ2, or Vanguard - depending on what kind of a mood I'm in.

What about you? What do you do to satisfy your gaming needs?

New Website

It's a work in progress, but my new personal website is now up. Feel free to check it out!

www.briansavells.info

Just For Fun

I'm not just a huge fan of these quizzes, but this one was pretty fun! :P

Introduction

I'm sitting here and looking down the long list of blogs that I have already created here, but none of them really touch on my technical side. That being said, here's a little bit about me.

My name is Brian Savells and I am currently a Game Programming student at the University of Advancing Technology. I have been programming for as long as I can remember and gaming just as long, however I never really combined the two until my highschool years. It all culminated after playing EverQuest for years when a friend of mine and I sat around talking about "how we would have done it differently." That flame of passion is what continues to drive me to create and I love to share both my creativity and my technical assistance with everyone around me (even when they quietly nudge and wish I would stop talking about games! *grin*).

Currently I spend my free time doing "market research" in the MMORPG Vanguard:Saga of Heroes, however I have played most of the games from the same genre since EverQuest. I balance out my gaming with a healthy dose of programming. I enjoy the 'C' languages the most as they are what I started with and have had the most experience with, but I also like to dabble in other languages such as Java, VB, or anything else that crosses my path. My most recent expedition was the XNA framework from Microsoft which is all done with C#. I had a lot of fun with it, partially because you can get a working program out in a very short amount of time and it lets the developer spend more time on creating rather than problem solving.

I hope that this blog will serve as a personal outlet for one of my passions as well as an inspiration for others who may be looking to choose game development as their career path.

Until next time,
Brian