Gaming

not quite hardcore, but up there.

Until finally something clicked in me. It took me a while to figure it out but I finally arrived at this: the game mechanics.

Yeah raiding was fun and yeah it was a the modern replacement of the weekly poker game, but it was the same thing over and over.

the repetition just became annoying.

My playing tapered off until I just dumped it.

Now when I think about it, I can't believe a committed so much time to something that just retreads old content over and over.

Since then, I've had extensive conversations about the mechanics of questing. The old model of "getting ten things of whatever then bringing them back to quest giver" is a completely outdated concept.

Yes, WOW has been introducing new types of quest models, but at it's core, the vast majority of quest are basically what I have mentioned above.

What I have been finding is that many of the new stand alone games have been breaking that model. Some with success others not so much, but it's showing that the gaming industry as a whole is waking up to the fact that quests need to be more challenging, not so much in the task of having to "kill 10 whatever" or "finding 10 whatever" but the ways in which you get a quest, and the methodology in how the quest is achieved.

And the new ideas for these quests are coming from the stand along games.

I could go into a whole litany of other reasons why I stopped playing WOW, of course, but they are purely superficial, were as the questing issue, to me, is the core of the issue.

This is why I'm eager to see how the Elder Scrolls online works out. They have had some really interesting concepts and ideas with quests in Skyrim and I'm hoping they apply those same things to Elder Scrolls.

Plus, I think many a fantasy player is looking for something more grown up oriented in it's content than what WOW has to offer.

My two cents