I guess that after my last entry you prolly all think I'm a bit of a dullard. Well I feel like a dullard. Or rather, I feel like a newb. I'm a newbie!

Sure, everytime you start a new MMOG you're a newbie, but the last five or so MMOGs that I've played have been very formulaic. Even though the territory is new, the graphics are better and the skills are different, they all ultimately seemed to me to be like different versions of the same game. That's why I'm not playing WoW. I tried it for a couple of weeks during beta, and although they had some cool new features (I liked how they handled death), and a broader choice of playable races, the terrain, the quest and skills system, combat and pk, all work together to make it basically feel, to me at least, like exactly the same game as AC2.

DAoC, AC2, WoW, EQ2... each of those games marks a point in the evolution of the MMG, an evolution that began with the advent of the three grandaddy games, UO, EQ and AC.

But not MXO. I complained in my last couple of entries that the developers of MXO seem to have come onto the scene with no prior knowledge of the massively multiplayer market. In some ways that makes the game very frustrating, and in other ways it's like a breath of fresh (virtual) air. I haven't had this overwhelming feeling of being a stranger in a strange land (read newbie) since I started playing AC in early 2000.

I enjoyed DAoC a lot when I first started playing it, but I felt like it was a lot like AC only with improvements. When it first came out, I remember a lot of peolple that migrated over from EQ calling DAoC "what EQ should have been." It was a big step in MMOG evolution.

A lot of players were surprised that AC2 wasn't basically the same game as AC only with significantly improved graphics. Turbine said they wanted to imrpove on overall gameplay. They built AC2 based on 4 years of listening to the players complaints and suggestions. Instead of just re-releasing AC on a more modern engine, they built the game they thought the players wanted.

The one major lesson they seemed to have missed in those 4 years is that the outspoken message board flamer types do not represent the player base majority. I remember a few people saying that back then, and having an overwhelming sense that Turbine wasn't hearing it. It was an honest mistake. They were genuinely trying to listen to their players. AC2 bombed, but it also represents another major landmark in the evolution of the MMOG.

WoW is another. Those Blizzardites are no slouches. They didn't come on the scene in ignorance. They didn't develop their contribution to the MMOG scene in a vacuum. They watched. They listened. They probably hired a team of widly experienced verteran MMOGers as a focus group or something.

MXO is definitely not another step in that evolution. It feels like a different game. That's a statement that I haven't been able to make about any MMOG that I've played since AC.

I resisted the MMG scene at first because when UO came out I was fresh from a decade of playing MUD games. A few companies had tried "graphical MUDs" before and they were basically stinkers. The atmosphere of a MUD just didn't translate well to a graphic environment. When UO came out and then EQ, I was convinced that they were just more of the same and didn't bother. I remember reading an article about AC in what was probably the December 1999 edition of PC Gamer Magazine. That article turned me on to the idea that there might be a real difference between MMOGs and those old attempts at putting a graphical face onto a MUD.

But anyway, I didn't mean to stray so far off topic. I just wanted to convey that if, like me, you're jonesing for that new experience fix you haven't felt since your first couple months playing your first massive multiplayer, you might want to try MXO.

As for my in-game progress:
In MXO your persona carries outside the game somewhat. Apparently you can set up an AIM account that's tied to your individual characters. For that reason you can only use any character name once across all servers. You also only get one character per server. My two sons always like to play the MMP that I'm playing, but because of those restrictions we can't all share one account and play on the same server.

My youngest son has had more luck finding and making friends than I have. That might have to do with the fact that I'm on a pk or "hostile" server.

I have actually seen other players more than once now. In one of my first entries I said that I had never seen another player. I probably should have qualified that then by mentioning that I was on a pk server but at the time it didn't even occur to me. The only indicator we get of how busy a server is is a rating type word, like "light", "medium", or "heavy". They almost always all say "medium", so it never occured to me until now that my server might have considerably fewer players on it, but now that I think about it, it probably does.

So anyway, my youngest son has joined a guild, or "crew" or whatever. I don't know much about it, except that they have been helping him level. He's played quite a lot less than I have but has passed me in levels. He says that a girl approached him and asked him, "do you believe in the Machines?" He said he didn't know what that meant and she said that it means he wants the machines to win. She told him that if he says, "yes" he can join her crew, so he said yes. I guess it was all uphill from there.