Danny and I recently finally followed the suggestions of our buds and purchased this game. I've only played it a little bit so far, but I've thoroughly enjoyed it!
[This space for more coherent thoughts about the game]
Pros: Skills are learned from weapons. You never have to worry about more than about 5 skills on your bar. Leveling is scaled to the area you are in, meaning it is never too challenging, and it is never too easy, to be in any given place. Huge experience is earned by crafting, exploring, and appreciating nice views. The game has five races, of which two are just humans (Norns being larger humans), one is plant-people (actually born of and made of plants, with leaf or branch hair and everything), one is Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, but turned into a race, and one is horned cat-people with a culture that makes me think of Klingons sometimes. This is pretty awesome, since you rarely see a Korean MMO where the non-human options even try to vary from just 'human'. Each race has a personalized series of storylines that you predetermine when you basically choose your character's defining personality traits during character creation. You have story-quests ALA Lord of the Rings that follow those choices, and are partially determined by your race. You have random events that just spring up when you're running around. You can gain lots of experience for non-combat, but combat is also actually pretty varied and interesting.
This is the experience I have had at the early level stages of the game thus far. I like it a lot. It's pretty amazing. There are some things about the game that are wonderfully progressive. As a plant person, one of the first things I had to do was rescue a gay plant couple from a bully who was trying to kill one of them; as a Norn, I was flirted with by my fellow lady friend. On the surface the game is relatively gender neutral, with the obvious exception of physiques (human women are particularly egregious here, which is why I only have a human man-- but I have a female of every other race) and the less obvious, but very unpleasant exception of "Lore".
Here's the problem. Lore is a tool to help build and shape your world. It's exciting to see that women are regularly present in positions of military power, positions of religious and governmental stature, when I look around this game world. It's exciting to see the plant people apparently totally cool with being gay. That makes me hopeful that such options exist elsewhere, and just like being able to make a black character is important to me for that reason, this is VERY important to me.
But.
The lore that I've found thus far has gone out of its way to mention the newness of female equality. I was enjoying playing the Norns until I encountered two quests in a row about the Sons of Svanir, a misogynistic group of all-dude Norn-types who hate women and called me nasty names since my big buff warrior is a lady. I have to deal with this kind of hate in my day to day life; I don't really like seeing it in the lore of my fantasy world.
I have said this before, and will surely say it again. The problem with fiction, with fantasy and sci-fi, is that it's still made by real people. When real people can't even conceive of a world that never had sexism, or the idea of allowing people to be gay without making excuses for why it's "not the same" (hint: the plant people are plants, thus both genders, which means players actually have arguments on forums and chat about how it doesn't really count because they're not really male and female in the same way. Why is that even an important discussion to have? I'd prefer they be discussing whether it makes sense for the saplings to be able to procreate since they apparently are all born from the Pale Tree's mysterious pods. That's weird enough to merit discussion. Whether the plant people are allowed to be gay or not? Come ON.)--
But when real people can't even conceive of a fantasy world where the challenges we face and the hardships we strive against DO NOT include the oppression-- be it for race, sex, sexual orientation, or religious belief or lack of belief-- that pretty much sucks for people who are actually oppressed, no matter how minor you as the privileged party may THINK that oppression is. I don't WANT to go into my fantasy world and be called a wench, or constantly reminded by the NPCs and lore around me that I should be grateful that women are allowed in the army NOW because ten YEARS ago, you know...
Fuck this shit. I should be able to play a woman and do whatever the fuck I want without this "color". But I can't.
I'm happy to say that I CAN play a black character, or a weird plant character, or a gay person without anyone seeming to notice or care in the dialogue. Certainly no one has felt it necessary to comment on the color of my skin. Regrettably, my gender is still getting mentioned by the NPCs around me, and that definitely counts as one big con for me. I want my fun time to be 100% fun, and I shouldn't have to play my boy character to be able to achieve that. Especially when my lady characters are so cool.
As a sidenote, unlike the Bioware-ness of TOR which let you have romances, I don't think that's a part of this game. I'm grateful, since I doubt the game would acknowledge any choices I might make here. Really, if I have any complaint about it that isn't directly tied to the problems I have with social bias against my gender, it's that you don't get to make real choices about how your characters acts in the cutscenes peppered liberally throughout the game. I wish I could choose whether or not my character says "Holy shit! Caithe, you just killed that person when I said I'd let her go! How can you call them evil when you just did THAT?!"
What that comes down to, unfortunately, is that no matter how good a video game is, it will never be D&D, which lets me do and say what I want.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}