A while back I blogged about Crypt of the Necrodancer, a game I hope at least a few, if not a number of you, went to check out. Pie and I both adore the game immensely, so don't be surprised if you see more comics based on this game~

Lately, we've been hungering for a game with some narrative that we can play together, but it's been pretty sparse pickings. Perhaps we are looking in the wrong places by trying to put our faith in online RPGs and MMOs to whet the appetite.

We had recently given up on WildStar, a game so content with leading you on, teasing you with its grandiose mystery of "Who are the Eldan?" that it thought it could carry the lore, and thus our interest, on the back of a single concept. Sadly, even with exceptional art direction and a rather fun battle system (not exceptional, mind you, but pretty good), it just never could get us hooked or yearning to login.

I think that the biggest issue is that I feel that there is a world and characters I should care about, but I don't. Nothing we experienced felt cohesive; questions would arise but no answers are presented and no hooks to keep pulling you forward. You are left largely in the dark, starving for any tidbit of narrative to start to weave together something, anything. You can religiously read all the, largely trivial, quest dialogue only to be left with zones and NPCs that never mature as characters. Okay mister NPC, you discovered something critical about the Eldan; would you care to share that with the rest of the class? No? Okay then.

It really is a shame because the game does so many things so well: player housing, though instanced, is rather impressive; crafting and stat building is fun; and the aforementioned combat can be exciting. However, without that critical draw of being sucked into its world, we had to cut ties because it failed to draw us in. Even if WildStar went free-to-play, we doubt we would be going back, which I think is so sad to see in such a large scale, AAA MMO. Perhaps we aren't the target audience? Perhaps we aren't alone in our views?

And so the hunt for the next MMO continues on, undoubtedly in vein, but we shall persist and carry on! We've been dabbling in Final Fantasy 14 ARR through the demo which was rather interesting; we both found ourselves more invested than we imagined we would be. I was rather amazed to see the server population bustling with several hundred people online on each of their numerous servers. The story felt intriguing enough for us to want to continue and I have to admit that seeing such a bustling server population piques my interest; I mean, if so many people are willing to pay a subscription for a game that had to be scrapped and re-made over a year ago, there must be something to it, right?

We also re-subbed to WoW a few days ago. And thus the Warlords of Draenor excitement train rolls in... choo-choo!