December 2000

Am I ready for FW to be ready?
Posted Monday, December 18, 2000 by
PanzerMagi

Am I ready for the Forgotten World to be ready for me?

As new rumors of progress made in the Forgotten World alpha circulate, I find I need to ask myself some harsh questions. For instance, do I really want the game to come out? Am I really looking forward to it?

In a way, I'm terrified of what will happen once the game is ready. It's been a long time since I played Neverwinter. What if I've grown out of immersing myself in a world like that during the years? After all, I've dabbled in a few games since then, but nothing was even remotely close to Neverwinter.

What if that's partially because of me? What if it's not simply that these other games suck, but that I've changed with time?

Of course, beyond not knowing whether I'll enjoy myself, there's the old fear I'm sure most of us share (if we dare to admit it): What if I suck? I mean, to say that I'm rusty would be an understatement. What if I just plain reek, and never quite recover.

Egad, what a possibility.

Lastly, there's the deepest, darkest fear. What if the Forgotten World just never lives up to its own stated goal of being an heir to the world of Neverwinter? What if it just isn't good enough?

The implications of that would be fairly profound.

Much of my own coping process since the gates to Neverwinter closed involved promising myself that somehow, someday, I'd find a new home worthy of the original. For the first year or so, that belief was fostered by hopes that someone would actually bring the original back. Then, once the Forgotten World showed up on the horizon, I quickly latched on to it as my life raft.

I'm patient. I can keep myself going for year after year so long as there is a credible hope on the horizon. The Forgotten World is definitely credible. From the start it has set out to be a replacement for the home we lost.

But what if it fails?

If that happens, then I will have to finally face up to the fact that Neverwinter is dead. That it died over three years ago. That I will never find its equal. That I will never have a home where I feel so perfectly a part. Where I know what the hell I'm doing, where I can be a part of the community, where I can make my mark.

It wouldn't be the end of the world. I'd find other hobbies, I'm sure. Goodness knows I've gotten a heck of a lot more work done since I've had no decent games to play. But part of me would be dead - a part of my life would finally have to be relegated to my past. I could no longer think of my warm memories of Neverwinter as being interrupted rather than tragically cut short.

To me, Neverwinter is not dead. It's merely waiting for the touch of life to bring it back. It hibernates, and I just have to wait for a new world to be built before thawing my own little piece of Neverwinter back to life. If the Forgotten World turns out to be the wrong sort of land, then I have to pull the plug on that musty chunk of my past.

I'm not very good at saying good bye. I don't cope well with losses. Part of me thinks that I've worked too hard, been too patient - I shouldn't deserve to be disappointed now. But the closer the Forgotten World comes to open Beta, the closer the moment of truth approaches.

Will I get what we all hope for? Or will it be a bust?

I don't know, but I do know this: I'd rather keep waiting than be disappointed once the waiting is over.

Communities that scare me
Posted Tuesday, December 5, 2000 by
PanzerMagi

Communities that scare me

During the long, long time I've had to wait for a new Neverwinter, I occasionally venture out into some of the other online communities that are out there to see what's cooking. One thing that strikes me is just how mind-boggling the volume of discussion is that takes place in message boards for most "commercial" gaming ventures.

What's wrong with these people? How could anyone in their right mind read all this stuff? Why would anyone in their right mind post an opinion in an environment where umpteen-zillion such opinions show up every day?

Now, I have no empirical data to back myself up. It's not like I'm out there prowling every fantasy game's message boards on a weekly basis to see how much shows up where. But the few times I've swung by the message boards for the evil new Neverwinter game, for instance, I usually find hundreds of messages for just a single day.

There's so much information that as an outsider, I couldn't even imagine wanting to jump in and participate. You'd have to perform research that would be equivalent to what's involved in a doctoral dissertation just to come up to speed.

Now, I realize that our Forgotten World message boards are fairly lively, and that you'd have to read a decent chunk of posts if you wanted to keep up with all the posts made every day, but at least we keep things fairly well pigeon holed into different categories. Lots of games like Neverwinter seem to have just a couple of active discussion threads, and being involved in those threads would require basically full time dedication.

And Neverwinter isn't even live yet! I mean, sure, I'd expect to find such endless yammering for a game like Ultima Online with trillions of active players, but Neverwinter has all this talk even though it hasn't even been released. Last time I actually tried to read a few days worth of what was there (which was over a year ago), there were some former NWN folks involved, apparently still hoping they might be able to make themselves a home in the new Neverwinter. I'm not sure whether any of them still stick around, but I know that you couldn't pay me enough to actually want to wade into that ocean of text again.

No game is worth that kind of discussion. Even the Forgotten World isn't worth that sort of mind-numbing, endless quibbling over details. Sure, we go back and forth plenty about some issues. The debate over melee PvP, for instance, was one that spanned an absolutely amazing number of posts. Heck, from what a few of you have told me, it's one that ended up being decided the way I'd argued (no melee) and I didn't even know it. I'd given up on keeping up with the argument so long ago, apparently I'd missed its resolution.

Now, I know that I'm not exactly the most enthusiastic message board user in the universe. While I do like to be regular, I'm not particularly prolific. I typically just scan the list of Forgotten World boards to see if there's anything new anywhere I'm interested in, and then post my worthless message to snag my recommended daily allowance of gold. I don't bother posting anywhere "real" unless I have something worth saying.

And I can't believe that there's hundreds of things really worth saying about a game like the new Neverwinter on a daily basis.

Neverwinter isn't the only game like this, it's just the one I like picking on since it's something that (of course) personally offends me. I loathe the fact that they're using the name of my deceased home to describe their product. It isn't Neverwinter. It's just something with enough similarities that playing it would probably make me homesick. Sort of like the NWN-Offline. I just avoid playing it, now, as any time I do give it a whirl it just depresses me.

It has been literally years. We hang in there because we're stubborn, because we can still remember how good things were in our old world for all of its flaws, and because we believe that someday, somewhere (hopefully here), we'll find a world that will meet our lofty requirements. Some of us (like me) may have tried settling for something else, but it didn't satisfy us for long.

In the end, no matter how many years it takes, I think that the Forgotten World remains my best hope for relief. I love playing games, but Neverwinter spoiled me. Nothing else has even come close. Which is why in spite of the fact that it often feels like the Forgotten World is going nowhere, I'll never leave. So long as there's a Forgottenworld.com, I'll still believe that salvation is on the way.

For those of us who have held out this long, I don't think anything other than death will stop us now. I just hope that someday, when Forgotten World truly arrives, the strange online disease of Message Boardus Postisitus won't infest our humble home. Because when you get down to it, I hate message boards. They're a pain in the rear. And while I can force myself to wade through a few dozen posts every day, I'll go crazy trying to wade through three or four hundred.

Most of the message boards I've seen remind me of Russian fiction. It takes forever to wade through the thousands of pages, and when you finally do, you're not sure whether it was worth it. Hopefully, we'll all be too busy playing to waste time posting messages. Although I suppose even Message Boardus Postisitus would be a small price to pay for a new home.