Online Adventure Gaming

Online gaming is a place where you can meet other people and interact with them as you strive to elevate your character. Some people spend hours battling the never-ending supply of monsters. Online gaming can be a rich experience. Depending on the game, you will need help to battle the tough skeletons, trolls, dragons, giants, and other assorted baddies. And for that reason, you will need to form alliances with others facing the same problems as yourself.

My online gaming experience started with Ultima Online. I had already played their PC games and was familiar with the cast of characters. It was fun, but my people skills were not great so I languished trying to solo the game. Then there was EverQuest. I actually elevated a character to level 31 until solo playing became too difficult to go any further. But EverQuest combined several races with different religions and factions that made for interesting game-play. When the game became scattered with multiple versions, the places that were familiar no longer had much of a following as most had left those areas for the new. Playing the game requires enough people to keep some of the monsters occupied so that you can do what you need to do without attracting too much unwanted attention. And of course, there was a penalty for your character dying. Being ambushed was no excuse; you lost experience points for it. My brag list is long concerning EverQuest, but so is my gripe-list. When my gripe-list became longer than my bragging list, it was time to move along and try another game. I do not need to pay to be frustrated.

I tried other games; there was Anarchy, then Dark Age of Camelot, back to EverQuest and finally Pirates of the Caribbean. Every one of the online games that I have played all had common themes. Your character starts out weak, the monsters get progressively harder, and finally, you must develop alliances to reach the upper echelons of character development.

Pirates of the Caribbean make creating alliances very easy, even for someone with poor people skills such as me. A person on your friends list means communication, ability to teleport to that friend if he is in need of help and the ability to crew up for tasks. If you do not like anyone on your friends list, you can drop him or her. Just like in EverQuest, I have a gripes list and a bragging list. So far, the gripes list is shorter than my bragging list. I play online with my granddaughter and between the two of us and our online friends; we have sunk many a ship and killed scores of monsters. Retirement affords one the time to enjoy such activities.

There are some caveats to subscribing to any of the online games. The number one consideration is a connection that has very little lag. Long lag connections such as satellite internet have a long lag time and can reduce the playability of the game. Lag is the time it takes for you to take an action before the server can acknowledge whatever you did. With satellites, the signal can take up to 3 seconds traveling back and forth to the server. Your character can die without you knowing why in that interim lag cycle.

Online gaming is a great place to interact with others. Which game you play is all personal preference so try as many as you like. Most of the games have a tryout period that does not cost anything. So my advice would be to try before you spend the money.

Cheers,

-Robert-