Back again, again and again... The long story.
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2024 8:09 pm
Hail and well met, forum dwellers!
This one is my 3rd return to this game if I remember correctly, not counting my first attempt at WAR, and I don't know the exact reason why I feel somewhat emotional this time around, but I'll try to write it out of my head so I can ease that restlessness regarding my thoughts about this game as a whole and to let the world how much this one game means to me. There is no TL;DR version, sorry! I do not expect people to read through the wall of text I'm about to drop, all about my personal life and experience nonetheless, but I'd be happy if others would find it mildly entertaining or I'd be able to meet some old friends long forgotten found again.
I remember I was slightly jealous of some of my friends who were fortunate enough to able to finance their WoW fix. Back when it came out I was in my early 20s. Attending university with the little allowance that I was able to gather from the few occasions that could net me some money and doing some summer work, saving up enough to have the proper hardware and monthly fee the game required was out of question. University student lifestlye is costly, and in Hungary if you weren't rich by proxy of your parents, you had to choose. Couldn't be life of the party AND a gamer geek simoultaneously. But than came a bit more tumultous period in my life. I was craving more independence from my parents, was already one leg out of the university (switched from law studies to humanities and that didn't fascinate me much more) and coincidentally Hungary just joined the EU, so there was an opening for working abroad. Had my first taste of adult freedom and steady income. After missing 2 semesters I came home, and a good friend of mine from high school and the uni introduced me further to the Warhammer universe (I only played Blood Bowl before that). I spent 2 more summers in the US (CO), the top 2 of my best summers of my time, the 3rd nowhere to be seen behind. But after the second stint my girfirend broke up with me which took the last waft of wind out of my sail of a university degree aspirations. My brother called from the UK, he was by then a mid-manager and lived in a lot more safer area in Kent than our previous experience in SE London. I had enough money saved up to move there, and just before I left my friend showed me WAR, which just has been released. That set my priorities...
Took me a couple months, but I gathered enough money for a PC that was just strong enough to be able to play WAR, then bought a CD copy of the game a week before my hardware's arrival. I think that is the only game CD I still have to this day in a cabinet in my old room at home full of memories, even though they all ended up there just because I deemed them valuable at the time, the cabinet accidentally became sort of a time capsule. ANYWAY! As a first time mmo player, I sucked at it terribly at first, even the hasty game-texting was totally new to me (dps, incincinc, pvp, pq, kotb, etc...). And though I never become anywhere near as good, I still had just taken off with the gaming time of my life. I loved pugging in T2 especially. No addons to help organize our little zerging but I have so many visual memories burnt into my brain with the attached feeling of game-induced adrenaline rush, no other mmo came nearly as close! We played as long-range specialist engineers (with that addon that allowed target sharing, whatever its name was), and just the sheer thought that we managed to turn a simple destro steamroll into an hour long defense of epic proportions (in no small part thanks to our sniper duo with keen target selection) still gives me goosebumps. Or the time we sent order to bed (playing as a BO-shammy duo this time) right from the walls of Spite's Reach. But rvr was just half the story of these days. I've thought about dabbling into WHFB before, but I was always more fascinated by the lore than the game itself. And I may be in the minority when I say that PVE was great in WAR and is good in RoR, but that is a hill I'm ready to die on. I roamed through the realms, fell in love with grimdark. Places such as the Tree of Beards ("The Tree of Beards is a holy place for the Greenskins and a shrine of unspeakable insult to the Dwarfs.") or the forlorn journey from Praag to the Chaos Wastes that rivals the madness of Apocalypse Now. The best immersion the Old World ever had to offer among video games. And it's not the great writing, that was quite basic, but that HUGE Tome of Knowledge and all that well-hidden unloackables through the map... I get distracted by occasional tome-hunting to this day.
(TBC)
This one is my 3rd return to this game if I remember correctly, not counting my first attempt at WAR, and I don't know the exact reason why I feel somewhat emotional this time around, but I'll try to write it out of my head so I can ease that restlessness regarding my thoughts about this game as a whole and to let the world how much this one game means to me. There is no TL;DR version, sorry! I do not expect people to read through the wall of text I'm about to drop, all about my personal life and experience nonetheless, but I'd be happy if others would find it mildly entertaining or I'd be able to meet some old friends long forgotten found again.
I remember I was slightly jealous of some of my friends who were fortunate enough to able to finance their WoW fix. Back when it came out I was in my early 20s. Attending university with the little allowance that I was able to gather from the few occasions that could net me some money and doing some summer work, saving up enough to have the proper hardware and monthly fee the game required was out of question. University student lifestlye is costly, and in Hungary if you weren't rich by proxy of your parents, you had to choose. Couldn't be life of the party AND a gamer geek simoultaneously. But than came a bit more tumultous period in my life. I was craving more independence from my parents, was already one leg out of the university (switched from law studies to humanities and that didn't fascinate me much more) and coincidentally Hungary just joined the EU, so there was an opening for working abroad. Had my first taste of adult freedom and steady income. After missing 2 semesters I came home, and a good friend of mine from high school and the uni introduced me further to the Warhammer universe (I only played Blood Bowl before that). I spent 2 more summers in the US (CO), the top 2 of my best summers of my time, the 3rd nowhere to be seen behind. But after the second stint my girfirend broke up with me which took the last waft of wind out of my sail of a university degree aspirations. My brother called from the UK, he was by then a mid-manager and lived in a lot more safer area in Kent than our previous experience in SE London. I had enough money saved up to move there, and just before I left my friend showed me WAR, which just has been released. That set my priorities...
Took me a couple months, but I gathered enough money for a PC that was just strong enough to be able to play WAR, then bought a CD copy of the game a week before my hardware's arrival. I think that is the only game CD I still have to this day in a cabinet in my old room at home full of memories, even though they all ended up there just because I deemed them valuable at the time, the cabinet accidentally became sort of a time capsule. ANYWAY! As a first time mmo player, I sucked at it terribly at first, even the hasty game-texting was totally new to me (dps, incincinc, pvp, pq, kotb, etc...). And though I never become anywhere near as good, I still had just taken off with the gaming time of my life. I loved pugging in T2 especially. No addons to help organize our little zerging but I have so many visual memories burnt into my brain with the attached feeling of game-induced adrenaline rush, no other mmo came nearly as close! We played as long-range specialist engineers (with that addon that allowed target sharing, whatever its name was), and just the sheer thought that we managed to turn a simple destro steamroll into an hour long defense of epic proportions (in no small part thanks to our sniper duo with keen target selection) still gives me goosebumps. Or the time we sent order to bed (playing as a BO-shammy duo this time) right from the walls of Spite's Reach. But rvr was just half the story of these days. I've thought about dabbling into WHFB before, but I was always more fascinated by the lore than the game itself. And I may be in the minority when I say that PVE was great in WAR and is good in RoR, but that is a hill I'm ready to die on. I roamed through the realms, fell in love with grimdark. Places such as the Tree of Beards ("The Tree of Beards is a holy place for the Greenskins and a shrine of unspeakable insult to the Dwarfs.") or the forlorn journey from Praag to the Chaos Wastes that rivals the madness of Apocalypse Now. The best immersion the Old World ever had to offer among video games. And it's not the great writing, that was quite basic, but that HUGE Tome of Knowledge and all that well-hidden unloackables through the map... I get distracted by occasional tome-hunting to this day.
(TBC)