Questions about .hack//

[cmdr_zoom]

Does .hack (the anime and/or game) include:

Powerlevelers and Chinese gold farmers?
Hot girls (played by clueless horny teenaged boys) getting it on with other hot girls (played by lonely old men) in public?
Entrance areas packed wall to wall with beggars?
The main character's best skill being unexpectedly nerfed rebalanced halfway through?

Without these important elements, I don't see how it can claim to even dramatically represent MMOs. I understand not showing the Sisyphean torment of the grind (turning it into something like Dragonball Z - in this episode, Goku kills another dozen dire rats! Only 300 to go for next level in Saiyan!), but they should set the stage properly. Get the feel of The World right, you know?

"Have you heard anything new about Tsukasa?"
"Yeah, he's supposed to be--"
"HAY SELLIN NU EMRLD SHOLDRZ 2K PLAT PST!"


/e grins

Comments

[mechaman.livejournal.com]

*dryly* I'm not sure, but I think //UDEWA did have some of the above. And of course, we have to discount //fragment.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Powerlevelers and Chinese gold farmers?

That'd be whoever is playing Kite.

Hot girls (played by clueless horny teenaged boys) getting it on with other hot girls (played by lonely old men) in public?

Tsukasa plays cross-gender.

Entrance areas packed wall to wall with beggars?

I haven't seen a whole lot of that in WoW so perhaps that isn't ubiquitous.

The main character's best skill being unexpectedly nerfed rebalanced halfway through?

Tsukasa's pet gets nerfed.

Taken as a whole? Yeah, it's an MMO without, you know, having to deal with other people. :)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen a whole lot of that in WoW so perhaps that isn't ubiquitous.

I've seen it in both Puzzle Pirates and CoX, which are the only games I've played, so... :/

it's an MMO without, you know, having to deal with other people. :)

As SeaWasp notes below, this is sometimes an attractive concept. An MMO set in a magical, wonderous, impossible world where Sturgeon's Law somehow does not apply to your fellow players...

[twoflower.livejournal.com]

I had hopes for the various .hack incarnations, but really, they don't convey the sense of being in an MMO. The animes barely convey the sense of playing a game at all. Human nature just doesn't play out correctly; people would never be this polite to each other and resistant to gaming the system and obsessing about the numbers.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

people would never be this polite to each other [...]

At the risk of stereotyping, maybe it's a Japanese thing? Do they look for and ruthlessly exploit bugs and edge cases the way we do, or do they tend to color inside the lines? (Finding "secret" cheat codes that are part of the game and were put there to be found doesn't count.)

And people...

[seawasp]

... wonder why I am not particularly interested in playing online CRPGs. If I could trust that ALL the other players were serious about the game, and exclude the twinks, munchkins, and jerks... but since I can't I stick to the solo computer games, or the real live FTF games.