Yes, it’s true. We’ve had our good times and our bad; we’ve spent evenings, days – even whole weekends – together. Laughter, tears, joy, frustration – but now I have to finally admit to the sad truth.

World of Warcraft and I are no longer together.

It always starts the same way: the niggling little faults that you dismiss at first start to annoy you more and more – sure, you can live with the long flight times and the long grind to 60 because the rewards when you get there are so cool. But then the rewards turn out to be slightly bigger numbers than you had before, and it’s not really that cool, after all. All your friends tell you that the cool parts are when you join together for raids, but they’re all in their late 60s and you can’t join them, and raiding with random strangers is frustrating and kind of… icky, you know?

I bought the expansion pack back in January, before I’d even actually hit level 58, and spent several solid days grinding up to 58 so I could go through the portal and see all the shiny new content – and one happy tuesday evening shortly afterwards, I did. I went through, and… what? It’s all more of the same. Kill 20 things. Collect 10 things dropped by some other things when you kill them. Kill 20 slightly harder things. Except they look a bit different this time. I made it to Shattrath, had a look around and … just logged out.

I haven’t been back since.

The thing is, it was starting to feel less like a game and more like a responsibility. Things to do today: clean bathroom, pay phone bill, ring parents, go to Blackrock Depths and kill Lord Incendius. It ceased to be fun, and if a game isn’t fun, what’s the point? Especially when you’re paying £9 a month for it.

That’s not to say I won’t ever go back. I might. My account still exists; it’s frozen, but not deleted. But I can’t ever see it dominating my gaming time again like it did before. Sorry, that’s just how it’s got to be. Times change. Things move on.

And hey, we’ll always have that one magical night in Darnassus, eh?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.