ESO
I recently allowed the littlun to make a character in ESO as he is quite interested in the game and I was quite curious to see what he’d come up with. A massive huge orc is the answer! He wasn’t interested in the other races at all, as soon as he saw the the orc race, that was it. I have my suspicions he was making The Hulk and if green skin had been an option, he would have chosen it. He also made his orc old, like Gandalf (Grandalf?!). So a nice mashup there 🙂 He’s not playing it as yet as he is still finding the keyboard and mouse a bit too challenging (he can work it just fine, just not with any speed yet). The content may also be a little adult for him (unsurprisingly), I’m not sure I want him dealing with choosing a (normally willing) sacrifice just yet, for example. I don’t worry too much about the violence aspect of it as I had a conversation with him and asked him whether the fighting and killing he sees in video games* would be a good tactic to use in real life, such as school. He looked at me as though I was completely and utterly stupid and said ‘well of course not Mummy, I’d tell a teacher’, and rolled his eyes. Ok then… 🙂
*mostly Lego PS games at this points but he has seen other games such as Lotro
SW:ToR
As I figured ESO isn’t quite suitable yet, I thought I’d try duoing with him in SWToR, he has previously tried Lotro and was doing OK. As I thought, he absolutely loves it, he really enjoys choosing his conversation options and he can’t wait until he gets his lightsabre. He chose a Jedi Knight, so I chose the Jedi Consular so I could start in the same area and back him up with heals. He again didn’t want to be human so we both ended up choosing Cyborg. I suddenly realised how much etiquette and knowledge I take as being obvious, forgetting that I have been playing MMOs for around 8 years and that I also had to learn not to interfere with other people’s fights, how to tell players from npcs, the whole quest system, minimaps etc. Its a fun, if patience-testing, experience, it takes him a little while to figure out how to run over and then hit, so I have to stand there getting hit while he comes to rescue me 🙂 It’s great though to suddenly hear ‘wooooaaaah look at that mummy!’ and see a virtual world from young fresh eyes 🙂 He is desperate to get a robot follower, so fortunately his first companion will be a T7-01. I also suspect that once he is able to get a speeder, our playtimes will consist of speeding about rather than questing 🙂 I can’t see us getting much past the starting area, but we shall see.
Doctor Who, series 8
We decided to let him stay up and watch the new series and see how he went with it. We weren’t sure if he’d find it a bit frightening but he absolutely loved it. His favourite character is “Mr Potato Head”, the Sondaren, who had us all in stitches actually. He was cheering the Doctor on when he was hanging under the seat and later was also yelling at the Doctor to just throw the robot guy off (so moral subtleties are yet to kick in 😉 ) I really enjoyed the first episode, I like the new incarnation and am looking forward to the rest of the series.
StarShadow 