Comfort Food for the Gamer

No, I'm not talking about actual food or recipes inspired by games and SF&F franchises.

I mean in the same vein as what comfort food represents: something familiar and makes you feel like all's right with the world. Maybe for some people they have an actual meal that gives them that feeling (for a coworker, it's all about the Texas style brisket when they get back to Texas) or for others it's getting to play a favorite game (for my wife, it's getting her crossword puzzle done) or still others it's curling up with a favorite book (for my brother-in-law, it's his annual reading of The Lord of the Rings). No matter what it is, everybody has some sort of comfort food.

For me, there are certain games --or places within certain games-- that I return to when I want a helping of comfort food.

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" is how the old saying goes, but when life gives me lemons I give life the finger and go play Sid Meier's Civilization IV.

Well, Hatshepsut isn't too bad a leader
to start with. And at least the random
location gave me a river with some resources.
I've been in worse starting positions, for sure.

It's a game I've been playing for over 15 years now, and it's the sort of game I can knock out anywhere from 2 to 5 hours depending on how the game plays out.* I can also get an early feel for whether my position is untenable or not --if I don't have access to Copper or Iron, for example-- and I'll just kill the game rather than die a slow death. 

But when I feel the need for gamer comfort food and I'm in an MMO type of mood, I return to the old standbys: create a new character and run through the areas I love best: the low to mid level zones.

Like, oh, this one:

Hel-lo, Ord Mantell.

For the record, the new on-screen map makes me look like I'm playing TERA** rather than SWTOR, so I'm grateful I can go into the Interface options and turn the damn thing off.

Or maybe start up a new toon in this game:

I'd never created a High Elf before, 
so I pulled out some of my Middle-earth
sourcebooks and started throwing names together.
I decided to not put umlauts over the last 'e'
like Tolkien would have; too messy to type.

There's something peaceful and pleasant about Ered Luin under starlight, just the way the Elves of Middle-earth like it. For all the quirks of LOTRO --such as trying to read those damn maps and the ability icons all looking the same-- the scenery, tone, and storyline are all highly evocative of Middle-earth.

And not to be outdone, I do have favorite places in WoW as well:

I always wondered what that Sentinel
was doing there.

I realize I'm in the minority, but I truly do love Teldrassil, Darkshore, and Ashenvale. They have that ancient Elven forest vibe down so much that you'd think you were in Lothlorien or something.  Yes, I do like Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Eversong Forest, The Ghostlands, and even the damn Barrens, but for pure atmospherics the Night Elf areas are dead on perfect. 

***

The more I go through some of these old original or vanilla areas on these MMOs, the more I enjoy them. You never get the impression that you're "the chosen one" or that you're there to save the world and/or galaxy --okay, the Jedi Knight story does somewhat sound that way-- but you're also not out there hobnobbing with all of the Powerful of the game world. Sure, you run into them from time to time, but it's not like they're saying "Champions! Meet me at the Town Hall! We need to take the fight to Mal'gannis!" At best they may offer counsel (Elrond, Gandalf, Satele Shan) or some quest direction (Aragorn), but nothing like what you find in later expacs in these MMOs. 

There's something comforting in the anonymity provided in these vanilla-esque zones. Even if you're on an active server, you're still not likely to run into many other players at all in these original zones because the latest and greatest zones are "where the action is". That is even the case in these megaservers in Wrath Classic, where most everybody has gotten multiple toons to max level and unless there's another 50% XP boost they're not likely to run another alt through the gauntlet. (I discovered this while waiting around for a Deadmines run in the past couple of weeks.) While those dungeon runs were active in the lead up to Wrath Classic launching, they're almost totally dead now. So, while you wait you go out into the world and quest. Or fish. Or level a gathering skill. Or explore. All of those sorts of things can be done on those three MMOs***, at your own pace without any concern for life, the universe, and everything. (Thank you, Douglas Adams.)

***

While these areas tend to be quiet and relatively empty, disruptions can show up when a high level toon rolls by and wipes an area clean of questing mobs. Perhaps they were going back and completing quests that were left behind, or perhaps they were farming for materials. Or maybe they did have a slightly cruel and/or trollish streak and did it just because. Whatever the reason, the effect was to basically throw off my cadence and I have to wait for respawns. If said high level toon zaps those, then I just abandon the area; arguing with idiots never ends well in my experience.

As a consequence, I've learned to do any low level questing on my high level toons when I know I'm not causing disruptions to people already there. On a (now) empty server like Myzrael that's not a big deal, because there have been times when I've literally been the only person in a zone for several zones in a row. But an "active" server, or a server where I'm new? Yeah, I'm sensitive to disruptions.

***

Okay, enough about me. Where do you go --or play-- when you just need a helping of comfort food?

*All about whether I've got a combat heavy game going. The combat heavy games are much longer than the ones where I simply out-develop the other civs.

**Minus the ridiculously sexy clothing (and the Elin), of course.

***Okay, so you can't fish in SWTOR, but you can do a lot of crafting and datacron hunting.