Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Menzoberranzan boxed set

Salvatore: They said, "Ohhh. This is going to be hard. We've got to get you to Freeport." And I'm like, "Ok. What do you mean?” They said, "Well, you've got to go through some pretty bad places so we'll come there and get you." They picked me up outside of Halas after I figured out how to swim and stop drowning trying to leave the place.

They cast SoW (Spirit of the Wolf) on me and they said no matter what you do, don't stop running. So we took off from Halas, through Everfrost, and Black Burrow into the Karanas. We avoided all the big ugly spiders and just kept running and running. We got into the gorge of King Xorbe and just kept running. And remember, this is in the days of dial up and pretty crappy computers. All of a sudden my screen goes black and I'm like, "Oh no. My system crashed." So I rebooted my computer. 

And of course we didn't have Ventrillo or anything like that and we didn't have cell phones, really. We were using land lines and since we were using them for dialing, we couldn't really call each other or we'd knock each other offline. It was an entirely different world.

Ten Ton Hammer: Unless you had a second connection.

Salvatore: Exactly! Which I didn't. I logged back on and they're like, "What are you doing? Why did you do that?” I'm like, "My computer locked up."

No it didn't. A mud man hit me with mud. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Oh no!

Salvatore: Yeah. *laughs* I thought my computer locked up, so I shut off my computer. At least I didn't die.

But now I had wasted time, and they were all upset that I had wasted time, because we had to go through Kithicor.

Ten Ton Hammer: Right. Oh. It'd be getting close to night time.

Salvatore: Yeah, nighttime.

I remember after that first day, I called some friends at Del Rey almost immediately and told them, “You need to do a book line immediately. I could write a thousand books in this world.”

I still think, to me... and I haven't played many, so I'm probably not the right person to ask... but to me, EverQuest remains (from a content standpoint) the gold standard.

Ten Ton Hammer: Yeah. There was just so much. I don't know if the initial writers left so much unsaid that the players were just like, "This must be this, and this must be this." It felt so big.

Salvatore: Why does this dark elf named Kizdean Gix keep chasing me and killing me? I don't understand.

Ten Ton Hammer: Exactly!

Salvatore: Loved the game. Loved it.

Ten Ton Hammer: On your gaming front, do you still play EverQuest, or have you moved onto WoW, or Warhammer Online? What are you playing now?

Salvatore: I moved onto WoW... reluctantly. EverQuest had gotten to the point where you really couldn't play alone because you were too high of a level and they were going in weird directions. You were going to the moon and to all these different planes. It really didn't give me that fantasy thrill anymore. So we were ready to move on.

WoW came out and EQ2 came out and there was a real argument over which way we were going. My friends went WoW. I went WoW with them and really came to like WoW a lot. I really appreciate the polish, the smoothness, the easy flow of the game. The way NPC's know why you're talking to them so the interaction is very intuitive. The UI is beautiful; the game is easy to play.

So on a lot levels, I really came to enjoy World of Warcraft. There are some really good places in WoW too. I think the starter zones for humans (Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Redridge Mountains, Duskwood) are four of the best zones put together that I've ever seen.

Having said that though, I think I'm on the end of my WoW campaign days.