A Review of the Text-based Game, the Eternal City
The Eternal City was reviewed in Gamer’s Weekly, which brought it’s first and foremost success in 1996. In previous times, the Eternal City was a game of magic and mystery; where people joined up to become thei rown person in an alter reality… But a lot of things have changed since then.
For instance, the game now is pay-to-play, on Skotos’ server… but in all honesty, there were more changes and more genuine playerbase happiness before the game started needing a subscription to play. Since then, most GMs have been lost, and players have become spoiled by the game masters. Now, all that remains of the old TEC are very few veteran players, which are far, few, and in between.
The good thing about the Eternal City mostly range from the creative genius behnd the game masters. They are always coming up with new plots and substories to get characters involved with. But, no matter how hard one tries, there will always be favorites… which seems to be the worst problem with this game. The favorite players can do things that others can’t, especially when it comes to cheating, or gaining “clout”. Favortism is also very much obvious in the games’ forums, where player to player tensions are high, and squabbling and flaming are incessent.
Out of character problems have also been a reoccurance in this online community. People take the issues that they have with other players into the game and mercilessly attack them, using their out of game reasoning to provide for in game reasoning. People in the eternal city can not seperate their lives from the fantasy of the game; in essence becoming their characters and taking offense to minor in game details or even other characters’ quirks!
Now, you are probably asking yourself why anyone would want to be in such a vindictive and unfufilling society of degenerate geeks who have nothing better to do with their lives other than pittle their time away typing words out.
It’s very, very simple: the game is addicting. With over 10 skill sets that people can choose to build their characters off of and mounds and mounds of information and adventure awaiting, who would want to say no? It’s more about how one should go about playing the game rather than playing it. If you ignore those who make the game a poor atmosphere, your time in the Eternal City will be rewarded by fun and excitement, rather than the dreary doldrums of online drama.
In effect, if you do ever come across this game and would like to try to play, please do. The helping Auxilii will lend you a hand in roleplaying and starting the game off on a good foot… And overall? It’s a great, great game that has a lot of untapped potential that the whiny players take away on a daily basis.
