Awaken Online: Dominion

This is where my journey with this series ends. I noticed this with the last book, but it was very apparent here, this could not grasp my attention. I did a fair bit of travel over the holidays and figured by the time I got back home I'd have finished this series, but I got through just one entry. These books are getting longer without really including any more story. The pace of the narrative is fixed to the progression of the game and that progression is broken up book to book; of which there are 7 mainline entries, 4 or 5 “side quests”, and a whole three book spin off series. I am not invested enough for all that, I barely got through this book!

It's not that things don't happen in this story, there's always something going on, but this reads more like gameplay commentary than it does a narrative. The bulk of this book is about Jason unlocking some race specific skills in order to overcome a new/powerful enemy. This in-game progression is mirrored by a high profile and lurid congressional hearing concerning the oversight of the VR tech and Alfred the AI. But maybe mirrored isn't the right word, the trial does take its share of pages, but it doesn't move the story along one bit. Everything that “matters” as far as the story is concerned is what's happening in the game; and like I said for book 3, that's not the unique and interesting part of this story to me.

I gave this a shot, but it's getting a little too long-winded and repetitive for me. There's just not enough development in here to justify the page count, I know the focus is on the game but dude I've played DnD, and I've already read/seen/heard about this game in a million other stories. I'm just not interested in this campaign dungeon master, I want to go outside.

Instead of Dominion, this should be called “The Book of many many problems”. I mean, all previous books have our characters face problems and challenges, both in the real world and AO, but man, this one takes the crown. I don't want to spoil anything that happens, only poor Jason, I'd say.

But yeah, this book is longer than the previous ones in the series, which after reading it makes sense and is practically unavoidable (and it's much better than Eliza's Sidequest), but you get through it as fast as the others, because it just has some very fast paced chapters, where many things happen at the same time, it just keeps you hooked.

On the other hand, there's some small parts which are too slow paced, and where I wished there's was either more information, more things to consider, or that it was faster. It's just a few parts where I found it bit more boring.
Then there's also some parts (as for example a specific “thorny” fight, which I wished had been more descriptive and exciting. It felt like some elements around the fight and some of the other characters hadn't been thought through completely by the author. As if he had forgotten about a character and needed to get him/her back into the story quickly, but in a way that would kinda make sense.

So in general I really liked it, following the style of the previous entries of the saga. But from what I describe above, I have to discount one star.

Now, on to Franks side quest! And then either AO5 if it's out or the Fire Deity's Avatar... We'll see!