07.27.06

World of Warcraft: Pre-Game

Posted in Gaming, The Unbelievers, World of Warcraft at 5:57 pm

The Unbelievers is an on-going project designed to provide a truly fair review of a game– by being blatantly unfair. Players who hate a particular style of game are asked to play that game for an extended trial period, and report whether or not their initial prejudices are grounded in reality or are mere fanboy FUD. John’s World of Warcraft review is the first in the series.

Game: World of Warcraft
Genre: Traditional Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
Developer: Blizzard
Publisher: Blizzard/Vivendi
Platform: Windows/Mac OS X
Trial Period: July 27, 2005-August 27, 2005

I was first introduced to World of Warcraft as most of the members of the DDR Erie crew began gravitating towards it at launch (fall of 2004). I was not-playing City of Heroes and Final Fantasy XI at the time (read: I had the games but had let the subscriptions lapse due to lack of interest) and was quite unwilling to join a new MMO when my previous experiences, which included stints in Everquest and Ultima Online (lasting two months and five days, respectively), had burned me so badly. Now, let it be known that I trust the judgement of these people. The Erie crew was made up of some of the least-biased, most intelligent gamers I’ve ever met– all of them. However, at the time, I thought they were total noobtards for getting into a game that was so ‘popular’ you couldn’t even play it when you wanted to; you’d get shunted into queues to even log on.

It’s now two years later. WoW has absolutely dominated the MMO market, gaining well over 50% market share by itself, and without the virtue of any expansions (The Burning Crusade has not yet been released at the time of this writing). Six million players worldwide, with half a million on at any one time– by comparison, City of Heroes/Villains has a total subscriber base of only two hundred thousand or so– so many people can’t possibly be wrong, can they? American Idol aside, I decided that as the price of the startup box had dropped, now was the best time to try the game.

My primary problems with the game, and the reasons why I had resisted, were all based around one thing– the sheer size of the player base. In any population as large as that, there are bound to be a huge number of idiots and griefers. As an extension to this, the huge number of foul-play players undoubtedly must make the game almost impossible to police properly. I have this vision in my mind of a bloody battlefield, with thousands of players’ corpses, more produced every second as a small cabal of high-level players sweep through the ‘noob’ zone for no reason other than they don’t want to grind anymore. As an added bonus, they players did seem to get the upper hand on the developers at least once– on one particular server during an event called “The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj” which centered around the opening of said gates, a player group completed the quest necessary to open the gates to all other players, but refused to do so until Blizzard acknowledged certain supposed glaring bugs. Furthermore, if I have to spend even five minutes in a login queue, I will bitch about it. Very loudly. My theory is this: a large enough player base actually reduces the immersion an MMO player has in the world, as through login queues, zone oversaturation, and GM nonresponsiveness, he or she is made to feel increasingly insignificant; basically, either you are one of six million players of WoW or one of ten billion humans on Earth, both of which make you feel pretty damn useless.

Next, the game seems created specifically for Player Vs. Player combat and thrusts people into that setting immediately. Granted, all games involve some degree of PvP competition. The problem is that PvP and griefing seem to go hand-in-hand as players seek out new ways to piss others off deliberately. I’ve been told that there’s a significant PvE (Player Vs. Environment) portion to the game, but then again that’s no good either as it basically relegates the game into greed-driven grinding. Partying with people becomes excessively taxing as well because whenever you have a situation where people have to share loot, there will be Drama. The Warcraft setting (Horde Vs. Alliance) naturally predisposes players into the PvP mindset, which I don’t like due to the potential for abuse. My theory is this: Forcing players into a PvP combat situation is akin to forcing players to be griefed; conversely, restricting players from PvP forces them into mindless grinding without any purpose. World of Warcraft does not provide enough PvE variety or non-combat PvP competition.

Finally, I remain skeptical about Blizzard’s promise that “even casual gamers will be able to enjoy all of the game”. The gaming world was in an uproar while WoW was in development due to a system called “rest”: basically, the longer you stayed logged in, the less effective your character was. It’s supposedly undergone some changes since then and has been hailed now as a “good thing”. What has caused such a reversal of the public opinion? It is important to give players an incentive to take breaks, but if it comes at the cost of effectiveness for the so-called “hardcore” players who spend days on end logged in and grinding, there will be an outcry. My own play style seems to be a hybrid of this– I’ll play sparsely during the week, usually at night, but spend most of the weekend in-game. As a result, I’ll likely see both sides of this. My theory is this: the “rest” system does nothing to contribute to casual players and in fact serves as an artificial hindrance to the “hardcore” crowd, who will overcome this through tedious grinding.

The game’s being installed as we speak, on my primary PC; I may also tinker with the Mac OS X version at some point. As soon as I have details about who and where I am in the world, I’ll post them.

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