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Monday 14 January, 2008
SUMMARY
In World of Warcraft, an MMO RPG, the player controls their own personal avatar, running, fighting, and spell casting their way across the famed landscapes of previous Warcraft games. As the player defeats monsters and completes quests, the player is rewarded with new equipment, money, and experience points which increase the player’s level eventually allowing for new abilities and even further character customization.
GAMEPLAY
Though I was never particularly impressed with the half-dozen MMOs I tried in the past, I must say that after spending a few of hours with it, World of Warcraft seems much more compelling than its massively-multiplayer brethren. The starting portion of the game is just about as good as you can hope an MMO’s to be. That is to say, you can’t expect a game which revolves around the attainment of ever-more powerful and impressive spells and equipment to be very exciting to begin with.
The beginning quests are fairly straightforward par-for-the-course MMO fare. Take package X to person Y, conveniently acquire another quest from person Y and collect Z dropped items from one monster or another. Make no mistake though; World of Warcraft is indeed fun to play, even at the beginning stages. With every critical hit my Gnomish mage scored, I felt a grin slide across my face. Likewise, I definitely felt a bit frustrated when my life was ousted by the likes of an oafish boar that somehow resisted three fireballs in a row only to rend my face into the dirt. That only goes to show that you get attached to your character even after only playing for an hour or so.
One aspect of WoW that I was sadly not surprised by was the lack of attachment to individual missions and NPCs. As you meet NPC quest givers in your travels, they all seem to be equally forgettable. I personally don’t care if you need to make a new kind of beer or get eight cogs to fix your machine, I just want my experience and a handful of coins to add to my coffers. In the same vein of discussion, I recall watching a cinematic of some type when I first started my mage’s life which detailed the history of the gnomes and their current state of living in the land of Azeroth. Suffice it to say that I care as much about the history of gnomes as I did when I first played Warcraft II in the first grade; not at all. I suppose at the end of the day it’s better than Blizzard included all of this rather than drop you in a land with no back story just to have NPC’s tell you “take this package to the guy marked on your compass and I’ll give you some gold”. It’s a shame that MMOs still don’t seal a bond between the player and individual aspects of the world. Regardless, the ‘World’ aspect of World of Warcraft is very exciting overall, especially if you’re familiar with Azeroth by way of the other three Warcraft titles (five if you count Beyond the Dark Portal and Frozen Throne).
Having only played the few hours enough to reach level eight, my avatar is still stuck in a sparsely populated frozen area where not much social interaction takes place. I’m sure this will be curbed after the next two or three hours of play once I reach a more well populated area of the world.
2nd portion
GAMEPLAY
In my second session I tried to pay special attention to the pace and flow of soloing in these early levels. I found that on most missions where you either had to kill a ton of enemies (most of them, it seemed) the pace was a bit off, but perhaps that’s just because I was soloing a mage. I couldn’t kill more than two or three enemies in a row without having to wait around a good fifteen to twenty seconds to fully restore my mana and health. While this really isn’t too long out of context, it was enough to definitely slow the pace of the game.
Even so, I found that after hitting level ten finally, the pace picked up a bit. I was able to restore my stats faster with new spells and could generally play better defensively and offensively. Also, my character is now able to experiment with talents which works much like the skill tree provided in the Diablo series, also by Blizzard. In addition, I could now choose my professions (I believe that’s what they’re called, I didn’t actually touch on them myself) but I can only imagine how much time could be lost collecting that last piece of iron ore or cloth for your character’s crafts on top of the hours people spend grinding away for experience. After reaching level ten, I can say I’ve definitely had fun with World of Warcraft, but being the frugal college student I am, I think I’ll have to stick with video games I only pay for once. That’s the plan, anyway.
DESIGN
If there’s one thing I must applaud Blizzard for with World of Warcraft, it’s how smooth I remember the launch of WoW being. Every other MMO I can remember ever coming out has been plagued with a slew of bugs; broken quests, inaccessible areas, classes that need to be nerfed. WoW had the smoothest launch I believe any MMO has ever had, and I applaud Blizzard for it. That in itself may as well be an innovation for MMOs. Having a working product is obviously an incredibly important part of game design especially when it comes to MMOs.
WoW has a very clean and accessible user interface, allowing players new to MMOs or video games in general to not feel overwhelmed, unlike other MMOs such as EVE. The general MMO experience grind is still as addictive as ever, though the recipe for it is hardly innovative. Grind, loot, quest, etc. Of course, what else could be expected?
Excellent art direction is one of Blizzard’s strong points in World of Warcraft. If you have ever played Warcraft 3, you will notice the obvious similarities in not just character design and canon, but also in architecture, tone, and use of color. The color and world design in particular made me feel like the game shouldn’t be taken too seriously; the world feels cartoon-like. Blizzard was definitely not going for monsters that made kids wet their pants, instead just making the world look great without going for the hyper-realistic look that video games are tending towards. In doing this, Blizzard also allowed their player-base to be more open to the game. Not because people would be turned off by a different world design necessarily, but because with this kind of art direction there is not as much of a demand for a horrendously powerful machine to run the game (here’s looking at you, Crysis).
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