Tuesday 15 January, 2008

Gameplay:

This run through was no different. Wow immediately sucked me in and made it very hard to stop playing. In fact, it was kind of annoying for me to have to stop playing the game to follow the assignment. Whatever. Either way, I found myself engaging in the great PvP aspects of WoW. Blizzard, the designer of WoW, really outdid themselves with their revolutionary ideas for PvP. Normally in MMO's, when PVP is fought, it's during the course of the game and at any point. This is called World based pvp. WoW has great world pvp, especially around area's such as Hillsbrad, where the general closeness of Horde and Alliance (the two opposing sides in the game) creates a lot of PvP opportunities.
But Blizzard went another step in introducing battlegrounds, which are basically instanced battlefields where you can duke it out with another human player for fat lootz and prizes. You not only play against people on your server, but from other servers that Blizzard has assigned into your battlegroundpools. With this far-reaching potential PvP population, and the level of tracking of stats ect done in game, players are able to rank and recognize the best players across multiple servers. If you value being better then someone else at a video game, at least WoW lets you know how much better.

Design

The design of the game, as I mentioned earlier, is intricate and beautifully done. Blizzard truly has created a long-lasting winner. The game isn't always the best at providing new content as the player progresses upwards through his level life, but then again, its an RPG. Theres bound to be some leveling tediousness. Overall though, I think Blizzard did a great job of keeping things interesting throughout all 70 levels. Recently, a new quest of the day has level 70's scrambling all over Outland to earn more reputation and gold for their characters who have conquered all the non-instanced parts of the game.
Being an MMO, WoW obviously has a lot to do with social interaction. However, WoW was the first MMO to break into mainstream culture. It's easy learning curve and addictive nature, plus changing conceptions about playing video games, make WoW an extremely accesable for those who haven't played an MMO or even many video games. The player structure encourages serious, competative gameplay with honor systems and ranked PvP, yet leaves plenty of fun, rewarding quests for those who wish to take their ride through the WoW universe a little slower.

Good job. Though for future note, I would suggest maybe expanding a little on both gameplay (possible with in the mechanics its self) and design. For design, you do touch on quite a few aspects which is very good but maybe try taking a few aspects and look at them in depth.
-Chris Ward (Grader)