Summer of Warcraft: And we’re done

My warrior at level 6 and again at level 51. They grow up so fast!

Part 12 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Well, it’s been a fun ride, but the leaves are changing and summer is officially over. And so is my romp through Azeroth. A few observations on the game as I leave it for now:

- Massively online gaming has a long way to go to attract a mainstream audience. Warcraft is the most mainstream of the MMOs, and it is has very little content for those who would use the platform as a social experience. I have seen flashes of community during my time in the world, such as happy hours at the inn and a wedding at the Stormwind cathedral, but those moments are few and far between. They should be constant, but they are largely missing in the older areas of the game. Allowing players to customize their appearance, as they can in Second Life, and allowing players to sell their own customized wares (not just those already built into the job systems of the game and not just shirt emblems) would go very far toward doing that. That should be something players should be able to do right from the start, encouraging self-identity and community formation.

- The guilds need help. There needs to be a systematic way for new players to find and easily apply to guilds IN GAME. The short-lived New Horizons guild of which I am still a member helped a lot of new players get a foothold in the game early on, but they found me. I never would have known how to find them until much later. And much of the guild management tasks handled by guilds through their own web sites and databases should be built right into the game itself. Guild leaders should not have to work a second full time job just to organize instance runs and distribute loot.

- Many of my previous gripes are being addressed in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion, including a complete overhaul of the old continents that encourage older players to come back and explore or, better yet, re-roll a character and join the noobs in progressing through the game. I also like that Blizzard is going to attempt to give the player permanent results for completed quests, giving the player a sense that he or she is leaving a mark on the world as the story progresses.

- When you install the Cartographer plugin, you discover very quickly that Azeroth is really pretty small.  The entire area of the older continents could fit into the county I live in with plenty of room to spare. In real life, the continents would be the size of a large town.

Testing, testing…

WordPress has had a Blackberry app for a while now, but my initial experiences with the program were so annoying that I deleted and forgot it. I’m giving it a whirl again today (as in, right this instant), and I’m surprised that the app’s speed and functionality have increased dramatically. I now seem to have access to all of my blogs, and I can edit them within reason, if I can remember my HTML tags. I doubt it will be much of a platform for longform blogging, given my Curve’s tiny thumbboard and the app’s lack of WYSIWYG formatting, but it could be useful for those times when Twitter’s 140 characters just don’t cut it.

Summer of Warcraft: The Mountpocalypse

The Rainbow Warrior rides to the rescue on his trusty steed ... Sigfried.

Part 11 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Patch 3.2 for the World of Warcraft dropped today…

No, “dropped” implies speed and suddenness.

After months of teasing, Blizzard finally shut down nearly ALL of its servers today for nearly 12 hours in order to update them all with new content for the Level 80 demigods.

Oh, and they threw all the noobs a bone too – cheap mounts. I was hoping for a bit of new content for the old hell hole original continents, but at least we unworthies will have a few less months to grind up to the fun part of the game, thanks to a 60 percent increase in travel speed that come 10 levels earlier and about 30 gold cheaper. My human priest now has a purdy horsey, and my elf warrior has an effeminate white tiger, which just proves he is secure in his sexuality.

We low-level grinders also benefited from some other, less-publicized improvements to the plain vanilla client, such as the new side-by-side quest log, enemy spell casting meters and bug fixes for Intel graphics chipsets. Speaking of my paltry graphics driver, I have not yet seen a significant hit to my framerate, even though Darnassus was jam packed with newbie riders and high-level bargain hunters this evening. I feared that the explosion of new polygons would melt my laptop, but that hasn’t yet happened.

What remains to be seen is whether the new mounts will bring players back to the old continents. I did see a lot of low-levels on this evening, and they helped me out a lot with quests, but I have this feeling that the renewed interest will be short lived. There’s nothing new for the noobs to do.

During my foray across the WoW media today, looking for 3.2 news, I stumbled upon this excellent article at the Pink Pigtail Inn, which sums up everything that is wrong with Warcraft questing:

There are many factions and elements to Warcraft lore but often these elements feel attenuated to me. … Frequently, questing seems directed to pushing us to the next leveling zone rather than the next plot element. The result is that I level faster but I wind up at the end of the game with a jumbled and fractured picture of the lore.

Oh well, back to collecting Furlbog nipples…

Summer of Warcraft: Like a hot sword through butta

My warrior, going through an early 'woo-hoo fabulous' phase. He grew out of it, thank god.

Part 10 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

My interest in Warcraft is beginning to wane severely. I put the two characters that I’ve leveled past 25 on ice until Blizzard releases The Mount Patch and allows me to get quests done in minutes, rather than hours.

So, I decided to start a new warrior character. I should have done this a six weeks ago.

The camera dropped down on my new green haired, purple-skinned night elf meathead, and … I was in a 3D version of Faxanadu. World Tree indeed. Is the entertainment industry in general finally out of ideas?

Still, the night elf areas and storyline have been, so far, the least cliched high fantasy experience that plain vanilla WoW has offered thus far (not saying much). The green and purple color scheme reminds me of the visual craziness of the old New Orleans-inspired Tableau sim in Second Life, only classically Greek in flavor. It’s actually “fantastic,” not just “Fantasy.” For the first time, I’m seeing design that’s not easy to pigeonhole.

Playing as a fighter has been a breeze. For solo leveling, the increasingly common mode of play on the old noob continents, Warcraft is a game of the clobbering classes – hunters, shamans, paladins and warriors. Most of the early leveling is melee combat ad nauseum with no one around to help out. If you’re wearing cloth armor, every solo quest is a strategic assault until you get some useful abilities. Warriors are ridiculously balanced for soloing, though, having low equipment overhead, heavy armor, high powered weapons and no mana requirement. I breezed to level 17 in only a few days of casual play. It’s enjoyable not having to run around and beg some aspy with a severe inferiority complex to tank for me.

The night elf storyline is definitely the most noob-friendly I’ve yet encountered. The first two playing regions are relatively linear, compact and enclosed, compared to the human storyline. Quests are located close to towns, and none have taxed my warrior yet. My only complaint is that Teldrassil isn’t a real hot spot for blacksmithing. It takes a boat ride to Darkshore if you want to practice the metallic arts.

Finally, elves are bloody ridiculous looking. You can’t help it. When the hairstyles are all taken from 1980s hair bands, the ears look like canards on a supersonic jet, and the skin colors range from mauve to violet, your characters are going to look bizarre no matter how you configure them. My advice? Just go with it and make the most asinine thing you can. It helps if you can snag a ridiculous name too.

Summer of Warcraft – The urge to mount

That's an expensive horsey.

Part 9 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

One of my constant gripes as a newbie in World of Warcraft is the slow pace of travel. It’s glacial, even when you rent a flight. I am consistently amazed at how much I can get done on a flight between Lakeshire and Ironforge – let the dog out, go to the bathroom, do some dishes, let the dog back in, play another video game…

Walking, even with a relatively swift human priest, is just mind-numbing boredom. And you do a lot of it. But my friends have always assured me. “Don’t worry, when you hit 30, you can get a mount, and it’s much better.”

So, last night, while toiling through the repetitive raucousness of gunshots and pig squeals that is Razorfen Kraul, I finally brought my Tauren hunter up to 30. I turned to my group and announced, “I have the urge to mount something.” This morning, I slowly hauled my character’s big bull ass over to Bloodhoof Village to purchase a Kodo, a lumbering dinosaur-looking thing that passes for transportation in this game. The shop wanted 8 gold for the beast. I only had 5. It was disappointing, but not terribly so. BUT WAIT, in order to train my character to ride this beast, I was informed that I must spend 29 gold. What?

I haven’t even earned a total of 37 gold with my hunter, ever. Even if I had traveled more efficiently, had not bought abilities that I rarely use, or had not bought armor for a friend (just so I could have someone to quest with), I would not have had the ability to save up more a quarter of that amount. Sure, I could have crafted leather bags and sold them at the auction for cash. But I already have a job that requires tons of boring, repetitive button clicking and no creative input, thanks. This is supposed to be a game, right? Supposed to be fun, right?

I can see how, in the early days of Warcraft, when the world was small and everyone still played on the old continents, a mount was more of a vanity thing. “Look at my rich ass traveling faster than you!” But, two expansions into this collective hallucination, mounts have ceased to be vanity and become necessity. Waiting until level 30 to get one and then having to farm a spectacular amount of gold is just asinine. If I ever want to play with my higher level friends, it’s going to take another year at this travel pace.

And here come the “stoopid noob” criticisms. Fine. But, as has been my point all along in this series, newbies pay Blizzard the same monthly rate as level 80s. If Blizzard insists on keeping Warcraft’s pacing this slow for the fewer and fewer newcomers coming to the game, there is going to be little incentive for them to stick around, since there are no longer as many players learning and slogging through at their level. It’s mostly free accounts and veterans power-leveling their alternate characters. My Alliance roll-playing server is filled with ghost towns during the week. Kalimdor is a little better on my Horde player-vs-player server, but not by much.

As I’ve said before, all the action is elsewhere, and I’d like to get there someday, not some year. But perhaps Blizzard has ceased to care.

The last gasp of the twitcher

Let it die. (Courtesy of Gizmodo.com)

Kotaku has posted what has got to be the most asinine, bottom feeding article I have read since Nintendo introduced the Wii and signaled that the unwashed rabble were about to come crashing into the pristine dork fortress that has encased the video gaming market.

Writer Leigh Alexander starts his “In defense of the classic controller” article with the statement: “Gamers may suffer some kind of identity crisis as the familiar markers of their beloved niche evolve – or disappear entirely. The solution to that one’s easy: Get over it. Like it or not, it’s clear that gaming’s not a ‘niche’ anymore, and its shape will change.”

Amen.

And then he launches into a ill-advised bout of wishful thinking, trying to cast doubt on the inevitable decline of the controller, writing, “Making something ‘more accessible’ doesn’t necessarily make it better.”

LOL wut?

This is an interface we’re talking about, right? It’s the ideal goal of an interface to make it as accessible as possible and therefore more widely marketable. Right? Not if you listen to the geniuses interviewed for this piece.

“Sorry to sound elitist, but I like that not everybody understands how to play games, and I doubt that I’m alone,” sniffs Frank Lantz, a java game developer and director of New York University’s Game Center.

I’m not going to call you elitist. Assuming that you were quoted correctly, I’m going to call you a fucking idiot. Let’s apply that logic to other entertainment experiences. “I like that not everybody understands how to watch movies or listen to music.” That’s not elitism, that’s self-defeating pompousness. Yes, there are writers who still talk like this, and NOBODY KNOWS WHO THEY ARE. That’s fine if you want to burn down your own life and waste public money in a fit of haughty exclusivity, but AAA game development investments are too large for this retardation.

The “classic controller” is not something to be mourned or retained as a hurdle for the unworthy. It very much still has its place, but that place is shrinking rapidly. There is nothing intrinsic about the old button array that makes it more ideal for developing shooters, sandboxes and MMOs – today’s popular genres. The Wii’s separated, motion-controlled remote ‘n’ nunchuck setup is demonstrably superior to either Sony or Microsoft’s pads, which is why both companies are dashing to replace them. But we’re not supposed to say that out loud, because the Wii is for kiddies and old people, or something.

There is something else going on here that Kotaku dares not mention for fear of alienating its readership. Videogames are becoming more of a physical thing and less of a cerebral or twitch thing. The non-transferable, highly specialized skills once needed to play button-mashing video games are being rendered useless. The jocks are taking over.

Notwithstanding the cherry-picked examples that Kotaku chose, I see nothing but upsides to making games more intuitive. It might actually attract some real artistic talent to the industry, dragging it out of the B-level comic book/sci-fi/fantasy ghetto in which it now largely resides.

Summer of Warcraft: Politicking and commitment

Part 8 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

It has dawned on me, slowly but surely, that in order to continue playing as a priest, I’m going to have to join a guild and participate in group activities. As I mentioned in Part 7, this holds no appeal for me.

While I have enjoyed playing this game with my buddy and my brother-in-law (on two different servers) on occasion, the thought of joining a group of complete strangers online to coordinate a strategic gaming effort gives me flashbacks of the fresh hell that was online group projects in college. The crippled communication and anonymity of net relationships is just a breeding ground for stupidity. So, as a rule, I must be paid to politick online, especially after last night’s experience.

I met a mage  – we’ll call him “Pabst” – outside the Silver Stream Mine in Loch Modan as I prepared to do some serious Kobold kicking. He was embroiled in a battle with a very lucky Kobold, so I blessed him and cursed the Kobold, a simple courtesy. He then asked if I needed help. He was what I call a “twitcher,” constantly moving around and typing in illegible pidgin – a tween poster child for Adderall. But I told him my quest objective and invited him to join me. Huge mistake.

Pabst’s idea of “helping” was to wait for me to draw an enemy, and then charge into the fray, enrage every surrounding enemy, randomly toss spells around and leave me to haplessly juggle my original target and my job, his defense. This twat thought that I, as a priest, should tank. After miraculously failing to get me killed, Pabst then began swiping my quest objectives even as he saw me heading to them. This may make for some good, old fashioned penis measuring among the offensive classes, but, in this situation, it was just pathetic. Blizzard hobbles the priesthood into irrelevance as it is. I don’t need my “friends” contributing to the problem.

So I ditched this liability and let him fend for his nutty self. I secured my objectives and then asked him if he completed his objectives, an unnecessary courtesy. He berated me for ignoring him and left the party. I wasn’t completely heartbroken.

But then, weirdness. As I traveled back to Thelsamar, the local burg, Pabst messaged me again: “listen u want to join my guild?”

Wow. I had to admire the balls on this guy. I responded, “I’m not on much, but sure.” That usually filters out the True Believers, as it did this time. Pabst then piously informed me that his clan was ” a leveling guild” and that I needed to be “on and committed.”

“It’s a video game, kid,” I responded. “‘Committed’ means ‘crazy’ in my book.” Boy, did that light his fingers on fire. Thank the gods for the ignore button.

Sorry, Pabst. You named your character after a beer. You twitched constantly with impatience. You were rude and annoying, and you played poorly. If you aren’t a “kid,” you are a manchild, and that’s even worse. But you’re hardly alone. This game attracts a certain kind of personality that sees leadership as domination, not inspiration, and delights in dominating behind a screen of anonymity. This type of personality is both the inspiration for and the creator of the stupid management essay and overly belligerent guild.

My buddy, the level 80 mage, finally lost his cool this weekend, complaining about the childishness and pettiness of his guild, but I don’t know how he put up with it this long. This is not what I call entertaining.

Summer of Warcraft: The Stigma

Part 7 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

“I am so disappointed that you are playing Warcraft,” said a co-worker this evening, without a mitigating preface or punchline.

I didn’t take this personally. In my line of work, this was a mild jab in our ongoing game of good-natured shit slinging. I responded with something self-effacing. I was ready for it. I was prepared to bear the burden of the World of Warcraft Stigma.

But it got me thinking. Silicon Valley, Blizzard Entertainment included, has a long way to go to convince the increasingly influential Xer chattering classes of the Right Coast that virtual worlds are a potentially life-enriching entertainment and communication experience. I bravely endured the slings and arrows from friends and the media (including The Office’s brilliant skewering) during my yearlong odyssey through Second Life. I, like many others, concluded that SL was a convoluted hassle. Those who aren’t into Tolkien-style fantasy concluded that about Warcraft as well.

But Warcraft’s growth rate is now tapering, and Blizzard needs to entice affluent Xers into its colorful world if, like Nintendo, it ever wants to break out of the geek set. Unfortunately, those Xers are still having trouble fully accepting Facebook and understanding Twitter, much less adapting to a fully 3D environment that has far less integration with their normal, fleshbag lives.

Scoff if you will at my comparison of Warcraft to web-based social networking tools, but what exactly is the core appeal of the game? It certainly isn’t the game itself. No, seriously, this is a terrible game. The overwrought, tissue-thin storylines are not sufficient to inspire lasting interest in Warcraft’s core mechanic, which is classic, dungeon-crawling grindcore of the most nerdy, repetitive and boring kind. I have started five different characters of different classes, races and alignments, because, after about level 15 or so, playing the game solo gets to be a chore of laundry list checking, rather than a learning and exploration experience. It’s like the game purposely runs you in circles in the same patch of land you’ve gotten to know intimately by level 5.

The real appeal, or revulsion, of Warcraft lies in its social component. Go raiding with buddies! Explore Azeroth as a swashbuckling party of hearty adventurers! That’s all fine and good, but how many working adult people who have access to disposable income and regular sex know more than two real life friends who play Warcraft? How often are those friends on Warcraft at the same time? This presents a problem. Whereas social networking can be done asynchronously, Warcraft requires a simultaneous time commitment. It must be scheduled.

And this is where Warcraft, for most of the population, becomes less like a game and more like work. I don’t want to come home from my scheduled workday to organize for a scheduled raid or instance. I like randomly finding friends online and cooperatively kicking the crap out of a few baddies while trash talking on the chat box, but I’m not going to bother making virtual friends and joining virtual fraternal organizations full of strange people who make demands on my time … just to play a bad roll-playing game. If I’m going to schedule anything with friends, it’s going to be in the real world, and it’s going to involve wine.

So what is the solution? Can Blizzard broaden the appeal of Warcraft without alienating its grindcore fan base? Or should the game’s core technology be reworked into a more palatable virtual world for The Rest of Us? Do we want a market full of MMOs using the “Warcraft Engine?”

We certainly don’t want them using Second Life’s.

Summer of Warcraft: As far as the eye can see

Part 6 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Don't fence me in.

It occurred to me that this series is turning into nothing but a bitchfest, so I had better clarify that there is at least one thing that I like about World of Warcraft.

I like the scale of the world.

Most RPGs of the 1980s and 1990s tried to create a world-sized map by resorting to … a world-sized map. They gave the impression of large scale by changing to the small scale. Towns and dungeon interactions happened on a different scale than world map interactions.

But then developers tried to get rid of this cheater method by actually rendering the world and having he player’s character run through it just like an action adventure. This had some terrible results at first. Final Fantasy X and XII, while highly detailed, felt like they occurred in regions about half the size of the county in which I live. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured  a huge world, but it suffered from “asset reuse” syndrome.

WoW has its own cut ‘n’ paste and pallete-swapping issues, but the punchy art style and clever terrain modeling distracts me from most of these problems. The horizon never feels limited, even has the game babies my weakling hardware. The entire kingdom of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess could fit mostly within Mulgor and certainly within the confines of Mulgore and Durotar. Azeroth is effing huge.

Even though the world is hardly the size of even a small real world continent, that’s a good thing. It’s big enough to give a sense of isolation and danger on long quests, but small enough to keep from dispersing players too thinly and wrecking the social feel of the game.

Summer of Warcraft: No noob love

I need a better reason to kill umpteen of these things.

Part 5 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

If Warcraft Realms is to be believed, the current population of Azeroth is less than 6.2 million, about the size of Tennessee or Rio de Janeiro. Detractors will whine that the game is actually 11.5 million strong (Ohio or Istanbul) as of autumn of last year, but I prefer the Realms method of eliminating characters that are under level 10 or haven’t logged in for the last 30 days. After all, we should avoid Second Life-style stat pumping.

That’s a stark contrast, isn’t it? Only 6.2 million of 11.5 million characters are active? That’s some serious churn. Still, Blizzard is operating from a position of strength, holding about 60 percent of the national MMO market. But stock prices don’t reward current standing, just potential growth. Warcraft’s growth is slowing and its cultural high water mark (Leeroy Jenkins, the Southpark episode, the artless term “pwnage” and alarmist news stories about its affect on marriages) has passed. It needs a kick in the pants if it wants to continue to add new subscribers in droves.

As a newbie, I have a few suggestions:

• Update the old areas – The beginner areas of Warcraft look every bit their four years of age, even older. The simple polygonal graphics allow for it to run on less powerful machines (like my Intel graphics laptop) and wide open vistas, but the textures could use some updating and refinement. Seasonal changes would be nice, as would a few new enemies. I haven’t seen this much palette swapping since Super Mario Bros. There is a sense when you log in as a newbie now that all the action is elsewhere. Nothing new is happening on the original landmass. It is just a grind tank. The quests haven’t changed at all, so their is little motivation for older, leveled characters to assist younger characters through the grind to more advanced, action-packed areas.
• Go beyond grind – Warcraft, in essence, is boring as hell. At the noob level, fights are an autoplay chore. I’ve parked my character next to an enemy to start slashing and walked away to get a drink. This is unacceptable. I’m sure that speeding up the fighting process would destroy Blizzards carefully balanced plot to make me take a certain amount of time to level up. Tough shit. It shouldn’t take 10 gunshots to kill something. If this game truly does not get fun until level 40, as one of my commenters alleged, then we have a problem. Because it is totally rigged for repetitive killing and little else. Where are the merchants and artistic classes? I realize it’s called Warcraft, but wars are won by logistics, not just warriors. Supporting classes, such as priests, have nothing to do if someone is not doing the killing for them. Here’s an idea – put the religious factions in charge of controlling guilds. You want some politics? You want player-created crusader drama? Put the priests in charge. No legal guilds without priest leaders. Oh, fighters and mages could make outlaw guilds, but then they would carry bounties on their heads, subject to PVP challenges without consent. Now that would stir shit up around the old stomping grounds, and it would make priests more influential and desirable. Of course, it would also make the game more like work than it already is.
• Add some story – I’ve already bitched about the fact that a WoW player never sees progress in his world. Quests aren’t cycled out and replaced after a certain number of players complete them. Azeroth has a long and fabled history that looks like a poor man’s Middle Earth creation myth, complete with unpronounceable names and OCD detail, but there doesn’t feel like anything is going on today. A noob’s first missions are always fetch quests and creature cullings, but there is no sense of why we’re doing this, except for vague excuses about not liking said creature/enemy. I don’t want to kill Kobolds because they are annoying. I want to kill them because they kidnapped, raped and consumed the flesh a young virgin of the village and then danced in her entrails until dawn. I need a reason to hate. Some players don’t need this. I do, and so do a lot of other potential customers.