World of Warcraft Review

MMOs are a strange beast. They are designed to make you play as much as possible, yet addictiveness does not always equal fun. In the field of pyschology, there are several kinds of rewards systems, and the one that seems to be the most successful is the random reward introduced at a random time. Sometimes you click the button, and nothing happens. Sometimes you click and get the food pellet. It's this mechanism that fuels the slots in Vegas, and when you walk away empty, as is statistically inevitable over a long enough stretch of time, you tell yourself that the overall value was the experience itself, since you come away with nothing tangible. MMOs take away your time and they never deliver a discreet conclusion.

I played a ton of Dark Age of Camelot shortly after it launched, and I find myself reminded of it negatively every day that I play World of Warcraft. To discuss the differences in favor of WoW would be an article in itself, but I'll try to keep to the main points.

First, let's talk about The Grind. In a traditional persistent online RPG, you advance your character by killing an endless string of monsters, and by doing "FedEx" quests where you get some money and/or experience points by delivering an arbitrary item from Point A to Point B. As your character advances, his or her progress begins to slow. It takes longer and longer to get to the next level, because you need more and more experience points each time, yet the experience returned from monsters and deliveries does not scale accordingly. Yet you feel compelled to continue because at Level X you get a really cool spell or other ability that's supposed to make the game more "fun."

The second part of the grind is "downtime," the amount of time it takes to recover from each monster (or "mob") encounter. When I played DAOC, it typically took every ounce of my resources to defeat an enemy that would give me respectable experience. Then I would sit down and wait while my energy bars slowly refilled. Then you'd have to wait awhile for the next batch of monsters to spawn again, and you'd typically be competing against other players and "camping" this same spot all day long.

Now, imagine an MMO where your experience is a string of quests where you're rewarded with a cool item, recipe, or a decent amount of pocket money. A game where the grind is virtually eliminated--a game where downtime is relatively nonexistent, where enemies respawn rapidly and dynamically according to how many players are in the local area; where you can use a healing spell, or bandage yourself, or eat some food, or all three, before diving right back in again. Your character's death doesn't result in the loss of many hours of experience points, or one of your items, or any money (although there is item decay, so whatever you have equipped currently takes a 10% durability hit). When you die, you resurrect as a ghost who moves quickly, runs on water, and cannot be harmed on its way back to its body. You can also have a player resurrect you in a matter of moments, even after you have entered ghost form. This is a game that understands Fun.

Welcome to World of Warcraft.


WoW has been described widely as a "newbie-friendly" game, but after playing since the closed beta phase that started back in Spring of this year, I can honestly say that WoW is friendly to everybody. Everything from the colorful art style to the endearing player animations, to the countless quirks of personality makes WoW an inviting experience. Blizzard's passion for gaming joy is infectious, and its sense of humor disarming.

Let's talk about the geography for a moment. The world of Azeroth is split into two continents: the actual continent of Azeroth (confusing, I know) and Kalimdor, where the Orcs, Trolls and Tauren live. The Night Elves, members of the Alliance, are stuck over there, just as the Undead, member of the Horde, are stuck in Azeroth with the goody-goody humans, dwarves and gnomes. Travel in between the continents is done by Zeppelin for the Horde, and by boat for the Alliance. The bus will come along every few minutes, and it only takes a few minutes to get across. You can also fly in between cities, and there's a free and very quick underground train between Stormwind, the human capital, and Ironforge, the dwarf capital. Both continents are broken into many zones of increasing difficulty as you go farther and farther from your faction's seat of power. At around level 30, halfway to the current cap, you'll start entering zones where each faction has quests. Some of these quests are "instanced," meaning your group gets loaded into an "instance" of the zone that won't contain any other players. This is quite handy in those contested zones, and in areas where you'll be competing for mobs and key quest requirements.

And it's the quests that weave the experience together, from the moment you first step into the world. They act as an excellent introduction to the game and are designed to guide you smoothly from zone to zone. The starting zone has mobs around level 1-10, the second zone is 10-20, and you should have quests the whole way through. Are these quests uniformly exciting? No. There are three types: kill quests, collection quests, and a few delivery quests (which are almost always used to introduce you to new areas, instead of making you run the same route back and forth, or sending you through dangerous territory, or being ridiculously long just to pad the amount of time you spend sitting in front of the computer, playing the game).


The kill quests aren't that bad. Yes, you could argue that this is nothing more than grinding with a twist, but the experience boost you get from completing them, and the concrete rewards you earn when successful, and the camaraderie you can develop with your fellow players in the meantime, ends the monotony and the vague sense of spiteful condescension on the designer's part. When you group up for one of these, everyone gets credit each time a mob is taken down. This is good, and it goes by pretty quickly as long as your buddies keep their heads and don't get too risky.
The collection quests, however, can be a bear. I like WoW a lot, but the frequency with which the quest items drop is pretty low. Say you need ten wolf ears or whanot--it could take thirty wolves before all ten of those ears drop, even though you should theoretically be able to rip the suckers right off, stick them in your pocket, and be on your way. And when you party up for these, the drop only occurs for one person at a time, unless you select the Need Before Greed loot mode. It can take a long time to collect certain items, to the point where you start feeling a little cheated and toyed with. It's rare, but it stings me every time.

There are several loot modes, which is excellent, but none quite prevent the problem of simple greed, even NBG. There's the default "Uncommon" mode, where all players can roll in-game dice to get the uncommon item, but there's no way to filter out certain character classes, so you have a warrior rolling for a mage staff, simply because they want to sell it or because a friend might need it. WoW does a respectable job of trying to make sure everyone gets a fair distribution of valuable monster drops, and they've made massive improvements to the system over the course of the beta phase, but it looks like there's a little more work that needs to be done, like an option window for the group leader that gives him or her some advanced filtering abilities. I'd also like to be able to have more than five people in a party, but then again, there are many quests where you can never have enough people.