Final Thoughts

Well, this is going to be the last blog about WOW. My time is up. Song is over. Thought I'd something more to say.

Alright, Pink Floyd references aside, there are some things I've wanted to talk about. This seems perhaps awkward for a last post, but some of them refer generally to the greater purpose of the game, so I suppose that may actually be a good way to end things.

I recently saw this trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFTWDJ25zdc
It was the second time I had seen it. The first was when I was thirteen, before the game was even released. After having actually played the game and gotten some perspective on it, I have one comment. There is remarkably little boar killing in that video. That video only shows action-packed violence and battle, not the extremely mundane, albeit aesthetically pleasing world I encountered. The shocking absence of war in world of warcraft has not slipped by me, and I have been wondering what might have been a better game.

I read an article about games being used as art, and in it the author described a game which came out in the 80's which was a simulation of the cold war. You can play as either the U.S. or the soviet union, and the game is made up of either invading or supporting smaller countries. The author of this article said that that game was art because playing actually challenged the players world view and assumptions about war.

All of this got me thinking.

What if World of Warcraft was not a simulation of fantasy life, but a simulation of fantasy war? What if your character could register with a commanding officer and be assigned to a squad and be sent on missions overseas? What if the horde could actually invade and potentially take over Alliance cities? What if there were periods of living under a tyrannical regime until other Alliance cities came to your rescue? Imagine if you could abscond and work as a spy for the other side? Imagine if such a game painted a striking and at times poignant image of war and the common man's place in it.

Obviously blizzard would need to find ways to keep things balanced. They would have to make sure that one side couldn't just over run the other and devastate all the n00bs. Another criticism of this idea could be that there are many people who actually like the grind and don't want the game to just be about war and fighting. Well, there are ways to accommodate both sides, while still giving players incentive to put themselves on the line. There are many aspects of WOW which aim for realism. Your equipment wears out over time, rest makes you feel better, etc. However, I think if they are doing this, they should go all the way. I think it would be cool if your character could starve to death, or die of exposure? Its fun to make money by crafting items and selling them, but what if I would die if I didn't? Not only would this be an interesting economy simulator and add extra tension and stakes to an occasionally boring game, but if the army paid well and provided meals that would make players want to go to war. They would have to decide if the money and food was worth all the fighting, much like many U.S. have to do for college. The whole idea fascinates me, and sounds much more fun that the game I am currently playing.


Its actually been a lot of fun playing and blogging. Peace!

So, I recently reached level 10. Let me tell you, was I in for a surprise.

There are a couple of interesting things when I finally hit double digits. First of all, one of my biggest issues with the game got addressed, however briefly. I don't like the impersonal feel the game has. The little intro cinematic told me that the fate of Ironforge was in my hands, but at this point I mostly feel like an intern running errands for the people with enough sense to build a house and stay put. When I reached level 10 however I received several quests which applied to me specifically (or at least created the illusion) regarding my hunter...dom. My hunterdom. I was taught by some hairy old dwarf hunter master how to tame animals to be my freinds. This took a little while, but eventually I left with a whole bunch of experiance and some neat abilities. While this still isn't as intimate as I would like the world to be, it certainly was a step in the right direction.

Immediatly after that fun little excursion I left snowy dwarf land and entered sunny dwarf land, which is gorgeous, esspeically Loch Modan which I just wanted to run down to and swim in (I wouldn't recomend it--there is an abundance of creatures normally ascociated with a certain other Loch). This new place introduced a whole number of interesting things including a new found ability to ride griffons which is so much fun it is actually worth the money I lose from not just using my hearthstone. However, the most relevant development I found was spiders. Giant spiders. Giant tarantullas more like it, actually. Naturally I tamed one as soon as I possibly could.


Hunters: the game COMPLETELY changes once you get a pet. My spider has more health than me, and does more dammage. It is like suddenly getting twice as powerful. Since taming Winsor (the name I have given my new partner) I have leveled up at least twice per session, not even close to my previous crawl (I hit level 14 by the next day). In addition it emphasized how much of a team game it really is. While he (or she?) runs up to our enemy, I just stand back with my gun and rattle of a bunch of shots and spells. There are few things we've encountered, including things four or five levels above us which don't go down almost immediatly.

So, I don't really know what this says about the game. It picks up, that's sure. I'm still not sure if it has picked up enough. After all, the excitement of running around with a gigantic spider is bound to wear off eventually. Until then though, Winsor and I are going to see how much dammage we can do to ourselves by jumping off cliffs (our current record is 256 dammage each).

Bonus Question: Which two words in this post would make the best movie title?
Answer: "Taming Winsor"

I found something really cool

So I was doing some research for a paper about video game design, and I stumbled across this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_blood

Here are some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEFR1Y3fm8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAEhyHiNdrA&feature=related

I think this is awesome. Using WoW as a control in an experiment is something which had honestly never occurred to me. So it looks like WoW might actually have a use after all.


No one ask why I was on Wikipedia for a paper.

Some House Keeping

I am currently drafting a post about a really exciting development in WOW, but for those elite among my audience who are actually grading these posts, I should probably inform you that my new non-trial version character is named Abpeum, and I am on the Elune server. I hope that clears up some things.

Next time on WOWblog (spoilers): I got a pet spider!!!!!!!!

Exploration!

Followers of this blog will remember that I frequently state that my favorite part of WoW is the exploration aspect--quests are a fun incentive to get better stuff, but at the end of the day I'd rather be wandering around in some valley or new city. Most of the quests are just there to encourage the player to leave their comfort zone anyway, so I often just cut out the middle man and go on an "un-sponsored" adventure.

You can imagine my delight and shock then when I was wandering around in the dwarven capital city and discovered a subway stop. Curious, I waited for the next train to come (I have always wanted to play on the tracks of subway stations, so I missed my train three times while frantically trying to avoid being hit) and hopped on, not sure of what would happen. A few minutes later I realized that my mouth was actually hanging open. The train sped underground at breakneck speed while my dwarf stood there and shuffled from one foot to another. We actually shot through an underwater tunnel, and I found myself looking at fish flying past. Then, we screeched to a halt, and I found myself on the other side of the continent, in the middle of an imense human city.
The landscape is beautiful. They have the perfect ratio of warm greens and blues with flashes of red and orange and brown in the flowers and critters. I spent a good forty minutes just orienting myself without doing a single quest. My suitemate who has been playing for a while peeked over and said, "dude, what the HELL are you doing over there?!" It was a triumph for exploration-based gameplay!

My suitemate also recomended this great site: http://www.wowhead.com
Its just a massive database of wow information. Search the name of your quest, and they'll walk you through it. Awesome.
I will also link to this, not becuase it has anything to do with Wow, but becuase if you are into folk music this is the folk music equivilent of Einstein and Jesus doing a colaberative project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr9nf2ZGWhc

This is Awesome

http://pc.gamespy.com/flintlockes-guide-to-azeroth/the-five-stages-of-warcraft/599411p1.html

A Tale of Beer and Tauren Interest

Today I had to do one of the most complicated quests I've had yet, and it was defiantly my favorite. I mentioned in a reply to someone's comment that I wish WOW let me glimpse into some interesting human interest (tauren interest?) stories which I could become involved in, like a widower trapped in an abusive relationship with her brother and this quest was interesting in how close it came to that. There were two beer breweries which got into a rivalry, and I had to switch the beer in one with a nasty concoction to ruin their reputation. This involved an elaborate scheme to distract the guard (help received here: http://www.warcraft-world.co.uk/wow-quest-guide-bitter-rivals.html) which I ultimately pulled off. Hah. Fun times. I hope it comes up again later.

I Guess All My Posts Are Really Long

Well, I'm back, and I've finally left Kalimdor. I finally broke down and bought the game, hoping to make it through the rest of this class on the free month and two guest passes that came with it. For round two (two and a half? three?) I decided to play as a dwarf. Since the primary thing stringing me along was the interesting settings, I thought that being in a frozen mountain would be a good idea. It turns out I was right. While not as beautiful as the rolling plains were, the mountains really are something to look at, especially iron forge.
I started out the way you do, doing some grindy quests before you can get to the interesting stuff, and I decided, fuck it, I'm just going exploring. I did, and to my pleasant surprise the game rewarded me almost immediately. While I was prancing around in the woods I came across a number of fun places, an eye-poppingly awesome city (seriously, it was like walking into Notre Dame. Of COURSE I don't mean that), and surprisingly I stumbled into the place I was supposed to go for my quests. This leads me to wonder if "fuck it, I'm going exploring" is exactly what Blizzard was hoping their players would say. Perhaps the quests are not the focus of the game after all. That would certainly earn them props on my part since thats what I'm enjoying right now.

A few comments on being a dwarf. First, while the location is good on the eyes, it doesn't have the same visual diversity that Kalimdor had. Pretty much everywhere you look there will be snowy trees. I feel as though Blizzard should have made the environments more extreme in a way, since after all the World is the thing that separates World of warcraft from other games of this type. Instead of being on a snowy mountain, I should be on top of something which dwarfs everest, towering into the clouds like a massive stone pillar, snow and ice whipping in the wind. Instead of being in a haunted forest, I want to be in a wild, untamed place of madness where the tangled, dripping branches block out the sun and paths snake through like a labyrinth. I feel as though they were too tied down to the environments they set up in the previous warcraft games, but the locations are so much more important now, and the whole appeal of fantasy is that you can magnify it as much as you want.
Second, being a dwarf is far too similar to being a minotaur (sorry, tauren) then I'd like. I know I've mentioned this before, but I wish the game play experience from one race to another would be less similar. I wish undead could fly, or never died, or that you could play races that lived under the water. I know that would expand the learning curve, but great, then the players have more to talk about with each other. As it is right now all I'm really picking is a paint job.

What Turned into a Really Long Post

So, my trial subscription finally ran out (you will note by examining the dates on my posts that it has by no means been ten days--colon frowny bracket) so it looks like its going to be back to the dreary looking forest as an undead. However, my roommate needs to update his account, so until then I'll address the issue I mentioned in my last post (okay, two posts ago) and never followed up on, IE the whole ghost death thing. So. My thoughts.

In short:
I really really don't like the whole ghost death thing.

In long:
So I have spent at least a little time in each entry unnecessarily gushing about the visuals of WOW. Yes, it is beautiful, at least as beautiful as a video game can be at this point. However that doesn't mean I'm not going to get bored wandering around the same patch of land again and again. While I'm still alive the repetition feels a little more justified since it sort of feels like punishment for being too stupid to figure out whatever quest I'm trying for at that time, but whenever I die it is a completely different matter. First, you have no control over your re spawn points so if some malevolent animal decides to eat you then the game might unceremoniously throws you a ten minute walk away. Second, everything gets all blurry which I will admit was cool looking the first time but which now not only obscures all the stunning visuals I'm always gushing about but makes it really hard to find my way back to wherever my body is, especially if my body happens to be on the other side of a cliff. Finally, the only times I have ever died is when I encountered an animal which is way more powerful than me (a fairly good assumption, I think). Then, when I get up and the same animal inevitably kills me again, only more easily now since Blizzard conveniently started me out with half health. I'll make the token obnoxious reference to Runescape: while I appreciate that I get to keep all my items (and believe me, I really do appreciate that), Runescape would always respawn you in some safe, friendly place, the message being not to go back. Yes, it was a pain to have to wander all over the map, but the learnign curve was fast. Now, I have all of the same inconvenience of slowly trecking from here to there, but now I have no choice but to go back to the same monster that killed me the first time. Its like the worst of both worlds (minus the item thing). Really what it all boils down to is that the game is telling me to stay in the familiar, and to by no means leave my comfort zone until I have enough levels and weapons to take whatever that place can throw at me. What is completely backward about that is that exploring the world is by far the most fun aspect of the game. Don't punish me for on a whim abandoning my quest and going on a journey up north, Blizzard! That is the whole point of your game! If I can't do that then all I'm paying hundreds of dollars a year for is running errands for animated cow people.
I was curious what reviewers had to say about it, and I was surprised to find that they had the exact polar opposite reaction. In this gamespot review (pause for link): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyQhcFa9yEs
(okay, continue) the nerdy guy says that the death system actually boosts the players ability to explore. I suppose its possible that all MMORPG games before WOW were linear, claustrophobic exercises in boredom and depravity, but that would frankly surprise me.

I'm not sure exactly what I would want to happen. Every game struggles to hit the Challenging/aggravating sweet spot, but it's hard to come up with something that doesn't do the most irritating thing a game can do; take the player out of the action for a while. This could be an area where the races could differ I suppose. It would be neat for example if undead couldn't die, but just got weaker and weaker the longer they fought and would have to buy new limbs and stuff, whereas the night elves would turn into an animal for two minutes and would have to hide while their enemies got distracted before resurrecting. Sometimes I wish Blizzard would remember that Starcraft is the best thing they've ever made.

One last though: I was curious what other people thought of all this, so I googled "World of Warcraft Death". The first five entries were all describing people who died while playing the game. Ironic, since for me the main challenge is staying interested.

A Heartbreaking Post of Shattering Genius

This really doesn't deserve its own post but what the hell its been bothering me.


After playing the RTS for all of middle school, it is SO nice to see buildings that are proportional to the locals supposedly inhabiting them.


Thank you.

Appalitch is Cheating!

So, I'm still in Kalimdor as a Tauren, which right now I'm enjoying. The visuals are still managing to string me along, and there is enough of a story that I can feel invested in the character (though it is peculiar to be invested in a character who keeps dying, espeically when I have to stare at my rotting carcass every time--more on that later).

I discovered a really useful site.
http://wow.stratics.com/content/features/guides/mulgore/index.php#riteofvision2
This is a website that goes through systematically describing how to win all of the quests in my area. While this feels startlingly close to CHEATING, I feel like the game designers intended for users to constantly be huddling and discussing strategy. After all, that builds on the community aspect that this game supposedly does better than most, and allows them to make quests as challenging and complicated as they like. And besides, Warcraft allows you to explore an entire continet, or if you get high level enough and entire planet--it isn't fun in the least to look for a single glowing needle (or in my case, a wellstone) in an entire world. Yes, wandering around is rewarding simply in the stunning visuals you will encounter, but the longer that is all that keeps me playing the more I want to just go outside.

After thought: I was re-watching some of these videos recently, and noticed that Yatzee actually said that WOW is as good as MMORPGs are likely to get. Huh. Here's the link: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/9-Tabula-Rasa

An excursion into Kalimdor

Today my suitmate (who has WOW) was out, so I decided to try the ten day trial where I am likely to remain for...the next ten days. I chose to play as a Tauren for a change of pace.

I have to say that day two was much better than day one. The landscape is truly beautiful, and I frequently found myself distracted from the long stretches with no action when I was required to walk somewhere. There were certainly slow bits, and the whole ghost system has the potential to be really frustrating, but I would say that the overall experience was much better the second time around.

We'll see if it stays that way when I return to being undead.

Wowblog: Day One

So, I finally gave WoW a spin. My character is an undead. I was hesitant to choose what seemed to be the absolute least palatable of my choices, but there seemed to be some perverse pleasure in shambling around as something which probably smelled like compost. After all, since the premise of the game is that you have this second fantasy life, I would think that the pleasure would come out of doing all the things you could never do in real life, like murder a dragon or...hunt...fezboars. Anyway, playing something I can't relate to will at the least encourage me not to take the game too seriously.

Jumping into the story so far was nostaligic. I used to play Reign of Chaos, so the old characters and setting was comforting. In terms of actualy game play I was less impressed. Playing the old RTS, the real fun was always inhabiting that wonderful and intricate world. The people at Blizzard are great story tellers, and I was willing to forgive some poor gameplay mechanics just to follow along as Lorderon fell or the Orcs wandered across the desert. However the game I jumped into had a stark, isolated quality to it. I didn't have any sense of the weight or beauty of the Warcraft world, and instead just felt like another character running erands in some anonymous forest.

In the same vein, the fact that I chose to be an undead didn't really make itself aparent. What seemed exciting about that template in the first place was the novelty of it. We all love zombies, and being one is almost as fun as running away from them, but if it wasn't for my avatar I could have been a human. I realize creating different game mechanics for each race is ten times as much work for the developers, but one would think that would be the whole point. Reign of chaos had the same problem; the idea of four races is alluring, but in the end all you are choosing is a few tweaked abilities and a different paint job. If (like in Starcraft, a much better game) each race was completely different from one another, it would help create that sense of scale that I think is what they are going for.

I realize its a little early to jump to conclusions. We'll see what comes my way.

The Bloggening

Ah College. 

Back in twelfth grade, there would have been no question as the the format of an english class. We would read classic literature, discuss the plots, and occasionally write a paper. If a teacher deviated from that course then they would in small cases receive a terse email from the administration or in extreme cases get fired. 

But, only two terms into College, and I'm being assigned to play World of Warcraft. By a grad student none the less. 

That is not to say that this is going to be an easy class. These blog entries are being graded believe it or not. And there will be a large paper do at the end where I will have to rhetorically asses the game, the blogging world and you, the world of warcraft community. 

But that doesn't change the fact that I am playing a video game for four credits. 

My blogs are going to be looking at the game itself by and large. I'm a born RTS/Platformer person (I realize that those are essentially the opposite of one another), so MMO's are going to be a new experience. 

When I judge the game there will be one main question on my mind: is it better than Runescape?  My only stint with an MMO, Runescape falls in the same category as Tim Burton and Green Day in that I enjoyed it until I turned 12. So. Is WoW going to be a new step in multiplayer games, or simply Runescape with updated graphics? You probably already know, but I'll see.