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.