My Crusade is on Fire

A few months ago I did a free trial of World of Warcraft. It was fun, although I didn't really get the appeal that much. I did end up picking up a boxed copy for ten bucks for the activation code, and proceeded to not play that much during the free month they gave me. Still, that gave me the right to a similar trial for the expansion, and I decided to test it during my break.

I'm not really much of an authority on the game, as my strongest character is level 13. A lot of what The Burning Crusade added was higher level stuff, and I'm not even close to that. I have to imagine that's where a lot of the appeal is, because I don't find repetitive quests revolving around killing something a bunch of times compelling, but that's what you have to do to get to the good stuff. I did play as a Dranei, so it was content new to the expansion. It's hard to get too far playing an hour or two at a time for 10 days, but I enjoyed it while it lasted and I'm actually a little disappointed the trial's already over. It might have been time though, as I was already getting a little tired of the quests.

The problem with World of Warcraft to me is that the setting and lore are much more interesting that the game itself. They put a lot of effort into developing the world and history, but I think I liked discovering new areas more than the combat. There is some strategy to fighting, and I'm sure there's a lot more at higher levels, but it's mostly just right-clicking, using a few spells or buffs, and waiting until the other guy is dead. The same universe with more action-oriented, direct gameplay would be great. Having other people around is cool, but if someone made an MMO with gameplay more like Oblivion, that could be really cool.

A Week With WoW

So, a lot of my coworkers have been playing World of Warcraft. You know a game has to be doing something right when it gets people in their 40's addicted to it. I decided to try out the free 10-day trial account and see if it was really that amazing. From my obviously very limited experience, WoW is definitely a fun game, but still can't avoid a lot of the pitfalls that steer me away from MMO's in general.

I played a bit with two different characters; a Tauren Druid named Haniki and a Dwarf Warrior named Chucksteak (This character is on the server my coworkers play, they mostly have meat-themed names). Being purely combat-based and tougher, warriors are a bit easier to play, at least in the beginning, and I made more progress with Chucksteak. He's level 11, and Haniki is level 6. Right when I first started playing, I thought I was already hooked. The combat was pretty simple but fun, and there's just something compelling about the RPG cycle of killing monsters and getting rewarded for it. But it really wasn't too long before some seams started showing. For the most part, there are four kinds of quests.

1) Kill a certain number of a certain type of enemy.
2) Kill a certain type of enemy, and hope they drop a certain kind of item you need to collect a certain number of.
3) Kill a specific, slightly tougher enemy.
4) Bring a given item from one place to another.

And that's it. A game with a bit more creativity than that is more my speed. That's fine in an action game sometimes, but we're talking about a genre where combat consists of right-clicking, maybe using a spell or ability as necessary, and hoping the random number generator works in your favor. I'm sure as you get farther in the game it gets deeper, as you do things in large groups and get to face more advanced enemies, equip more advanced gear, and develop actual combat strategies that require intelligence and a bit of dexterity to pull off. But that sure seems like it will take a while.

The other MMO annoyance is when you get killed, usually because you get ganged up on. This happens much more as you advance and enemies are smart enough to retreat, which doesn't actually save them, just causes you to walk into the range of another, fully healed foe if you decide to pursue. WoW is really pretty forgiving, you don't lose experience or money or anything, you just have to either go find your body or sacrifice some of your equipment's durability to resurrect. The relative kindness still doesn't make it less annoying to die than in any other genre, though. Especially when you get killed in a cave somewhere far away from the nearest town, it's a complete chore to trudge all the way back to your corpse and try to do better this time. It really becomes a problem when it's tough to find a place close enough to the body that isn't in range of some more enemies, because it sucks to come back and then almost immediately die again while trying to retreat and gather your bearings.

World of Warcraft is a fun game, but it's a little difficult for me to justify paying $15 a month for it, when I don't totally love it yet and there are plenty of other games I want to get around to finishing first. I might upgrade my account some time in the near future, at least to see what some of the higher level stuff is like, but it won't be happening too soon.