Confessions of a Recovering World of Warcraft Addict or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Gold Farmer…

“Hi my name is Trasken and I have played World of Warcraft.” Yes, I like the rest of the freakin’ world have played Blizzards substitute for crack. I’ve played and loved it. The world was rich with places to explore and many a wolf-pelt to collect. WoW was fun and engaging in a very specific way and this synergy has yet to have been matched by any game I have yet played. But this massively multi-player aspect of the game continues to be World of Warcraft’s greatest strength and its’ most pronounced weakness.

I have been a rabid consumer of Blizzard’s games since almost since they started making them. While I may have missed out on some Lost Vikings action, I can proudly say that I have owned every single Blizzard game that has made its way onto the Macintosh platform. I started in the winter of 1996 with Warcraft II: The Tides of Darkness. Now as a child, and a boy-child at that, who doesn’t look at a game with the sub-heading “Tides of Darkness” and just go “I must have this game.” Just say that name out loud. It just oozes cool. There were other aspects of the game that made it enjoyable, but if Blizzard went back to naming the games like they used at least some of the shortcomings would be overlooked. TIDES OF DARKNESS!!! Erm… Sorry, just a little bit of nostalgia overload. The larger point of this, if there ever was one, is that Blizzard games used to be about great story. No there wasn’t necessarily a lot there, but it was good and captivating and entertaining. There was something around the vicinity of seventy pages in the Warcraft II manual and a good half of that was dedicated to the story of Orcs and Humans.

Despite reaching its pinnacle in Warcraft III, there was a strong motif of betrayal carried through the entirety of the game. It wasn’t quite as fun as the previous game, but that is mostly because of the nuance allowed to the characters in WC III. Many people find that the story of Warcraft III was when Blizzard came off the rails and started to introduce too many different angles and reference too many different aspects of previous ideas, from Tolkien to Dungeons and Dragons. However, Warcraft III had the distinct advantage of playability and the introduction of role-playing elements into the real-time-strategy universe of Warcraft played rather well. This was all well and good considering that World of Warcraft was due out in two years after the release of the Frozen Throne expansion pack and had been under development for several years. I, and as I suspect many players, were not initially interested in the whole MMORPG concept. We had played Diablo and its’ wonderful sequel, but the prospect of always having the be online and reading about what a mess that EverQuest was in, was not terribly excited that Blizzard’s next foray into gaming was through the venue of the MMORPG.

So I was convinced that I would never buy World of Warcraft. Then several things happened in relatively short succession. Firstly, I acquired a new computer. A G4 PowerBook 12 incher. A sweet machine in its day and still kicking around doing light duty work here and there. Secondly, I moved to an establishment with a dedicated broadband connection. I will admit that the prospect of playing a game where you would have to be connected to the internet the whole time on flaky dialup did not appeal. I have since played the game on said flaky dialup and it’s really not that bad. Finally, I tried out the World of Warcraft Stress Test. For those of you who don’t remember it lasted about the last week of November of 2004 and allowed anyone who dounloaded the demo to create a character in the world of Azeroth. I was hooked in about three hours of play. In short order I had convinced I needed this game and when the Stress Test beta expired I drove out to the local Best Buy and collected a copy. It was off from there.

The experience was overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I can remember my first visit to Stormwind. So many of the little details that many players now overlook struck me as fantastic. The clock tower sounding the hour (which was correct amazing times that we live in), the hammering on the anvils in the Dwarven Quarter, hidden warlock coven in the Slaughtered Lamb, and the magnificent Stormwind Keep. Leveling and running quests was fun at first because the gathering of wolf-pelts was actually bringing clear and obvious character advancement. This is still the major strength of World of Warcraft. It is ridiculously for new players to start and have that little fuzzy feeling that they could run up the ladder quite quickly and see all of the world. Slowly the engulfing feeling of the first few zones and levels was out and the heroic player character is falling into the grind.

Still I persevered with the help of a friendly guild, but soon good story arcs and challenging, yet not impossible quest items were few and far between. The story which had so attracted me to the Warcraft universe in the first place was falling prey to repetition and the traps of many successful franchises. Blizzard didn’t know where they were coming from or often where they were going with any given story element. Thus become the grievous and often very avoidable storyline fuck-ups that only serve to aggravate the loyal and shall I say very OCD fan-base of many MMORPGs. Not to say there weren’t good stories there, but therein lies the second problem that I have with World of Warcraft; the lack of good easy to access story content.

There is no way in the Seven Hells that anyone could collect all of the particular story elements for any one of the massive quests that frame the end-game material in World of Warcraft. The dilemma then becomes, as someone who is interested in that portion of the game, how does one enjoy it? Most guilds are not going to let you lollygag around in a hard instance reading all of the books in the library or the plaques in the statuary. They want loot and at the very least to escape with minimal repair costs. Thus the only real way to experience the good story is to try to brave it solo or to find guild willing to cater to your desires. Having searched far and wide and not finding a solution that I wanted I am pretty much ready to deem this a near impossibility at this point. Even getting to see the end-game content requires more that just a successive period hammering at a mission to beat it, it requires time and effort the likes of which have never been seen before in an electronic format. To acquire keys and potions, there are an elaborate number of steps to follow and traveling half-way across the world to collect these items becomes quickly irritating. Now one could argue that there would be little point to a powerful dungeon and thus a great reward without a little bit of the epic quality to a quest that people have come to expect from Hollywood, but I say that if the main motivation for the characters is clearly not the plot then why should the game designers make the plot choose so many of its’ settings for them? Why should the key need all of these ingredients from far flung places if the only reason to do so is to further a plot which no one cares about?

And therein lies the biggest challenge for the World of Warcraft. You can’t beat the game. There is no end to it. And eventually I lose interest in even the most compelling game, even if there are new things to do and more time to waste. I say that Blizzard is fortunate that I played World of Warcraft for almost 12 months straight, that has seriously eclipsed the amount of time that I have ever spent upon any game of theirs combined. But that begs the question of what made me stop playing? The answer is trifold: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. The dull and repetitive nature of World of Warcraft wears very thin very quickly and makes the game almost unplayable at points. Everything from quests to the crafting requires so much time upkeep that it it really is absurd the amount of time that can be easily wasted doing this. Add to this a game environment that is frozen in realtime and there really are some very unpleasant aspects to World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is exciting and fun to play, to a point. I wholeheartedly agree with the way that Blizzard implemented the character system for early players. It encourages newbies to become a part of the game rather quickly and the interface has really simplified the actions of the new player. Based upon reports and other personal experience I believe that World of Warcraft has the best early game of any other MMORPG. But I realized that the late-game problems of the quest for the best sword and not really for the challenge of beating the best monster or coming up with a new and different way to accomplish things, leaves me waiting for Diablo III or the next off-line hack-and-slash RPG. This realization lead World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade to be the first Blizzard game that did not grace my game rack. I hope it and its’ companion to be the last such instances.