Review

Quick - what do Disneyland and World of Warcraft have in common?

They both use a fantasy setting as bait to charge you too much money in exchange for the privilege of standing in line with too many people for an activity that requires no skill on your part whatsoever.

But first, a disclaimer: this was my very first MMO experience. I was an MMO virgin. By choice, mind you; it's not that I hadn't been courted by previous MMOs. But the thought of awkward fumbling in the backseat had kept me home on Saturday nights, eschewing the 'scene' in favor of good wholesome single-player fun. And you know what I mean by 'single-player' [wink] [wink]. No, I'd read the literature, I knew about treadmill leveling, pvp ganking, griefing, class nerfing, duping, and in general the addictive compulsion to acquire randomly-generated items as a means of self-fulfillment. No thank you. So what was different about WoW? Well, mostly just one thing: peer pressure. My good friend Danny (alias DL3, alias Manfredo) had signed up and had begun, cautiously at first like a good drug peddler, to gauge the level of my resistance to joining him in this debauchery.

Ultimately, his lies eroded my better judgement, aided by rumors of WoW being 'casual-friendly', and the player population being less barbarously uncivil than most, and having 'solved' most of the social issues found in the lawless MMO games that had preceded it. So, guardedly optimistic, I gave Blizzard my $40 for a 30 day pass through the looking glass.

Good

There are a lot of 'good' things about WoW, particularly when you define 'good' as 'better than other MMOs'. In short, what Blizzard did was take stock of the MMO landscape (which they had calculatingly circled like a predatorial cat), and identify all of the warts and cracks and structural flaws in the both the genre's blueprints and its manufacturing. Then, they made a better mousetrap, painted it in the colors of their flagship franchise, the Warcraft universe, and unleashed it upon the market.

So, I don't dispute for even a moment that WoW is a 'better' MMO. I know this because even though I haven't played them, I have nevertheless been extremely curious about the genre and have lurked on many forums, and consumed reams of analysis. I know about the economies, pvp, player death, instancing, crafting, griefing, raids, developer-player relations, nerfing, in-game marriages, farming, ninja-looting, kill-stealing, spawn-camping, Korean males dying from 37 hour marathon sessions and/or killing each other over in-game items, etc. etc. etc.. So I jumped into WoW with an eye towards all of these issues, and curious as to how they would be addressed. And for the most part, they were addressed satisfactorily. Blizzard did their homework.

Though hardly a second goes by in the game that you aren't acosted by the fact that you're sharing that virtual space with 1000's of other players, you're meticulously insulated from them. It's surreal, actually, running to and fro in the gameworld, seeing all of these other players running to and fro, each of us functionally oblivious to each other unless we make a conscious choice to stop and breach the dimensional barrier between our coincident universes. In a way it seems antithetical to the touted nature of an MMO - that you're in one virtual world with other living, breathing humans - because you aren't, really. Each of the players is in their own world, and all of the worlds have these carefully negotiated channels for interaction, which can be selectively ignored. And all of these interaction rules have evolved from the discovery, early on, that a bunch of random people populating a virtual world behave, in a word, poorly. And so, over the years, artificial constraints developed, much as they have in our own RL world (RL = 'real life' for you MMO virgins), intended to curtail and eliminate the unpleasantness inherent in human-human interactions. Blizzard, through patient and thoughtful development, has merely offered up the heretofore most civilized incarnation of the MMO promise. Ironic that the pursuit of civility necessitates a reciprocal degeneration in the stated reward of the game.

But enough philosophizing. The crux is that Blizzard filed off nearly all of the rough edges of your daddy's MMORPG. The best evidence of this is that you can, if you wish, play through the majority of WoW's content all by your lonesome without having to sully yourself with any real interactions with other filthy humans. In other words, WoW lets you solo. You'd be totally missing the point, but you can do it. Actually, soloing brings up an interesting thought that I'll postpone discussing until the end.

Honestly, though, I'm trying to give kudos here about how polished are the game systems in WoW. The auctioning system is great, not the 'best', I was told, but well done. Grouping is easy and effective. The chat system is superb. Trading items is easy and (in my experience) fraud-proof. Combat is a very polite affair, with little risk of kill-stealing or any of the other legacy evils suffered by earlier, less-refined, games. The guild system, though I didn't particularly avail myself of it, seemed effective and congenial. And, of course, the pvp environment is as non-threatening as you want it to be. Though I'm sure the true MMO academics have a raft of issues, large and small, with WoW, remember that my perspective is that of someone who hadn't previously ventured forth into the MMO badlands. In short, I found nothing in WoW that actively discriminated against my participation in the gameworld. There was no hazing (save for a lingo barrier) and in that respect WoW is an unmitigated success. Whether or not the mere absence of rough edges is sufficient to nurture long term enjoyment of the game is, of course, up to you, but we'll get to that later.

Here are a few other miscellaneous good points:

• Different categories of servers. While this is clearly a predominately pvp feature (pvp vs. normal servers), the addition of the RP, or role-playing, servers was welcome by me. The allure wasn't so much that of actual role-playing, though I did try to fit in, it was that I suspected - and was proved correct - that those on the RP servers would be, on average, more mature. The population was, in fact, better behaved. Though I personally spent very little time on any non-RP server, I frequently observed my friend Danny play on non-RP servers, and it was obvious that the player population trended more towards the boorish end of Blizzard's fanbase, those weened on years of abusing each other on BattleNet's jerk-infested slums. Which isn't to say that every non-RP server was uniformly bad, only that I suspected that the RP rules would elevate the social behavior slightly and that seemed to be the case. Also, merely having a broad selection of servers in general, of all types, is a boon to the player. If you find the environment on a particular server not to your liking, you can just try another. Granted, you can't take your character with you, but the choice is still there and player choice is always good.

• Blizzard has always been good at creating a unique aesthetic for their games, and WoW is no exception. Upon release, there were immediate howls of anguish from the mob about how bad the game looks, how low-poly the models are, how bottom-rung the graphics are in general. I understand that Blizzard has always favored lower system requirements (luring a much broader potential customer base), but they at least make the most of it, even if they set the bar particularly low. And, frankly, I like the way it looks. It's got character, as trite as that sounds. There's no mistaking a WoW screenshot for anything other than WoW.

Bad

• Restricting player names to a single word is, in my opinion, a mistake. It strikes me more as a convenience to the developer, who doesn't have to accommodate multi-word names in code. And likely it also is used to help curb inappropriate names -- it's a lot harder to be obnoxious with just one word than it is with several. Nevertheless, I think the net effect is negative. Recall that I spent most of my time on the RP servers, and an opportunity to provide avatars with surnames would have been put to good use and also significantly contributed to the immersion.

• I totally disagree with Blizzard's decision to have game time synchronous with real world time. Here's the problem: probably 90% of my opportunities to play the game occurred in the evening hours, as I suspect is the case for most people. And if you play in the evening, it's evening in the game. You rarely get to experience the gameworld under other conditions. A big part of the allure of a virtual world, for me, is that it operates independently of my real world. Time and weather are a huge part of that, and Blizzard failed both.

• Speaking of weather - there isn't any. Or, rather, the weather isn't dynamic. It's actually even worse than not dynamic. It not only doesn't change while you're playing, it doesn't change ever. Certain areas are always partly cloudy and warm, other areas are always partly cloudy and cold. Sorry, but that costs Blizzard about 1000 immersion points right there.

• Let me, in no uncertain terms, dispel the myth that WoW is for casual gamers. It isn't. It is, or rather becomes, about as hardcore as hardcore gets. You may or may not have heard of Blizzard's highly-touted 'Rest' system, intended to allow the proverbial casual gamer to keep pace with his OCD-afflicted compatriots. It doesn't. In less than one week my friend Danny had so far outpaced my character that when we next got together to play, the only viable option was for him to roll a new character. The rest system is no great equalizer. It allows for a small compensatory boost to help erase the experience margin that might arise from one night's absence. In other words, if you and your crew play all the time, and you can't get out of the anniversary dinner with your wife on Friday night, then when you login at midnight after she goes to bed you can probably make up the difference in a few hours and be back on track when your posse reconvenes on Saturday.

  Along other axes, the game fails to avoid the maledictions common to MMORPGs which invariably ward off the truly casual gamer. I think the root of this is the fact that if you're in the game at all, you're in the game with people who play ALL THE F***ING TIME. It's not their fault if the entire social framework skews in their direction, they're the ones that essentially define it.

Ugly

Ok, here's where the gloves come off. Note, however, that I'm freely admitting the following: much of what I'm about to say holds true not just for WoW, but for the stereotypical MMORPG mold from which it was cut. That doesn't make the following criticisms any less legitimate, in my opinion, so long as WoW is in fact guilty of them, which it is.

The fundamental flaw in MMORPGs, as they currently exist, is this: the only metric in the gameworld is how powerful your character is, and the only variable for that metric is how long you spend in the gameworld. It is in this way that MMORPGs fail as games. 'Games', mind you, not interactive experiences. Of course, I'm simplifying when I say that there's only one metric and only one variable for that metric, but it's a reasonable simplification for this discussion. In WoW, and MMORPGs in general, how good you are has nothing to do with you. If someone's been playing for two weeks longer than you have, their character is better than your character. If you've been playing for 8 hours longer than someone else, you character is likely more powerful than theirs is. In my opinion, games represent opportunities to develop and exercise skills, and to do so in an entertaining and enjoyable environment that cannot be found elsewhere. Often, these skills are abstract, requiring problem solving, critical thinking, formulating strategies, comprehending and manipulating interdependent systems, etc.. Other times, games require skills that are closer to what we normally think of as physical skills: eye-hand coordination, quick reflexes, etc.. In WoW, none of these things is required of you. Sure, some of the things you do in the game can be categorized as one of the above, but the extent to which they are actually required of you is incidental to your success in the game. Just do your time, and you'll become more and more powerful.

It is important to note that this is not an accidental characteristic of MMORPG design. It is conscious, deliberate, and at the very foundation of the developer's goals. MMORPG developers have set out to design games at which no conceivable player could ever be bad. Think about this for a moment. All games generally represent a challenge of some sort to the player -- something they must overcome. It might be an intellectual challenge (like a classic adventure game), a skills-based challenge (like a console fighting game), a mix of the two (like a platformer or a story-based FPS). The challenge may originate from another human, like good old-fashioned chess, or from artificial systems constructed by the developer. In all these cases, it is easy to imagine that someone might not actually be very good at overcoming the challenge. For MMORPGs, this is not the case. Aside from utter incompetence, there is nothing that threatens failure for a player in WoW. Simply spend enough time in the game and you'll eventually succeed at everything it has to offer. Ok, sure, there's late-level content that requires grouping, so I guess someone could be so socially inept that they would fail to ever successfully participate in a party. Playing WoW is like playing 52-pickup.

So my claim is that WoW (and MMORPGs in general) are designed specifically so that noone playing them can actually fail the game. Failure engenders frustration, and frustration can engender abandonment. And here we get to the crux of it: the developer's desperately want to minimize the risk of abandonment. Money. Remember that this is all about money. The normal (and familiar) history of game development exists on the premise that people will exchange their money for a challenge, as a single transaction. The history of MMORPG development is an alternate one, which exists on the premise that people will exchange their money on a continuing basis for... what? Not a challenge, that much is obvious. No, the goods being offered are a social environment, and specifically a social environment draped in the accoutrements of an alternate universe.

So MMORPG developers are deliberately courting people who are attracted to the alternate universe being offered, but who would be alienated by any sort of skills-based challenge at which they might fail. The problem with this is that in doing so, the developers have instead alienated those people who are attracted to the alternate universe but discover it to be wholly unsatisfying when that universe requires nothing from them besides the slavish donation of both their money and their time.

Now I'm sure I've pissed off all of the MMORPG fans, who are now convinced I've said that they 'have no skills'. No. What I've said is that the games require no skills of them. Obviously, Blizzard has no reason to listen to this complaint, since they (and many other developers) seem to be making tons of money doing precisely what I've described.

I wanted to include in this section a few quotes from the gents at Penny Arcade, who are now in the habit of discussing WoW on a weekly basis, it seems. They've summarized a few (negative) issues that I feel are core to the definition of the WoW experience.

• 20050608:

  "So last night I waited 45 minutes to play an eight minute game of CTF in the Warsong Gulch Battleground. Those eight minutes were pretty fun but once it was all over the server booted me back out to wait in line again for another game."

  I haven't mentioned the Battlegrounds yet, mostly because I think they're asininely stupid. First, the notion of having to fucking *wait* to play a game for which I'm already paying a monthly fee is absurd. Second, the experience offered by the Battlegrounds strikes me as being a polar opposite to that which brings people to MMORPGs in the first place. If someone beats me at CTF, I want it to be because they, and their team, are better than me and my team, not because my team got stuck with a couple of lvl 54 characters while their team's roster was lvl 60 top to bottom. This whole notion of instanced multiplayer content actually brings up the bigger issue of WoW's identity crisis. You don't have to read much about WoW to find people complaining that it morphs into something entirely different in the late game. Generally, the complaint is that, near the level cap, WoW ceases being what people were enjoying and what they'd paid for, and becomes something else entirely. It isn't just the Battlegrounds stuff, either. The normal questing stops being about solo or small party based PvE and becomes the stereotypical MMORPG multi-hour, huge group raid. Why don't you hear people from the other side of the fence, saying that the game transitions from being something they hated to something that's fun? Because by the time you hit the late game, you've probably spent hundreds of hours in the game, which isn't something someone usually does if they're not having fun. Thus, the transition ends up being almost universally negative for the player base.

• 20050729:

  "At 60 we're no longer gaining XP so what that means is that now we're after loot. Like pretty much every other Rogue I'm hungry for the Shadowcraft armor and Kara like any good Druid is hunting down her Wildheart set. So every other night we jump into a ten man raid group and we run through one of the three instances that hold these rare treasures. Like a trip to Vegas this involves a lot of finger crossing and dice rolling. Every time no matter what group we fall in with it�s exactly the same. The most effective paths through each of these dungeons has been plotted out long ago and like a ride a Disney Land we simply latch the bar and follow the rails. The same mobs are pulled in the same order and through the same rooms while the same spells are cast for roughly two or three hours.
  ...
  We keep going back though and I guess that's why Casinos make so much money. The siren song of that elusive jackpot is hard to deny. The frustrating part is that even if I hit that jackpot and I am able to obtain my Shadowcraft set, what then? I'm doing all this and after it's all done I'll look just like every other level 60 Rogue. Sure there are the guys that raid Molten Core every night and are decked out with Nightslayer gear or the crazy kids that spend their lives in Battlegrounds running around with the Warlords armor of Jesus Christ or whatever. For the most part I'm going to end up looking just like every other Rogue. Honestly I think that's a huge problem."

  I think that's a huge problem as well. In fact, I'm astounded that these games which superficially go to such great lengths to accommodate avatar customization turn around and embed homogenization as the implicit ultimate player goal. And keep in mind that the above complaint comes from a self-described devout addict of the game. Imagine how the same circumstances feel to someone who possesses a lower magnitude affection for the game to begin with. You don't have to imagine, because I can tell you. It casts a pall of futility over the entire experience. Note, in my defense I had actually written my opening Disneyland analogy before I got this quote, so forgive the inadvertent pseudo-plagiarism.

Beautiful

• The emote system in WoW is sublime. Honestly, it's easily the single strongest contributing factor to the game's appeal. Having said what I've said about MMORPGs boiling down to nothing more than social clubs, I can say that WoW's emote system is what makes its social club so incredibly appealing. The game empowers the player with a huge array of character gestures and expressions that imbue genuineness to the social interactions.

• The speech bubbles, which at first seem so artificial, are actually an excellent compliment to the emote system. Conversations between characters are able to actually manifest in the gameworld, and not just in the text chat window that's part of the HUD. Your eyes remain in the scene, watching both the non-verbal and verbal contributions of the participating characters. Instead of just watching text flit past in a window, you're watching multiple avatars interact with each other on the screen.

• A third pillar of social support is the ability to customize and segregate the chat into different categories, each displayed in their own UI window, if desired. This doesn't sound like much, but having the ability to display a designated party chat window, or guild chat window, etc., dramatically improves the player's ability to participate meaningfully in those social channels. As important as the emote and speech bubbles are to the enjoyment of close vacinity interactions, the customizable chat channels are to the location-independent interactions, which constitute such a huge part of the experience.

  That these communication tools of the game are so refined tells me that Blizzard understands that what players do most in this kind of game is communicate. From day one, and increasingly so with each passing day, the reason gamers are logging in is social interaction. Blizzard simply can't create content faster than players can consume it, so the majority of payers will have always seen the majority of the game, and what keeps them subscribed is a positive social environment.

• The gameworld is physically huge, and Blizzard has done an excellent job of designing it in such a way that it accommodates the player population. Hub cities provide the dense hustle and bustle that creates a sense of healthy vibrancy to the world, contrasted with increasingly remote areas that enforce the sense of scale. The instances (areas spawned on the fly and dedicated exclusively to a small party of players) round out the spectrum by providing the sense of adventure and danger necessary to maintain the allusion of a medieval fantasy setting.

• Speaking of physically huge gameworlds, travel is an interesting issue in MMORPGs, and again Blizzard has provided a stellar solution. There are several modes of travel, and the decision to actually show the player the world as they travel it is genius. Years from now, I will look back on WoW and the one thing I guarantee I'll remember with tremendous fondness is flying on the back of a giant eagle as it swooped along treetops and between mountain peaks, while I spotted adventuring players on the ground below. Make travel too tedious and players hate it, make it too instantaneous and players compain about lack of immersion, but make it take the right amount of time and have that time be stunningly cinematic and you've hit the sweetspot.

• The UI in WoW is excellent, for two reasons. First is that, out of the box, Blizzard provides an intuitive, flexible interface that is nearly abrasion-free. The second is that, by the time you've played enough to begin lamenting the default UI's few failings, you're probably saavy enough to grab a few UI mods and find just the right kind of customization you're seeking, thanks to Blizzard's choice of LUA for its UI scripting implementation. The reason I didn't give WoW the highest possible interface score is because Blizzard left it to the mod community to take some of the UI concepts to their natural conclusion. While it would have been more convenient for me had I not had to seek out, install, configure, and maintain UI mods, I'm thankful that Blizzard had the wherewithal to not prevent me from doing so.

Summary

The bottom line of all this ranting is this: know what you're paying for. At the end of the day, for all its improvements, WoW is still nothing more and nothing less than your typical MMORPG. They didn't break the mold. In my opinion, 'typical MMORPG' means that its long term appeal is the social environment. There's no gameplay challenge. You're paying for membership to a community and a client with which to interact with that community. In WoW's case, both the community and the client are above average, to say the least. But don't go in expecting something else. You probably already know whether or not paying a monthly fee for access to a community is tolerable to you, and what kind of community makes it tolerable. The question I found myself continually asking is 'what do I expect for $15?' The answer, ultimately, was that I expect more than WoW has to offer.

Money changes everything. It's impossible to discuss a game like WoW outside the context of its subscription fee. The reason is that the subscription fee ultimately denormalizes the way we compare games. Consider games like Baldur's Gate, or Morrowind. How do you compare them to an MMORPG? They're all of them based on a medieval fantasy setting. You have a character, with stats. You kill montsters, you get lots of stuff. Let's say that they have an equal amount of questing content in them. The difference is that for a Baldur's Gate or a Morrowind, you get everything that the game has to offer for one single sticker price. And that price is the basis for comparison. With WoW, to experience its content, you've got not only the initial sticker price, but then the ongoing monthly fee. I mentioned previously that the concept of soloing through WoW brought up an interesting thought. Both me and my friend Danny (who also ultimately quit WoW) agreed that we'd be happy to have spent the initial $40 for the opportunity to play through all of WoW's quest content. We loved the huge gameworld, the aesthetics, the customary RPG rewards of leveling and collecting. If we could have gone to the store, paid $40, and come home and spent a good (say) 50 hours or more experiencing the game, we'd call it a win. If we could do that cooperatively, we'd call it a huge win. But instead of offering a nice RPG's worth of content, condensed into a digestible 50 hours, WoW's content has been stretched out over months and months, so that you're now comparing apples and oranges because of the subscription fee. Instead of asking if WoW offers enough to justify $40, you're asking if WoW offers enough for $100 or more. Ultimately, the price goes so high that I'm forced to just throw out the game comparison and examine just the social aspect. That's why I end up concluding that all MMORPGs, up to now, should be viewed as membership in a community and a client with which to access that community. It is upon that evaluation that you should base your financial decision.

Let me be clear - I didn't quit WoW because I didn't like it. Believe me, as negative as I am inclined to be about the genre, I get it. I get the appeal. I understand the addiction. Even sitting here, writing this, I wish my WoW account was still open. If it were, then I would, on occasion, log in and spend a few hours in that world, with those people. I made some friends and I enjoyed the time and the environment. I just didn't think it was worth $15 per month. And I told Blizzard as much, in their feedback form when I cancelled my account. Their price point doesn't accommodate someone like myself, who doesn't want to turn a single game into a lifestyle. I like to play *lots* of games. The $15 WoW was asking of me only seemed worthwhile if I bundled it with a significant percentage of my free time, and I wasn't willing to do that. In that sense, WoW doesn't do what everyone is claiming it does, it doesn't work for the casual gamer. Blizzard offers no option for someone like me who genuinely enjoys what they have created, and the community that goes with it, but who wants to enjoy it in small doses. They offer all or nothing, so I took nothing.