Monday, October 26, 2009

World Warcraft New World


Game Info
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Genre(s): Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
Players: Thousands
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Release Date: November 22, 2004


Summary

Four years have passed since the aftermath of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and a great tension now smolders throughout the ravaged world of Azeroth. As the battle-worn races begin to rebuild their shattered kingdoms, new threats, both ancient and ominous, arise to plague the world once again. World of Warcraft is an online role-playing experience set in the award-winning Warcraft universe. Players assume the roles of Warcraft heroes as they explore, adventure, and quest across a vast world. Being "Massively Multiplayer," World of Warcraft allows thousands of players to interact within the same world. Whether adventuring together or fighting against each other in epic battles, players will form friendships, forge alliances, and compete with enemies for power and glory. A dedicated live team will create a constant stream of new adventures to undertake, lands to explore, and monsters to vanquish. This content ensures that the game will never be the same from month to month, and will continue to offer new challenges and adventures for years to come. [Blizzard Entertainment]

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December 10, 2004 - MMOs are a strange beast. They are designed to make you play as much as possible, yet addictiveness does not always equal fun. In the field of pyschology, there are several kinds of rewards systems, and the one that seems to be the most successful is the random reward introduced at a random time. Sometimes you click the button, and nothing happens. Sometimes you click and get the food pellet. It's this mechanism that fuels the slots in Vegas, and when you walk away empty, as is statistically inevitable over a long enough stretch of time, you tell yourself that the overall value was the experience itself, since you come away with nothing tangible. MMOs take away your time and they never deliver a discreet conclusion.

I played a ton of Dark Age of Camelot shortly after it launched, and I find myself reminded of it negatively every day that I play World of Warcraft. To discuss the differences in favor of WoW would be an article in itself, but I'll try to keep to the main points.

First, let's talk about The Grind. In a traditional persistent online RPG, you advance your character by killing an endless string of monsters, and by doing "FedEx" quests where you get some money and/or experience points by delivering an arbitrary item from Point A to Point B. As your character advances, his or her progress begins to slow. It takes longer and longer to get to the next level, because you need more and more experience points each time, yet the experience returned from monsters and deliveries does not scale accordingly. Yet you feel compelled to continue because at Level X you get a really cool spell or other ability that's supposed to make the game more "fun."

The second part of the grind is "downtime," the amount of time it takes to recover from each monster (or "mob") encounter. When I played DAOC, it typically took every ounce of my resources to defeat an enemy that would give me respectable experience. Then I would sit down and wait while my energy bars slowly refilled. Then you'd have to wait awhile for the next batch of monsters to spawn again, and you'd typically be competing against other players and "camping" this same spot all day long.

Now, imagine an MMO where your experience is a string of quests where you're rewarded with a cool item, recipe, or a decent amount of pocket money. A game where the grind is virtually eliminated--a game where downtime is relatively nonexistent, where enemies respawn rapidly and dynamically according to how many players are in the local area; where you can use a healing spell, or bandage yourself, or eat some food, or all three, before diving right back in again. Your character's death doesn't result in the loss of many hours of experience points, or one of your items, or any money (although there is item decay, so whatever you have equipped currently takes a 10% durability hit). When you die, you resurrect as a ghost who moves quickly, runs on water, and cannot be harmed on its way back to its body. You can also have a player resurrect you in a matter of moments, even after you have entered ghost form. This is a game that understands Fun.

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See Also World Warcraft : Burning Crusade

See Also World Warcraft : Cataclysm

See Also World Warcraft : Wrath of the Lich King

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