World of Warcrack

Ok, first, let me say, I realize that the title is derivative and overused.  Let’s get past that.

Are we good?  Ok… I need to say something.

Blizzard really knows what they’re doing.

I jumped off of the World of Warcraft wagon about 10 months ago, right around when Star Wars: the Old Republic came out.  At the time, I was a bit bored with WoW; my guild was in the early stages of death and there wasn’t much for me to do with my main character without them.  I didn’t have much interest in starting over with a new group of people, trying to earn my spot in raid groups for endgame content.  Also, as doing the same quests over and over can only not be boring the first couple times, starting new characters in the game was also not much of an option. 

So, when greener pastures with light sabers and space ships appeared, I jumped the fence.  It hasn’t all been sunshine and puppies in the galaxy far, far away, but that’s a story for another time.

2 weeks ago, Blizzard sent me a “baby come back” email.  They offered me a free week with WoW to help me prepare for the new expansion (read: to get me hooked on the crack again).  At first I pooh poohed this - what would a week do?  What would be different?  What have you done for me lately?

7 days ago, I cashed in my free week, curious to see what, if any, changes had taken place in Azeroth in the 10 months I had been away.   

That first night, I didn’t do much, and wasn’t very impressed.  I logged into my main character – a level 85 Orc Hunter that I’ve been playing since about 2007.  Initially, I was disappointed: 2 years ago, before the last expansion (Cataclysm), there were quests and daily events leading up to release that tried to get you involved in the story; this time, there was none of that.  I spent an hour or so playing as a lower level character I had abandoned a year and a half ago thinking that nothing had changed, other than a tweak to the talent system.  I was underwhelmed.

I didn’t even log in on day two.

By day 3, I decided to log back in as my “main.”  I thought I would try the raid finder tool (an addition that went into effect after I defected) to maybe get a crack at the big bad of the last expansion, a dragon by the name of Deathwing.

 

I wanted to fight this guy... isn't he cute?

 

I was a bit bummed to find out that my gear was not good enough to queue up for the raid this way, and since my guild had finished its death throes in my absence, I wasn’t likely to get into a group for this raid as random people I had never played with would have more stringent gear needs than the raid finder.

I decided to try to run a few random dungeons to pass the time, and I found a new option in the raid/dungeon finder screen: Scenarios.  The only scenario available: Theramore’s Fall.

Rather than queue immediately, I decided to look up what this entailed.  Basically, scenarios are new to the Mists of Pandaria expansion.  They play out like dungeons, but are tuned to be done with 2 or 3 people instead of a full party.  Also, they are open to any party configuration, so waiting on a tank or a healer isn’t necessary.  And, rather than the 45 minutes to an hour that a regular dungeon can take, these are usually able to be completed in 20 minutes.

Then I saw the loot table: there were 2 significant upgrades that my hunter could use that were possible drops from this mini-dungeon.  Also, as this was only a “preview” of the scenario, it wouldn’t be available after the 24^th to anyone under level 90.  I logged back in and queued up for my 1^st crack at Theramore’s Fall.

OMG... so much epic-er than my shit!

I found a group in less than a minute.  This in itself was a treat, since, as there are a glut of damage class players, usually we are stuck waiting 30 minutes or more for a full group to get together for a normal dungeon.

20 minutes later, the scenario was over.  It was a quick, fun diversion, I earned some “justice points” (currency you can use towards gear), but did not get either of the 2 items I was hoping for.  I also re-discovered something: WoW has a ton of charm and I missed this world. 

So I queued up again.

And did so at least another 15 times over the course of the next 4 days.

I ended up getting both items I was hoping for; the 1^st about halfway through my runs, and the other on my last attempt.  I also had accumulated enough “justice” to buy 2 other upgrades to my equipment.  I even started running regular dungeons again and ended up with another upgrade.

Bear in mind that this was all for gear on a character in a game I haven’t played/paid for in about a year.  Gear for a game that I wasn’t sure I was going to keep playing after my free time ended.  Gear that, if I did get the expansion, would be obsolete in a few levels.

Today is the release date of the new expansion, and it’s been on my mind since I woke up this morning.  It has me seriously considering dropping $55 today - $40 for the game, $15 for a month of play time. 

I’m pretty sure I’m going to cave in – I ran into an old guild mate last night that is trying to lure me into his new raid group.

And you get to play as Jack Black in this one... no , really.

Well played, Blizzard pusher-men.  Well played.

A long time ago, in an Azeroth far far away...

I had an opportunity to take Star Wars: The Old Republic for a test drive this weekend.  Since my interest in World of Warcraft has waned of late, I was eager to see EA/Bioware’s upcoming entrant in the MMO wars would be worth the subscription fee come December 20^th.  As a fan of the Star Wars universe (yes, even the prequels), Bioware as a game studio, and MMORPGs, I figured it would be a decent fit.

I put in about 10 hours over 3 sessions of play with 3 different character classes. While I was playing the beta, with launch being about 3 weeks away, content is pretty much set at this point.   I didn’t get to see any high level content, so these relatively spoiler free impressions are based on my experience from level 1 to level 10.

For the uninitiated, SW:TOR is set a few thousand years before Vader, so you won’t see any of the characters from the movies.  But you still get all the trimmings of a Star Wars story: space travel, light speed, droids, bounty hunters, Jedi, etc.  The only difference between then and now is that instead of a handful of monks with laser swords, there is a shit-ton of them.  This goes for the bad guys too – instead of just the emperor and one “Darth,” there are whole planets full of guys with pale skin, bad complexions, and horrendous asthma, who apparently have been ordered to wear only black, and that lightsabers must be red.

If you thought that last paragraph was amusing, good for you.  If it pissed you off because I belittled the Star Wars mythos (and if so, stop jerking it to “Slave Leia” pics, you freak), this next sentence may make you go Boba Fett on me.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is just World of Warcraft set a long(er) time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

This isn’t meant to be a knock at the game.  EA & Bioware made a very smart decision; like it or not, WoW is the gold standard that all MMORPGs are held to, based on their subscription numbers.  11 million people can’t be wrong, right?  So instead of trying to re-invent the model, they took what makes WoW work, and tweaked it.  You won’t be killing 10 boars while searching for a book that was left in that deserted farmhouse, but you will kill giant man-eating slugs while searching a Sith Lord’s tomb for a holocron.  Go back to the person that was to weak/lazy to do it themselves, get a little money, rinse/repeat until its time to move on to the next questing zone.

Travel has been tweaked for the better.  Once you’ve visited a terminal at a quest hub, you can fast travel to it from anywhere else on the map.  In terms of WoW, its like having a hearthstone with multiple destinations.

Combat feels familiar, but a bit more frantic.  Single enemy pulls are almost non-existent; even if your target appears to be alone, in all likelihood he is part of that next closest pack, so 4 on 1 fights are common while questing. 

During my playtime, I was given a companion to accompany my Sith Warrior.  This character will accompany you during quests and will fight alongside you during your journey.   It works similarly to hunter pets in WoW, only you actually get to have conversations and build a relationship (good or bad) with this character over the course of the game.  You can also send this character back to town to sell all the useless shit you’ve acquired while adventuring.

I didn’t have a chance to get too far into the crafting system in the game, but the production skills are referred to as “crew skills.”   Basically if I take archaeology as one of my professions, I can send my companion out to do all the digging, and I can continue to quest.  After a while, he/she will return, and I’ll have materials for one of my production professions.

Where the game blows away most of the MMOs I’ve played is presentation.  I’m not talking about graphics, although they are quite nice for this type of game.  Story is where this game basically hits it out of the park.

In addition to the game’s opening cinematic, both factions (Republic and Empire) get their own intro movie.  Each character class (4 per faction) gets their own Star Wars text crawl and their own class based story missions. 

The biggest step forward is the voice acting.  Every single quest giver is fully voiced, as are your character’s responses.  And the voices are not phoned in – each performance rings true to the source material.  This, coupled with Bioware’s signature conversation wheel and light side/dark side choices, it makes the whole experience more immersive and it seems like you are the impetus for the story instead of a player on the fringe of it.

When I first fired up the game, I played for a solid block of 5 hours, and the time just flew by.  I was completely sold.  After character creation (which is more complex than I care to go into), when the John Williams score kicked in, and the opening text crawl started, I felt like I was 10 again.  I was caught up in this world, and was amazed by the voice acting.  I was ready to call up Blizzard and tell them I needed some space.  Its not Wow, guys, its me...

On Sunday, I put in another couple hours, and the game started to feel very familiar.  I even created 2 new characters, to see the beginnings of their stories.  Again, the stories are fully realized and done very well, but the largest portion of the content is the same basic structure as any other MMO on the market.  The setting is new, the polish is shiny, but the product is very similar.

My final thoughts are this: if you love Star Wars, and are a fan of the current MMORPG formula, this should be an absolute buy for you.  If you think games like WoW ruined the genre by making it too accessible to casual players, you’re going to have to keep looking for the “savior” that reinvents the game.    

World of Warcraft: LFS (Looking For Story)

Ok, so I’ll just come out and say it: I play World of Warcraft.

I’ve been playing for about 3 years now – I picked up the habit just before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out.  At the time, my brother and sister had both been playing for about a year or so, and I finally broke down and accepted one of their invites for a free trial. They’ve since kicked the addiction; I keep going back for more. 

When I was new to the game, I would constantly see people in the chat channels complaining about how the game was being “ruined” by the developers.  The old-schoolers and elitists would talk down to all of us "newbs" about how none of us really were forced to learn how to play the game or how to properly use our characters.

They would complain that the game was too easy – that leveling was too fast and loot came too quickly.

They would bitch that the “big bads” in the game were “nerfed” (nerd-ese for “made soft"), or how they remembered when they had to walk everywhere until level 40 (20 levels from the original level cap) before being able to get a mount and that it was “unfair” how the mount requirement was lowered to 30. 

They used all these things and more to vilify the game’s publisher for breaking the game – that the game was somehow ruined for all the old school players because, in their eyes, the game was being changed to cater to “less skilled and less dedicated” newer players.

At the time, I used to roll my eyes and thought of these complainers as the geek equivalent of the old man who bores the shit out of you with stories about how a penny would buy him 8 tons of candy back in his day.

Now… 3 years later… I find myself having similar complaints.

I don’t care that new characters can get mounts at level 20 (down 10 levels since I started playing).  Walking is slow, the world is big, so I support this change.

I think it’s great that they can press a button and basically “wait in line” for a questing group to tackle a dungeon.  When I started playing, I had to hang out in town and beg in the chat channel for an hour, usually with no success. 

I even like that every so often, they make the high level content easier so that a higher number of players (and not just the dedicated few) get to see and conquer the end game baddies.

What does bother me is the speed of the leveling.  While I like the easier flow of questing from zone to zone, I completely agree with the complainers that gaining levels has been dumbed down too much. 

For me, story is important, particularly in a game that has any sort of grind.  All RPGs, MMORPGs especially, are quite repetitive - you can only kill x amount of y so many times without it feeling like groundhog day.  As such, the story in these types of games is what keeps me engaged and keeps me playing.  The lore for the world that exists in this game is intricate, vast, and chock full of little pop culture easter eggs - if you go out of your way to see every bit of it.  But the game’s design has changed so that it almost seems as if it’s pushing you forward to the detriment of the story

Levels fly by so quickly at this point that your character often “out levels” an area before you’ve seen the whole story for that zone.  The experience and rewards offered for seeing that story line through to the end are far outweighed by the rewards offered for moving onto the next “level appropriate” zone.  Leveling happens even faster if you happen to run a few dungeons in between quests. Throw in heirloom gear (special gear that high level characters can “pass down” to lower level characters) and guild perks and the levels pass by at lightning speed.

For a game that is built on getting the next upgrade, for hitting that next level, the message is clear: fuck the story.  Who cares if the people of Westfall are counting on you to solve the mystery of the murders happening throughout the country side – you’ll get a better sword than you’ll ever get in Westfall if you move on to Redridge Mountains and help the people there with their gnoll problem.  You can improve your character’s growth, abilities, and gear, or “waste time” by seeing the quest through to the end.

When the game was first released, you needed to explore just about every inch of the 2 continents that were available to hit level 60.  When I started playing, you could get away with doing half of that.   These days, you may only see a third of the “original” world, and, more than likely, only see half of the story in every land you visit. 

The game has been going strong for 7 years, and I understand that changes need to be made to a game like this to keep it somewhat fresh, and to keep the all-important subscription dollars rolling in.  I’m just disappointed that it comes at the expense of the story.