We must save the World! ...of Warcraft
It finally happened.
You have to understand that, after dabbling in Everquest a few years ago, I swore to myself that I would never, ever let myself get drawn into another MMO again. My EQ experience can only be described as equal parts addiction and frustration: rather like heroin, but without all the fun hallucinations. Therefore I remained on the sidelines while the WoW phenomenon completely passed me by, while nearly everyone I knew, one by one, fell prey to the game's nefarious grasp. Not me, I swore. I would stay pure and chaste; I would dine on the lesser fare of single-player games.
Enter my roommate, Albert, a WoW veteran of several years, who recently picked up the game again after a hiatus. As with all MMOs, the quality of the experience is directly proportional to the people that you play with, and he wanted to drag myself, as well as our friends Nick and John, into the game with him. It was a hard sell, but Blizzard's insidious ploy of offering a free, week-long trial, without any sort of necessary commitments whatsoever, helped sucker us in.
So it was with some trepidation that I signed up, an arduous process that took three or four hours to install the game and download all the various patches.
After another few hours of trying to decide what race and class I wanted to play, including three or four false starts, I eventually settled on a human mage. Her name would be Gothiqua (Gothika was already taken), and she would be Emo Sorceress Supreme. Sporting dyed black hair, multiple piercings, and teenage angst, I sent Gothiqua forth into the world of Azeroth.
Now, a week and 16 levels later, I look back at my experience, feeling like I've just taken the first step on a long, wonderful journey. Now, granted, compared to the level 60 l33t I'm still something of a n00b, but I think I can safely say that World of Warcraft is a fun little game. As I've said to Albert on multiple occasions, it's like Blizzard took all the good bits of EverQuest and improved on it, and left out all the bad parts.
Part of it stems from the fact that there's always something to do. Most of your time in WoW will be spent on completing quests, which are ubiquitous throughout the world. Most of the quests, at least to begin with, are simple to achieve, and reward you upon completion with a nice experience boost, a handy item, and a feeling of satisfaction. There wasn't any of the aimless wandering of EQ, where I killed things just to kill them and collect ph4t l00t. There's that in WoW, of course, but the beauty lies in the fact you can do so many things at once. While attacking bandits for a quest assigned by a Goldshire guard, you can pillage and loot their stuff, selling the spoils for handy gold; while also simultaneously working on your skinning and cooking skills from the local beasts. There's always something to upgrade, improve, or practice on; the game never gets boring.
The learning curve is quite gentle, at least to begin with. Every class can solo until about level 10 or so. After that, the differences between the classes start to become readily apparent. One thing that was pleasantly unexpected was the discovery that the mage could actually solo, more or less. As long as I had mana left, I could usually handle critters of higher levels, and even groups of two or three, by myself. After EQ, where my wizard was dead meat unless I happened to convince a "tank" to help me out, this was definitely a nice surprise.
Sure, some of the other players were idiots and yahoos, but I've accepted this as an inevitable fact of any online multi-player game. The nifty thing about WoW is that, unless you're playing on a PvP server, PvP combat is entirely optional--you don't have to worry about being slain by a PKing asshole unless you like that sort of thing.
My only real complaint was everything--the characters, the creatures, and the world--seemed sort of cartoonish; it was like they took Warcraft 3 and made it an MMO, which I guess was what Blizzard was going for. I wish that the various races could look a little bit more realistic, a little...sexier. Is that so wrong?
So now I have to make the decision whether to actually cough up money for WoW or not. While I did definitely enjoy my WoW experience, I'm not sure if I'm ready to make that commitment just yet. It wasn't as addictive as I was afraid of; maybe that's just me getting older. I'm definitely more of a casual gamer than a hardcore one, willing to devote no more than maybe one or two hours a night. I've been hearing a lot of things about Guild Wars, mostly good, and I think that maybe I'll check that out before deciding to stay with WoW.
You have to understand that, after dabbling in Everquest a few years ago, I swore to myself that I would never, ever let myself get drawn into another MMO again. My EQ experience can only be described as equal parts addiction and frustration: rather like heroin, but without all the fun hallucinations. Therefore I remained on the sidelines while the WoW phenomenon completely passed me by, while nearly everyone I knew, one by one, fell prey to the game's nefarious grasp. Not me, I swore. I would stay pure and chaste; I would dine on the lesser fare of single-player games.
Enter my roommate, Albert, a WoW veteran of several years, who recently picked up the game again after a hiatus. As with all MMOs, the quality of the experience is directly proportional to the people that you play with, and he wanted to drag myself, as well as our friends Nick and John, into the game with him. It was a hard sell, but Blizzard's insidious ploy of offering a free, week-long trial, without any sort of necessary commitments whatsoever, helped sucker us in.
So it was with some trepidation that I signed up, an arduous process that took three or four hours to install the game and download all the various patches.
After another few hours of trying to decide what race and class I wanted to play, including three or four false starts, I eventually settled on a human mage. Her name would be Gothiqua (Gothika was already taken), and she would be Emo Sorceress Supreme. Sporting dyed black hair, multiple piercings, and teenage angst, I sent Gothiqua forth into the world of Azeroth.
Now, a week and 16 levels later, I look back at my experience, feeling like I've just taken the first step on a long, wonderful journey. Now, granted, compared to the level 60 l33t I'm still something of a n00b, but I think I can safely say that World of Warcraft is a fun little game. As I've said to Albert on multiple occasions, it's like Blizzard took all the good bits of EverQuest and improved on it, and left out all the bad parts.
Part of it stems from the fact that there's always something to do. Most of your time in WoW will be spent on completing quests, which are ubiquitous throughout the world. Most of the quests, at least to begin with, are simple to achieve, and reward you upon completion with a nice experience boost, a handy item, and a feeling of satisfaction. There wasn't any of the aimless wandering of EQ, where I killed things just to kill them and collect ph4t l00t. There's that in WoW, of course, but the beauty lies in the fact you can do so many things at once. While attacking bandits for a quest assigned by a Goldshire guard, you can pillage and loot their stuff, selling the spoils for handy gold; while also simultaneously working on your skinning and cooking skills from the local beasts. There's always something to upgrade, improve, or practice on; the game never gets boring.
The learning curve is quite gentle, at least to begin with. Every class can solo until about level 10 or so. After that, the differences between the classes start to become readily apparent. One thing that was pleasantly unexpected was the discovery that the mage could actually solo, more or less. As long as I had mana left, I could usually handle critters of higher levels, and even groups of two or three, by myself. After EQ, where my wizard was dead meat unless I happened to convince a "tank" to help me out, this was definitely a nice surprise.
Sure, some of the other players were idiots and yahoos, but I've accepted this as an inevitable fact of any online multi-player game. The nifty thing about WoW is that, unless you're playing on a PvP server, PvP combat is entirely optional--you don't have to worry about being slain by a PKing asshole unless you like that sort of thing.
My only real complaint was everything--the characters, the creatures, and the world--seemed sort of cartoonish; it was like they took Warcraft 3 and made it an MMO, which I guess was what Blizzard was going for. I wish that the various races could look a little bit more realistic, a little...sexier. Is that so wrong?
So now I have to make the decision whether to actually cough up money for WoW or not. While I did definitely enjoy my WoW experience, I'm not sure if I'm ready to make that commitment just yet. It wasn't as addictive as I was afraid of; maybe that's just me getting older. I'm definitely more of a casual gamer than a hardcore one, willing to devote no more than maybe one or two hours a night. I've been hearing a lot of things about Guild Wars, mostly good, and I think that maybe I'll check that out before deciding to stay with WoW.