World of WarCraft

Several years ago, Blizzard Entertainment bought a small game company in its attempt to expand its product line. That company became Blizzard North, and the game was, of course, Diablo. Diablo, its wildly popular sequel and its expansion were the closest Blizzard has ever been to an online RPG in its product line.

Until now.

On November 8th, 2004, I got my first chance to play World of WarCraft, after having followed its development over the past three years. I am very impressed by what I see - this game benefits a lot from Blizzard's experience with Diablo and with the talent they have pulled from Sony Online Entertainment (the company responsible for EverQuest).

The Pros

Appearance

The game is a visual treat. There is a lot of eye candy here; it leaves no doubt that this is the World of WarCraft. There is a lot of attention to detail, which always adds to the believability of the game.

The system requirements are quite reasonable; my GeForce4 MX is well up to the task (I believe they claim GeForce2 MX as a minimum).

Interface

Movement uses WASD or the arrow keys, which is pretty common for first-person shooters on the PC. Left-clicking selects entities in-game, and right-clicking performs an action. It's pretty intuitive, which is the way it should be. The user interface is built with Lua, a powerful programming language, and is customizable by the user through addons. Very impressive!

Quests

The best way to earn experience is through quests. This is one of the game's big selling points: instead of just killing random stuff, quests revolve around goals (which usually, but not always, involve killing stuff - this is WarCraft after all, not PeaceCraft). Goals include finding things, rescuing someone, delivering packages, escorting people, killing certain monsters, and several others. The variety is what keeps the game from getting boring.

Lessons Learned from Diablo

A Single World

From a programming standpoint, the biggest problem with Diablo is that it has devolved into the following algorithm for players:

• Create a game
• Find and kill a certain monster or set of monsters
• Grab the loot
• Lather, rinse and repeat

This is extremely repetitive (thus boring), but it has an important consequence for the Battle.net servers: they spend much of their time creating the world itself. This is a waste of resources better spent keeping people *in* the world. WoW definitely succeeds on this front.

No Magic Find!

The biggest single broken feature in Diablo is a bonus called Magic Find, or simply MF. Basically, it improves the chances of finding special items. Since finding the uber elite items is the only remaining reason to play Diablo, Magic Find is critical to "real" players.

Blizzard has crippled (nerfed) this feature repeatedly, but it hasn't changed anything. MF only serves to separate the "haves" from the "have-nots", which is why you can find magic items on Ebay for sale, for real money. MF player accounts also appear for the same reasons.

In WoW, MF does not exist at all, thank goodness!

Lessons Learned from EverQuest

I've never played EverQuest, but I can tell a couple of things that WoW has benefitted from the experience. The quest system gives you a reason to play, which is a huge irony given the name "EverQuest". The player economy is very reasonable (money actually means something). Death is penalized with the so-called "corpse run" and a penalty of damaged items (which requires money to fix).

The Cons

Cost

Unlike Diablo, logging into the Blizzard servers is not free. This is a subscription game, like EverQuest and other so-called MMORPGs. The supposed benefit is real-time in-game support, plus ongoing content creation. In WoW's case, this should mean new areas and new quests being added over time.

If Blizzard's content creation is up to par, then this won't be much of a negative. If anyone can do it, Blizzard can!

Lag

In one sense, Blizzard is a victim of its own success. The popularity of the open beta is causing ridiculous amounts of stress on its servers, due to in-game activity (picking up items, trading, that sort of thing). However, Diablo suffered from this in its day too, so this is probably a minor point at best.

Last Word

So, will I buy this game? I don't know. It's a true Blizzard game, which says a lot. But is it worth a subscription?

My brother has commented in the past that he likes to 'finish' games. I don't blame him; I'm not sure how I was able to play Diablo II for as long as I did. But WoW's quest system makes this a huge game with a definite beginning, middle, and an end, at least in the sense that your character finishes some sort of 'epic' quest. To me, that sounds like a good place to retire a character and perhaps start a new one. After all, there are eight races and a variety of classes for each one.

I guess only time will tell...

Last Word, Part 2

Well, I did buy the game and I've been playing it ever since. Everything I said above has turned out to be true; the game is not perfect, but it's a lot of fun, and in the end, that's what matters most.

Check out my addons for World of WarCraft here.