World of Warcraft Review

As the game has matured a lot, I think it is time for a new review of World of Warcraft:

Technology: World of Warcraft isn't the most high-tech game out there. The system wants were already on the low side in 2004, and by this point it runs on about any machine, even 8' netbooks. An advantage of that's universal accessibility, but the drawback is that the graphics are not quite as pretty as those of some other games. Fortunately the cartoonish style of WoW graphics ages better than pseudo-photorealism. About over the last five years, WOW has been comparatively low on bugs, and high on server uptime, compared with other MMORPGs. That is not to say that WoW did not have extremely difficult periods, especially at the start, where bugs were still more common, and the influx of big numbers of players caused server stability Problems. And changes to the game which made examples a lot more popular during wrath of the Lich King led to'no more examples available' issues at peak times, which are just now being resolved. Nonetheless one must be careful, because memories are selective, and have a tendency to remember brief periods of issues much more than lengthy periods where everything runs smoothly. Therefore I'll stay with my across-the-board judgment that *on average* World of Warcraft had less bugs and better server uptime than its rivals.

Content: World of Warcraft is a giant game. Not necessarily vis virtual square miles, but vis content filling up those virtual square miles : Number of zones, number of quests, range of different monster models, number of dungeons, number of races and classes, number of amateur sections. While there are definitely some bottlenecks, you can play at least four different characters ( two coalition, two Horde ) from level one to the level cap while repeating only little content. Thus replayability of WoW is high, compared with other MMORPGs. World of Warcraft already was a large game when it came out, and 2 expansions and one or two content patches added much more content. Sadly that also has some bad results : New content often makes old content out of date, and especially the old dungeons and raid dungeons today are more a holiday maker attraction or place for high-level characters to raise low-level characters than challenging content. Even blizzard admits that, and started recycling old content : Naxxramas, Onyxia, and replacing a lot of old content in the upcoming cataclysm growth. On it's 5th anniversary, Warcraft will only have two expansions out, with a third one expected for the 6th year. That's not a great deal compared to other MMORPGs. There's a wealth of evidence of large numbers of WoW players running out of content between the release of one expansion and the next , leading to dips in activity, followed by peaks of resubscriptions when content patches and expansions arrive. This is certainly one of the puny spots of WOW : in spite of great annual profits, snowstorm hasn't ever been in a position to add content at a fast enough rate to even keep the average player happy. Given the scale of WoW's customer base, that led to a curious phenomenon where the successfulness of other MMORPGs to a point is dependent on whether they launch in a top or a valley of world of warcraft. The opposite side of the coin, and the excuse snowstorm likes to use when explaining why they can't produce content any faster, is the extremely high quality, level of detail, and what's frequently called "polish" ; of the content of Warcraft. Each corner of the planet is hand-crafted, and while you may encounter the same building or cavern in different corners of the Earth, there are not huge areas of boring, CGI landscapes with nada to do. Most things serve some purpose, and even the things that don't are crafted with a fine level of detail. There is a lot to explore in this world if you are that way inclined.

Accessibility: WOW is a comparatively easy MMORPG, with mass market accessibility. The advantage of that is glaringly that folk who would never have played a game like Everquest now find themselves playing Warcraft. The drawback is that giant parts of WoW are not extremely challenging to a standard gamer. Similarly what challenge there is is concentrated in the endgame, forcing players who like a challenge to rush through the leveling part of the game to get to the challenging endgame part. Some progress has been made during the past 5 years in moving from a game offering merely a single level of difficulty to having some content available at different levels of challenge and reward. But offering a challenge to all players all of the time is still way beyond the chances of WoW, and maybe MMORPGs generally. Efforts to at least buff the transition of challenge level from the leveling game to the endgame have been made with some success, but had a meeting with some resistance of players who would have liked the raiding endgame to be reserved for a little elite of players enjoying a higher degree of challenge. Part of the accessibility comes from blizzard not being very serious about the lore of the planet of Warcraft. The game is chock-full of in-jokes about Leroy Jenkins, "more dots" [*SCO], and funny references to the physical world, like a Haris Pilton NPC selling expensive purses. Of course the result's frequently somewhat incongruous, with crashed spaceships in a wizardry forest and elves riding motorbikes thru medieval cities. Ultimately WoW has often been more a "Game of Warcraft" ; than a "World of Warcraft".

Social factors: Each gamer at least knows someone who plays WOW, there is a huge network effect of people playing WoW in part because their friends play. But this is founded on inherent sociability of the MMORPG genus, not a specific quality of World of Warcraft. In fact World of Warcraft is substantial LESS social, and LESS fostering direct social interactions between players than most other MMORPGs. The key culprit here is the leveling game. Not only is it absolutely feasible to level up all the way to the level cap in WoW without having spoken or cooperated with another player ; but in many cases group play is even basically deterred : Quests are organized in a way that doing them with friends takes longer than soloing them. The experience point distribution for groups is arranged in a way that folk earn considerable LESS xp an hour in a group than if they solo. And the looking-for-group functionality of WOW, after several modifications, is still substandard, and suboptimal. Guild functionality in WOW is also highly basic, it took years to even add a guild bank to the game, and many guild features common to other games don't exist yet in WoW. Furthermore the raid-based nature of the endgame has led on to guilds sorting themselves by level of skill and time expended for raiding. Thus where in prior games guild inducted folks on the principle of social compatibility, many WoW guilds induct players on the base of their character class, talent build, and gear. Guild-hopping, that's revving up in one guild, only to leave it and join the following more complicated guild, is unfortunately often found in World of Warcraft. On the positive side, snowstorm is working on improving social interactions between players. Yet another new looking-for-group system, this time with cross-server dungeons, has been announced, presumably before the following enlargement. For the next enlargement the addition of varied guild features, like guild achievements and bonuses for belonging to a guild have been declared. It remains to be seen what the social consequences of these changes will be.

Gameplay: World of Warcraft has a gameplay which is these days considered really middle-of-the-road : It is founded on character classes, with each character having a level, and gaining new levels thru experience points distributed for slaughtering monsters and doing quests. A majority of gameplay activity is spent in combat, with combat consisting basically of launching sequences of spells and capabilities by pressing the reciprocal buttons on a hotkey bar. Critics have a tendency to forget it was the fondness for WOW which turned this type of gameplay into what is now considered bog-standard. While plenty of the elements existed in 2004, the MMORPGs you would play in that year ( Star Wars universes, last Fantasy XI ) didn't agree with this standard. Usually WoW is thought to be an evolution based primarily on the original Everquest, but there are important fundamental philosophical differences in game design between these 2 games. Everquest is a far nastier, much more social, and far more open game. What people essentially experienced as being "new" ; in 2004 in World of Warcraft was the powerful degree of led gameplay : Quests were not separate entities, or random, but mixed into a search system, which would guide the player through all of the interesting corners of the area he was in, and then send him off to the next zone when he was finished. You can look through all the reviews of WOW from 2004, and you'll find that quest system certainly discussed in every single one of them. Naturally this "playing on rails" ; has drawbacks, and can feel artificial, but in 2004 it was a development, and it greatly added to the accessibility of WOW. While vets and fans of sandbox games might make fun of directed gameplay, new players actually enjoyed being told what to do. This is also observable in the fact that some distance from trying to break out and look for more liberty, players install addons like Questhelper or Tour Guide which augment the playing on rails experience. While quest-based directed gameplay was and still is popular, the quests themselves weren't really all that good. Only a few quests remain remarkable, and for the first four years of World of Warcraft almost every search fell into a small range of types, involving nothing less than killing monsters, and going from A to Z to click something. The wrath of the Lich King growth improved the quality of quests noticeably, improving storytelling, adding more vehicle-based quests, and introducing phasing, that is the illusion of your quests changing the globe. The wrath Gate quest line is way past the "kill Hogger" ; experience of vanilla WoW. The combat part of gameplay unfortunately did not improve much over time. The number of buttons you might possibly press grew, giving an impression of added complexity. Combat got faster over time, and mostly in raid encounters players were more and more made to respond to raid chief special abilities. But the basics of group combat, with its holy trinity of tanks, healers, and damage dealers, never modified. Solo combat is still not really interactive, what a monster does is utterly foreseeable, and regularly doesn't signify at all to your tactics. And while raid chief encounters are "difficult" ; insofar as everyone in the raid has to react properly to a bosses special ability in split seconds, they are still completely scripted, with no necessity to develop techniques, as the strategy is available as video on YouTube. Of course combat being very easy during leveling is designed deliberately for accessibility. And the colonnade game-like nature of raid encounters is especially centered at the young male audience most certain to spend ages raiding one or two evening per week. Nonetheless a rather more interactive, unpredictable, and tactically fascinating combat would've been nice.

Summary and outlook: World of Warcraft is a huge game of high quality, which is accessible to nearly everyone, with only a few entry barriers in hardware or player talent necessities. Even though it is some distance from ideal as a social, virtual world, it does offer thousands of hours of popular directed gameplay, with a constant stream of virtual accomplishments and rewards keeping the players satisfied for years , literally. Seen as "entry level" ; MMORPG, World of Warcraft is definitely the best game on offer, and it will in all probability still be around in a decade, and still have significant numbers of customers. But at the same time WoW will have produced millions of players who grew beyond what this game can offer : Players searching for something which is more a social virtual world than merely a game, players looking for more liberty, players hunting for more challenge, or players looking for different and more interactive gameplay. Given how well world of warcraft still sells, and that its players base has not been noticeably growing any more for some time, it's probable that there are more ex-WoW players than current subscribers, waiting for a game with an analogous level of quality, but being of a rather more sophisticated level in several aspects. So instead of a "WoW killer" [*SCO], another big thing is likelier to be a game "beyond WoW". It just isn't plain what this game beyond world of warcraft will be, who will produce it, and when. Too many people are busy either copying World of Warcraft, or badmouthing it, in a mistaken, pseudo-religious, "there can be only one" ; belief, and that "copy or damn" ; approach impedes research of where the strong points of WoW really are, what MMORPG players really need, and how one could develop a better game. But the simple truth is that WOW is kind of a good game, with serious restrictions, lots of which are a unavoidable result of it's mass market appeal. Enhancements are still likely over the approaching years and expansions, but it is improbable that WoW will grow far beyond it's current restrictions, and keep us all playing happily for keeps. Warcraft certainly has earned its place as a reference for the MMORPG genus for years to come, and will be forever part of the history of MMORPGs. But World of Warcraft isn't the end of this history. At some point soon a game beyond WoW will write another big success chapter of that history, and break away from WoW's gravitational pull.