|
|
// Filed under: Video Games on Friday October 05th 2007, 9:16 pm A month or so ago, I had a series of interviews with Interzone Games for the position of World Designer. I didn’t get the job, unfortunately - but during the course of the interviews, I was asked to write up my thoughts on the early game experiences of some MMO’s that I had played. Only really having any substantial experience in City of Villains, and having played enough (read: ten minutes) of Ultima Online to establish that doing something so crazy as walking outside of town was a medically bad idea, I figured I may as well get the fuck over myself and sink my teeth into a trial edition of World of Warcraft. So I teamed up with the beautiful and delightful Jess, to explore the lands of Kalimdor and/or Lordaeron for the princely number of 14 days. And here is the result. World of Warcraft is a ridiculously well-crafted game, and this much is evident right off the bat. The opening cinematic for each class is so over-the-top and clichéd that it made me choke on my tea - but I must say that I absolutely love the fact that they did it in real-time, in-engine flythroughs. I’m not usually a big fan of game introduction movies taking place in-engine, but since they already took the time to blow us away with the initial CG movie I’ll allow it. Even if that CG movie was ridiculously heavy on the hated, hated Night Elves. I took instantly to the fantastically intuitive question and exclamation mark system. Even if you haven’t played Diablo II, which is basically where it’s lifted from, it’s a pretty universal understanding of attention and makes it very easy to see who you need to be talking to. I also really like that silver marks appear over the heads of people who have a quest for you that you’re not capable of doing yet - it’s a bit hand-holding to be sure, but that’s just what newbies need at this early game. What is particularly annoying however is the slowly scrolling quest-text that the NPC’s dump on you - I’m a particularly fast reader in any case, but it was just agonising waiting to see what I was actually required to do. Once my friend told me about the option to turn the scrolling off, I set that straight away. I was very surprised I couldn’t just click the text to bypass the scrolling in any case, even without changing the options - it’s the logical thing to do when presenting players with a lot of unfolding information. I also love being able to see clearly what rewards a quest offers. That’s very neat, especially being able to see when a quest’s reward is clearly not worth your time. The clear expectation and reward system is very friendly but the geographical directions could use a bit of work. There were more than a few occasions where the unclear directions and incredible sameness of the tileset confused me - and when your character is wandering on foot all the time through wilderness where impossibly unrealistic amounts of wandering cougars want to kill you, this can get pretty annoying. I’m a much bigger fan of the City of Villains approach of highlighting exactly where you need to go and telling you exactly how far away from it you are. On the subject of exploring, I love that it rewards you with experience for travelling places and discovering things. It was a genuine pleasure in many cases to open up new areas and the incentive of bonus XP, however meagre, is very nice. I found the notion of exploring new areas much more appealing than actually taking quests in many cases, though I noticed that other people seemed to spend a much longer time grinding on mobs before moving on than I did, which seemed odd. I surmised that this may be why I was having slight amounts of difficulty taking some of the later mobs - my skipping of the exceedingly repetitive quests was coming back to haunt me. When it comes to the subject of the quests themselves, this is where I have the most issue with the game structure. All of the early quests - and my friends tell me, most of the later quests - are basically unsubtle, blatant timesinks with little to no variation, following a very clear standard template. Some of them are really fun to do but after starting five different characters and working them to level ten or so it becomes horrendously tedious - not to mention the long periods of walking between all quests at a very, very slow pace. Some of the class-specific quests are really excellent. I got to take part in two Shaman spirit quests and the concept and execution are really neat. It’s this sort of race/class depth that allows World of Warcraft to flex its quest muscles and do some really interesting things, and I wish they were more common instead of being forced to slaughter more respawning wildlife than the local ecosystem could possible support. On that subject, the looting system is outrageously illogical - I need to bring someone back some boar meat and yet only one in every ten boars I casually slaughter has meat. The other nine boars are obviously made of fucking tofu or something. And especially irritating is that when you’re partying up with someone else, there’s always one of you who gets the quest items first and is then forced to follow the other one around helping them out - which is horrendously boring for all concerned. If you could share the requirements for these quests in the same way that all of you can contribute towards the X amount of Enemies killed quests, that would be fantastic. Instead you have to kill about 15 times more enemies than items you need and just hope that this tiger will actually have fur on it once it’s finally dead. I really like the way you can share quests with others, so that they don’t have to go and pick it up from the NPC yourself. This is actually really convenient and saves a lot of time. I was slightly disappointed to note that you can’t actually complete a quest for someone else as well - this seems to me to be the logical extension of this mechanic, even if the concept is slightly abstract it would save another lot of time. Especially in partying situations where one of you needs to remain out in the wilderness because they haven’t managed to find any boars that actually had meat on them once they were dead. I’ve noticed a lot of incongruity between the starting zones for the different races, to the extent where some of them have been really enjoyable and some of them have caused me teeth-pulling frustration. The Tauren starting zone, for example, consists of ridiculously huge expanses of plains that you need to walk across to get to your quests. This walking, which isn’t exactly helped by the horribly vague quest directions, means you’ll waste at least five minutes on every trip and end up getting attacked by every single critter that crosses your path. And the cities themselves are all up on immense, towering bluffs, which means you need to run a huge distance around them if you want to get somewhere on the other side. It’s just a huge, frustratingly designed zone and you can literally feel the hours slipping by as you plod slowly, Tauren-esquely to your destination. On the other hand, the Troll and Orc starting zone is a positive delight. The quests themselves are slightly more varied, and much closer nearby than in the other zones. The landscape lends itself to the different quests being clumped nicely together, meaning a lot more can be accomplished in a shorter time, and the distances between places of interest are short enough to make walking between them a pleasant distraction rather than the chore it is in other zones. And pleasingly, there is a nice flow to the landscape meaning the eye is drawn to the paths you need to take, unlike the Dwarf zone for example where the incredible sameness of the snow-covered terrain led to Jess and I getting lost on a number of occasions. Another thing that I found particularly frustrating was the lack of directions inside of the major cities. It was impossible to discover quickly where you need to be if it is your first time there because there is absolutely no direction. Want to find a shaman trainer in Orgrimmar? Why not wander from area to area, each filled with dozens of buildings and NPCs until you chance across the right one? I guess you could always ask somebody but the chat window is filled with hundreds of screeching morons hocking their wares. It’s simply frustrating and coming from a City of Villains system where all I have to do is open up the map, click on the NPC I want and then quickly fly over there, it was terribly frustrating for me. What I took away most from my two-week World of Warcraft experience was a sensation of being stuck in a well-crafted, well-designed and beautifully detailed timesink. I found a lot to like about the game and the world, and I can very much see the appeal in playing with a large group of friends, but the phenomenal patience required to grind your way through the unsubtle repetition of it all, even at introductory levels, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was a pleasingly easy game to get to grips with and has taught me a lot about the nature of the early game hook – but it was a hook that in this instance I found all too easy to avoid. Everything I tried seemed like aesthetic variations on a theme, and though that is true to say of most other MMO’s I have played as well, the mechanics of that variation were just not enough to keep me interested. // 5 Comments
Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post »
|
Noodlez says:
October 6, 2007 at 6:43 am
James says:
October 6, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Jake says:
October 19, 2007 at 4:08 am
REDS8N says:
October 24, 2007 at 6:23 pm
James says:
December 28, 2007 at 5:42 am