• 9Apr 07

  World of Warcraft

  A few weeks ago, I downloaded World of Warcraft and used my free ten-day trial. I don't presume to be reviewing the game, because I only experienced a tiny snippet of what it has to offer. More than anything, I think that in writing this I was trying to justify my decision to not return as a subscriber.

  I don't want to slam a fantasy game for being unrealistic; that's kind of to be expected in the genre. However, even a fantasy game should be plausible, should be believable on some fundamental level. A world in which you have to wait your turn to complete a quest which certainly sounded at first like something that would only need to be done once? Not especially convincing. A world in which the vast majority of the characters you see are other players like yourself, other heroes working toward the same goals to help out the few NPCs? It doesn't seem right.

  On one of my quests, I had to steal something from one of two satyrs. I killed the first one, but was low on health, and so I ducked behind some cover hoping to avoid the arrows from the second. And I got shot. Because I was still in range, and there is no concept of cover in this game. That's not believable. I shouldn't be able to throw my knife after a beast that's running sideways across my screen and watch the knife change its path to follow the creature. These aren't enchanted blades. I just bought them over at the knife shop.

  Speaking of knife shops, I expect a weapon vendor to be more than someone who has text to that effect hovering over his head. If I walk into a weapon shop, I expect the ambience of a weapon shop, not just another cookie-cutter NPC in another cookie-cutter building who happens to be willing to sell you weapons. The way it is, they might as well consolidate all of the salespeople into a single person and save the player all the time spent walking around needlessly big cities.

  Sure, the old-style RPGs didn't have great graphics. And I'm not saying that they were any more realistic; my argument isn't for realism. But they had character. If you went to a town, it felt like a place where people lived, a place with history, not just another waypoint for you and the 8 million other adventurers running around completing quests but never actually changing the world. The ambience of a location gets lost when throngs of players descend upon it, all pursuing the same couple of quests.

  Maybe that makes me an elitist, makes me so old-school that I refuse to play MarioKart on anything newer than a Super Nintendo. The truth is, I enjoyed my ten days of WoW quite a bit. But now that I'm out of that world, there is nothing pulling me back.

  • Posted Apr 9, 2007 9:47 pm PT
  • Category: Editorial
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