World of Warcraft Review

Cafe Society
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Cross posting this as I’m a vain bastard and want everybody to see it when I write a 3 page monologue.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT REVIEW

After having played WoW for a months now, I think it’s high time for a little review. So far I managed to advance my warlock to level 30, a warrior to level 12 and a mage to level 10 - obviously I’m a long shot away from those kids who had level 60 chars in 2 weeks time, but I’ll pretend to know what I’m talking about anyway :wink:

On the surface WoW is a typical representative of its genre. Nevertheless, true to company tradition, Blizzard managed to take several bad aspects from other MMORPGs, e.g. timesinks, and give them a positive or at least less annoying spin.

Unfortunately some of the illnesses from the infant stages of computer roleplaying games have survived to this day. For example there are several plants that you can pick with the herbalism skill and which can be used for the alchemy skill. Those plants each have a level assigned to them, so that you can only pick a flower, when you’re proficient enough to dig it out of the ground. Fair enough. What’s pretty dumb (imho, ymmv) though is that no matter where you are, there are always the same plants. If we’re in the newbie orc desert, there will be the peacebloom and silverleaf, just like in the elven newbie forest…

Then there is the whole nonsense about level scaling so that a level 3 character is thrice as good as a level 1 character. This has some pretty nasty repercussions for the pvp system, but I guess I can’t complain about something that is rooted so deeply into gamers’ and gamedesigners’ subconsciousness…

I’ll do so nonetheless: A linear scaled level system with a slope of 1 is the worst thing to have ever happened to multiplayer computer roleplaying games. What’s fine in a pen and paper session or even a single player rpg simply does NOT work for multiplayer games. Oh well, I guess one of these days I have to continue working on my own game.
PLAYER VS PLAYER

Anyway, this brings me right to the next topic, namely pvp. When engaging in player vs player combat, there are a multitude of factors that’ll influence the outcome - potions, spells, skillpoint allocation, player skills. In fact it’s a highly complex process, but due to superior observation skills and numerous fieldtests, I was able to figure out the underlying principle: The character with the higher level wins. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Of course this has the consequence that low level areas of faction one are camped by high level characters of faction b to wipe out those low level dudes, before they advance and harrass the lowbies of faction b.

I’m pretty shocked that Blizzard merely copied other people’s shoddy ideas here, when they could have copied good ideas in addition to a few ideas of their own warcraft series. I would have put in goldmines and such from the warcraft universe in the contested areas. Then, those mines and outposts could be captured unreal tournament style (there was this gameplay mode where you had to touch and colour in flags and they’d give you points over time as long as they were your colour) and would yield some benefit for the conquering faction. That’d get people to fight meaningful battles instead of reducing pvp to skill-free newbie nuking fests.

Those harrassment moves do have some merit when they’re done in a raiding party and you’re attacking another city. The high level city guards are protecting the towns and so they are the number one target and not some low level suckers that won’t survive a hit anyway.

http://users.baer.rwth-aachen.de/~optimus/files/a.jpg
Here you can see our little raiding party in tarren mills, shortly before the signal to march is given.

http://users.baer.rwth-aachen.de/~optimus/files/b.jpg
So far so good, we’re killing the guards. Someone had the idea to attack the windrider master, so that the influx of high level alliance players, who rushed to the town’s defense, would be stopped. What the guy didn’t know was that the npc unleashed several griffons that attacked us in response.

http://users.baer.rwth-aachen.de/~optimus/files/c.jpg
The rout can be seen above. After that I saw several griffins landing and just like in a real battle chaos ensued and our lines crumbled. Not a successful, but still funny, raid. The guildmasters decided afterwards that only level 40+ characters will be invited to raids in the future…
PARTY

A party consists of 5 people at most, but a lot of quests can be done alone. Specific dungeons called instances require you to team up with 4 others players as they are impossible to solve alone and are insanely hard with incomplete groups. Those instances are zones that will be created specifically for your party so no other person can enter and kill-steal the monsters. That in itself is a good idea, but the difficulty factor and time investment of instances are a big minus. All in all, they appear to be poorly thought out, despite a good premise.

Due to the aforementioned level gap, it’s hard to mix groups of people with vastly differing levels. This rift is even increased by having low level monsters yield 0 experience to high level players. To a high level, the playing time with a low level character is essentially lost time, which is a shame when you try to arrange games with a couple of friends who don’t have an equal amount of time to burn on the game and to raise their characters at the same pace.
Again, this is a flaw of the direct transfer between pen & paper and multiplayer games - what’s working for one medium simply doesn’t work for the other. I wish gamedesigners would see that already.
QUESTS (or “Story? What story?”)

The quests you get are mostly your garden variety kind of thing, kill x monsters of type y here, gather z items there. A few unconventional quests stand out, but mostly it’s a run of the mill type of deal.
What’s getting to me is that you’re walking around aimlessly, taking and completing quests here and there… But to what end? In Diablo 1 & 2 you knew who the bad guy was and in case you forgot several cinematic cut scenes reminded you of the overall story. Not so in WoW, there simply is no story, it’s all about walking around in the Warcraft world, leveling your character and harrassing newbies.
Some provision to long term motivation needs to be made (again imho, ymmv), be it a quarterly changing storyline or a simple highscore list. Heck, even Pacman had a highscore list, but there doesn’t seem to be anything lasting achievable in WoW.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is fun and even addictive, but after hours of playing, I always sit back and wonder “Gee, where did all that time go? What’s more, what did I accomplish in that time???”
This leads me right to
TIMESINKS

It’s another (un)necessary evil relic from other MMORPGs. The perfect timesink has to slow down the player, so that he doesn’t get to see everything there is yet and has to fork over more of that monthly fee, but they can’t slow down the player to the point of annoying him, lest he might cancel his subscription in disgust.
In Ragnarok Online the waiting time between monster respawns of an important type, the healing time and other such things were exactly that - annoying to the point of turning me off of the game. WoW strikes a good balance as time sinks - you need to walk back to your corpse after you die, traveltimes even with griffins and bats available, respawn times, healing times, etc. - aren’t a pain in the ass. It’s funny to fly around with a bat initially. However, after a while you do realize that they’re a big waste of time and don’t really add anything to the game. One more angle, where I’d improve on the genre.
HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER GAMES AND FINAL VERDICT

World of Warcraft is a nice game to play if you’re willing to shell out money for the privilege to play. It’s Diablo2 in 3d, but with more quests and less story. Personally I think it’s not even close to the game I have in my mind and would like to play (if only I had the time, motivation and funds to create that), but due to the fact that I’ve played till 2 in the morning on weekdays and killed a whole sunday playing 12 hours in a row, I’m giving it at least one thumb up. The goal is to reach level 60 by May when my subscription runs out, so that I don’t regret not renewing it.

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I agree with you about the gameplay. There doesn’t seem to be much point besides “Level up and go kill bigger monsters and get more loot so you can kill even bigger monsters.” I’m not finding it very fascinating, although the scenery is kind of nice.

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I love the scenery. I find the chirping birds soothing. I’m serious; it’s cold and unpleasant outside in the real world but in the World of Warcraft, there’s sunshine and chirping birds.

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I’m still enjoying the game, but PVP is nothing more than griefing. There’s no point to it other than bragging rights. One thing I would add to the level equation is “He who attacks first” usually wins. I used to /wave and run by only to have them attack me. Now it’s pretty much KOS, which is a waste of time until they add some rewards. I like your idea of fighting over precious resources, but I’m not sure the game could handle two very large raid parties fighting over a town. The servers don’t seem up to the task. there are queue’s a plenty and lag o’plenty on my main server. Not to mention LD’s and the occasional loss of time.

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Nice review Optihut. I have some questions:

Does the game have any “secret” levels, like the Cow Level in Diablo 2? Maybe the secret Bird level? :wink:

Are there any power level-up areas in WoW, ala Bal Runs in Diablo 2?

What’s the most powerful character? What’s the weakest character? What’s the most powerful spell?

Thanks

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There are no “secret” levels as far as i know, but they did manage to sneak in heaps of pop culture references and nods to their older games. For example one weapon you can pick up is called “wirts third leg”, my rogue was wielding a “hanzo sword” for a while, there is a quest given by a guy name Egan to hunt ghosts in a hunted town using his gun conveniently called “egan’s blaster”, etc, etc, etc.

I’ve been 60 for going on two months now and i’m still having plenty of fun. The game doesn’t break any new ground but everything they did they got right. There are just so many details packed into the game that you can tell how much love and dedication went into crafting every little detail of their world.

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You know, if you dont like PVP, dont play on a PVP server… Elune isn’t PVP, and nobody ganks me other than the monsters :rolleyes: like the Bataan Death Mar\\run through stranglethorn vale when under level 25…

Quests are a story line… take the human starting area, Elwyn Forrest. When you are in your first 4 levels, you are told there is a kobold problem, so first you kill a certain number of low level kobolds, thinning out the population, then you move to higher level kobolds, and finally you explore a mine to determine the level of kobold threat. You are told of a defias bandit problem, so you need to go kill some defias bandits and bring back bandannas as proof…and the local vinyard woner needs to get some buckets of grapes that she needs from the defias infested vinyard. Both of these are directly like real life in a frontier area…we have a wolf problem - they are eating our cows so the town of Massachusetts Bay Colony puts a bounty on wolves, so you kill a wolf and bring its tail back, and get some money…you also skin it out and sell the pelt to a fur buyer that gets them sent back to england and turned into leather and fur for clothing…There is a problem with the Hole in the Wall gang robbingbanks, so theyt put up a reward for proof that you captured/killed a criminal, so Fresno’s sherrif pays you 20000 $US for bringing back the head of Joachim Murietta and the hand of 3 finger Jack.

There is actually more or less a story line to the whole shebang…if you actually watch and listen to the original movies for each race [i think you can see them all at wow website, or just go to some random server and make a character of each race and watch the movies] that is played out in the various quests, and each quest thread more or less carries out a theme. Other than the trade/class quests of course=)

You get what you pay for. You can play WoW 1,2,and 3 on BattleNet, and deal with script kiddies and assholes, or you can play with people screened out from the freeloaders by a monthly subscription fee… You would have HATED WoW in open beta when all the bnet babies and script kiddies were playing free, talk about a population of assholes…I loved closed beta, very professional and friendly. My server is generally friendly though there are always going to be assholes. You do NOT want to know what I went through as a guide in everquest…

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At the moment… with Battlefields coming up and rankings to be implimented, then there will be a point. Now PvP is only practice for the big time. I play on a PvP server and enjoy it a lot. It is still quite a thrill to get attacked by someone, then turning it around and killing your opponent. Yeah, I get killed sometimes, but since there is no death penalty, I say “so what?”.

My highest is only a 41 Mage at the moment, and since his guild disbanded a month ago I haven’t really played him at all. My attention has been spent on trying a priest and seeing how that works out. She’s up to level 20 now and harder to solo, but able to get into groups far easier than my Mage was ever able to. I’m using her to try to find a decent new guild to join.

9

A couple things:

  • If you think PVP comes down to level, then you’re not looking hard enough. My buddy the 52 rogue hunts down level 60 chars and kills them with regularity. There is some skill involved, although level, class, and gear do have a pretty large bearing on it.

And don’t forget, soon enough we’ll all be level 60, and skill will play much more of a factor in PvP than it does now.

Have you read their plans for Battlegrounds? Mines and outposts, as well as graveyards and other strategic areas, are all planned.

As aruvqan pointed out, there is a pretty strong storyline. You just have to actually read the text of those quests you get, and read the various books, pages, and notes you pick up.

My review of your review is that you’ve touched on the simple aspects of the game, but haven’t gone into depth with it at all. :smiley:

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I don’t see the problem with this. the alternative would be to force the newbie orc and newbie elf to travel the globe looking for the plants they need and the journey isn’t one they are likely to survive.

Any roleplaying system needs to have an advancement scheme to reward players for their efforts. Whether that scheme assigns them levels, skill points, or the ability to use bigger weapons, the end result is all the same - the longer a character has been played, the more powerful that character is.

I believe there is more to it. Not to deny that level is a big factor, but battles between characters within 5 levels of each other can easily go either way depending on character setup, equipment, and tactics. A warlock can fear a higher level character while tossing damage over time spells on them, a rogue can stealth and backstab. A bit of luck and an understanding of one’s class can make a difference. The number of allies you have along with you can have an even bigger effect than level.

Only on PVP servers. On most servers, you have to flag yourself or enter an enemy capital city in order to open yourself for attack from other players.

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Also, Optihut, the plants are not the same in every section, although they’re roughly sorted by zone-level, which makes sense. When I get to a new zone, I’ll find new plants that I can pick, and it’s always a little thrill to find a new plant for the first time. (About two weeks ago I picked my first icecap, and I think that’s the last new plant in the game for me).

Daniel

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The only thing I’ve read about stuff like that are the “easter eggs” someone mentioned on the blizzard forums. Apparently something is different when you’re entering the undercity in your ethereal dead form. I haven’t done that yet though, so I don’t know what it is.

I’m just level 30, so you’re definitely asking the wrong guy about powerleveling. Right now it seems like the high end areas are only possible to survive in groups and then you have to pick your allies or else some yahoo rolls for an item you’d like to have and he can’t even use (the default setting for splitting magical items works like this: Everybody can choose to roll a d100 for an item and the highest number gets the item. Some items bind when you pick them up, so they can’t be shared afterwards. It’s very annoying when a warrior picks up a magical wand that binds, which should have gone to the spellcasters, for example).

Optihut, the level 30 warlock is the most powerful character :wink:
Seriously, I don’t know what’s powerful - some people claim that rogues are awesome in pvp, but others claim that casters dominate pvp. As for my own preference, from those classes I have played, my order is warlock, mage, warrior.

I do like pvp, but only well thought out pvp and not a tagged on, flawed system like it is right now.
I deliberately picked a pvp server, because skipping content didn’t make sense to me. Still, that doesn’t mean the system can’t be improved.

That’s one way to look at it, but to me a storyline in Blizzard games is tied to cinematics and ideally the player’s actions would have some impact on the outcome.

Yeah, someone pointed out that my suggestion is very similar to the one they announced with battlefields and now I wonder whether I’ve read it, forgot about it and my subconsciousness wove aspects of it into the review. Still, the battlefields seem to be a contained high level area, so the game itself wouldn’t change (hence there’d still be newbie killing going on). We shall see how it pans out.

Level 60, the big equalizer. Yeah, I’ve given that some thought, but frankly my remark about reaching 60 by the end of May was tongue in cheek. I don’t think I’ll exceed 40 by much till then.

As I said, it may entirely be that I’ve read it and subconsciously picked up those ideas. If I didn’t and if Blizzard and I independently had the same idea, it goes to show once again that great minds think alike :wink:
That battleground addition is something I’m looking forward to. Hopefully they’ll implement it before the end of May in Europe.

The storyline has as much impact on the game as the storyline of Space Invaders had. Wasted potential for a MMORPG.

I guess if someone adheres to the level setup, then it makes sense to divide the other aspects of the world into levels as well. Probably I’m just picky, but having peacebloom and silverleaf grow both in deserts and forests strikes me as wrong. For balancing reasons they did this, but I’d still do it differently. I can foresee my idea crashing and burning, so of course it’s sound for Blizzard to do what the market demands.

The keyphrase was the “slope of one”. If there are 60 levels, I’d go with a slope of 1/60, so that the best character is only twice as good as a new one. In addition, I’d put an emphasis on single shot items, having a power distribution of 10% stats/level and 90% items that are used up.
That way, I’d swap the rigid “but you’re getting the most of playing with people around your level” setup for one that allows people to play with their friends, irrespective of how much time they invest into the game.

Correct. I’m guilty for bad wording here and there. In fact on re-reading what I wrote (I guess I really should proof-read forum posts…) I noticed several paragraphs that are not clear to someone who doesn’t know what I’m getting at - this is my fault for not clarifying a few issues. Certainly you’ll encounter different plants in different zones and even when there are high level plants around, you might come across the occassional peacebloom. The fact that the eco system plays no role whatsoever in plant distribution is the fact that I’m bemoaning.

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I think that’s what he’s saying: all the newbie zones have the same herbs, all the mid-level zones have the same herbs, etc. even if the zones are in radically different climates. I don’t know what he’d suggest as an alternative, though. If you don’t have low-level herbs in all the newbie zones, Alchemy becomes impossible for starting characters of certain races. Or, you could have different recipes for the same potions, depending on where you start: elves get healinig potions using peacebloom and silverleaf, orcs get healing potions using bloodroot and wormleaf.* Which sounds ridiculously unwieldy. I already have enough problems storing all my herbs as it is, without confusing things with “duplicate” herbs.

Actually, I thought the whole herbalism thing was pretty well implemented. Most herbs have a specific enviroment in which they’re more likely to be found: peacebloom tends to grow in fields with lots of sunlight, silverleaf grows under bushes with lots of shade, liferoot on the banks of freshwater streams and lakes, etc. I thought that was pretty clever.

Overall, I think that if you came to World of Warcraft expecting innovation, you must not have ever played any other Blizzard games. Blizzard doesn’t innovate, they perfect. They take genres pioneered by other games, and pare away everything that detracts from the fun until you’ve got the best possible version of that sort of game imaginable. I’m the furthest thing from a RTS fan, but I’ll buy every Warcraft/Starcraft game that Blizzard comes out with, because they are always excellent games. Even though I normally hate that genre, Blizzard knows how to do it just right.

*I just made up those herbs.

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My brother called me last night to tell me he found a cookbook called “How to Serve Man”.

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Well, the ecosystem DOES play into it, to some degree. Sure, certain herbs are common in certain areas, but you’re going to find grave moss growing around graves, ghost mushrooms in caves, goldthorn and mountain silversage growing on mountains, liferoot near streams, firebloom in the desert regions, and so forth. Silverleaf prefers growing in the shade of trees, whereas mageroyal prefers open sunlight; even in forested regions, they stick to these rules more or less.

I kinda like that. If I’m low on silversage, I go to the mountainous areas and hunt; if I"m low on liferoot, I wander along rivers. It’s pretty cool.

Daniel

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Please explain this further. What, specifically, is the problem?

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Obviously, every class has their pros and cons, but they’re suppossed to be roughly equal when solo (although I believe there has been a lot of complaints about Paladins being overpowered–there was a bug with one of their abilities giving extra power, so not unfounded). Rogues and mages are DPS types, warriors and warlocks are balanced between offense and defense I believe, pallys and priests are good at staying alive but not great at doing damage (Ideally, pallys were and prehaps still are capable of doing more damage than intended). Basically, there’s pros and cons to every class, though I certainly can’t name them all, only having played a mage and a bit of a warlock myself.

Um, how are you skipping out content? It’s an extra as far as I’m concerned. I like playing a non-PVP server. Actually, my complaint is that some quests have you attacking PVP-flagged NPCs, tagging you for a brief period.

Personally, that’s not something I expect from an MMORPG.

Re: power-levelling–Stick to areas around your level. If you’re in a group, you can go higher, but not too high–more than four levels higher than you and spells won’t hit (more than two and they resist a lot more than usual). I’m not sure if this applies to physical attacks though–I think damage is just scaled down. You can’t team with a high level character to kill stuff way above your level either–If the monster is too high above your level, you’ll get little or no experience, same as with stuff below your level. More than six levels below you and you’ll get nothing. I’ve also found that sticking to monsters close to your level, maybe a level or two lower, gets you the best experience with the least downtime.

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The problem I have with it is that if I want to play with my friends, who either invest a lot less or a lot more time into the game, one of us has to forfeit experience, because the slope of 1 means that for balance reasons low level monsters don’t yield experience for high players, as they’re cutting through them like butter. If the slope were shallower, you could still allow the monsters to give experience, as they’d still be somewhat dangerous. Plus, initial quests wouldn’t be trivial and thus boring for the high level characters, overall enabling you to get the most out of playing with a group of friends, irrespective of the level.

Then there’s the pvp system - perhaps it’s true that a level 53 rogue can defeat level 60 characters. At lower levels, the difference in levels is a pretty severe factor though, so a non-shallow slope makes balanced pvp at differing levels harder. If you’re playing a pen and paper rpg, there simply are no powerleveling kids coming over to your house to repeatedly wipe out your party, nor are there in single player. But if you’re making a multiplayer game, you can’t just have pvp interaction as an afterthought, treating it exactly like pve.
Perhaps I stand alone with this, but I think that mostly player skill should determine the outcome (since this isn’t a shooter, it’s a bit harder to define skill, so I also tossed in one-shot items as important factors) and not level, i.e. who has got more time to burn.

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It really sounds to me like you would be happier on a non-PvP server. Trust me, there is still plenty of PvP. You just get to pick and choose when you participate.

I think you are making a little bit too much of level too in PvP. Granted, level is a major factor in PvP, but not as much as it is with PvE (player vs environment or NPCs). With NPCs after about 4 levels higher than you, you aren’t going to touch them with much. In PvP I’ve nuked someone 20 levels higher than my shaman for full damage. Granted, that person could one shot kill me, but it wasn’t like I was completely useless like I would be against a 20 level higher NPC. Another example is a friend of mine and I both around level 10 killing a level 18 mage in PvP. The mage thought it was a fluke and attacked us again… and died again. Some of PvP is definitely the match up, gear, and skill, not just level.

20

Could be my fault for not expressing myself clearly, could be your fault for not reading properly. shrugs