Above: How a gaming world should be done. Love the 0:52 scene.
Now this is what I’m talking about! Vast, marvelous world. Underground. Underwater. In the sky. In light. In darkness. This is surefire stuff.
“But Malstrom,” says the reader. “There is an obscene quality to the music with women chanting nonsense at the player!”
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
World of Warcraft is not only one of the most important games made this generation, it is one of the most important games ever. I do not think any game has grossed more revenue than World of Warcraft. So it is important to note what is going on here with it.
What did WoW do so correctly to get so popular? To break it down in the most simplest terms, WoW is a vast gigantic world for people to escape themselves in (which is what entertainment does, it allows an escape). In addition to that, WoW is a series of very small pieces and chunks of gameplay. In other words, someone can log in, do a task like check how their stuff is doing on the auction, and log out. There is absolutely no time commitment outside of the dungeon. And even then, there is great elasticity in how players can play. You can play solo. You can play co-op. You can play at a snail’s pace. You can turbo charge leveling. You can play in large guilds. Or you can not. You can play competitively against other players. Or you can play cooperatively with people. It is because all the ‘tasks’ in WoW are small, short, and bite sized that they can be rearranged, at will, to feed any personality.
A vast continuum of a world. And many simple gameplay tasks.
The reason why WoW got its stigma as ‘destroyer of lives’ came from two sources. The first was the hardcore gamer. While it is the fashion of this generation to divide gamers into various groups such as ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’, no one does this with the WoW gamer. Somehow, someway, 12 million players are all ‘the same’. And that is absurd. The people who play all day, everyday, to get every achievement in WoW (you know your life is in trouble if you are trying to get achievements in WoW) and sacrifice their life to do all this end up becoming the problem. Gamers are like airplanes, you only hear about the ones who crash.
But a more interesting reason why WoW got its stigma was Blizzard itself. Blizzard has been doing the expansions incorrectly. The third expansion, Cataclysm, is coming out today. But the first two expansions were disappointing in the grand scheme of things. Note the importance of a vast world. Burning Crusade continued more old style WoW content (e.g. repetitive quests) with Outland shifting the content to space and alternate dimensions. Wrath of the Lich King shifted the content more towards ice and undead. It is not that these expansions didn’t add good things. It is that they didn’t add enough of the right things.
The right thing is to keep the focus on Azeroth. It seems as if now that Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King are over with, WoW is shedding off its Warcraft 3 shell and directing its content to its own direction. Surprisingly, this is refreshing.
The rule is that if something works, you do not mess with it. But creative destruction says that you must constantly destroy what works to make it better. Using the Cataclysm to revamp many parts of original WoW had many people saying, “Now Blizzard is destroying that last good thing about WoW.” But these changes have been for the better. The land is more interesting. The quests are better done. And more important, it shows a change within the world as if the ‘great war’ between the Horde and Alliance is evolving.
Half a decade ago when WoW came out, many people made the following complaints to Blizzard. They were tired of the repetitive quests (how many raptors must one kill?). They did not feel the world was at war. The zones felt more like nature walks than anything else. And most of all, there were consistent complaints that the Orcs had been ‘neutered’ from the badass nasty guys they were in old Warcraft such as Warcraft 2.
Above: Badass Orcs in Warcraft 2.
Using ‘phasing’, there is now much war in World of Warcraft and the old Orcs are back. In Silverpine, you witness Hellscream call Sylvanus a bitch. In Hillsbrad, you set bombs to alliance armies and nuke them. In Stranglethorn, you defend Booty Bay against an armada of dog pirates complete with the player infiltrating the enemy as a pirate, to sabotage, to leaping from ship via rope, to using cannons firing at goblins, to even riding a wyvern and dropping bombs on the ships. In Western Plaguelands, a vast battle of Anderhol consistently goes on from different factions. Azeroth is no longer a nature walk anymore.
And after half a decade, we finally have a victor in the ‘battle of Hillsbrad’. With Vanilla WoW, players would always congregate and battle at Hillsbrad between Tarren Mill and Southshore. The Horde won, and Southshore was destroyed.
WoW players are enthusiastically thanking Deathwing for destroying the world. Azeroth is now a better place.
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