Let's Play World Of Warcraft Postlude

There is, as far as I can see, only one real problem with World Of Warcraft:

It's not very good.

Really, there's just something about it that doesn't quite work on any level. Whilst it's not totally unplayable or anything it's just.....

Bland. Dull. Unexciting. Take your pick. The game is there, but that's about all. At no point did I feel particularly engaged in any aspect. Including my stated goal of simply mocking it. Whilst to start with I figured that doing this write up series would give me a few cheap and easy laughs, at the end of the day it was just more work than it was worth trying to wring comedy from the desolation of the game world. It turns out that there actually IS a limit to how many "kill 10 rats" jokes you can make.

This is perhaps part of the problem. Going through the small portion of the game I did nothing ever rose beyond the the level of fetch or kill D10 of whatever. There was no real sense of any story, or progression, or... well, ANYTHING. The only reason you move from place to place is that the quest givers where you are have slipped into a state of catatonia from the mind numbing dullness of the quests they're giving out. There is not even the slightest illusion of anything you do having even a marginal impact on any aspect of the world around you.

Now, to be fair, fetch and kill quests are (for good or ill) the meat of pretty much all MMOs to at least some degree. However one of the key things in making an MMO actually playable is how well they disguise this fact. Slap some half decent story and characterisation over the top and you'd hardly notice. Guild Wars achieves this possibly best of any MMO I've played, leading you from mission to mission and giving you objectives and challenges in the storyline. World Of Warcraft..... Didn't. At all. The only comparable games I can think of that are quite so nakedly grind based are those cheap looking free to play jobs that have been (mostly) translated from Korean by running the text fields through babelfish. Warcraft is slightly more polished it's true, but that's about all.

Of course, just being grindy isn't exactly the worst crime either. After all, if you've got a fun combat system it can be quite entertaining to chainsaw your way through hordes of enemies for an evening. Sadly Warcraft falls down here as well. Combat essentially goes:

10 find enemy
20 try and get the shitty targeting to lock on
30 press 1
40 press 2
50 press 3
60 GOTO 10

After a while you may unlock the ability to, in particular circumstances, press 4. It was not exactly what you'd call dynamic is all I'm saying.

At the end of the day, even when I'd actually committed myself to writing a series on the experience, even when I had a lot of free time stuck at home with very little to do, even then I had a lot better things to do with my time than play WOW. As guilty as I am of playing FAR TO MUCH of a variety of video games I just couldn't be bothered with it. And I've spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time writing up some books that cause me physical pain to even think about. I can't get that anyone would pay for the experience. Let alone sacrifice the levels of time and wallet that apparently they do. I'm aware of the possibility that maybe things get more interesting at some ill defined point down the line, but I really can't understand how you'd get that far. There are just so many other things you could be doing that would be more entertaining.

When I did this for Guild Wars I played right up until my trial expired. And then I bought the game. Although I was poking some fun I was also enjoying the experience. This time around I actually found myself avoiding playing and hoping that the the 10 day trial had expired already so wouldn't have try for another installment. I think that sums it up quite well.