The Lameness of Warcraft 354
Slate is running an article lamenting the fact that, despite World of Warcraft's popularity, it is a deeply flawed game. Author Chris Dahlen makes the statement that Blizzard's MMOG should take its cues from single-player RPGs by offering further customization, morality based choices, and dynamic events. From the article: "Blizzard has written new storylines before. Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort. As a payoff, it unlocked new territory. This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them. New wars should break out, cities should rise and fall, and all hell should break loose at least once a month--and the players should be the ones to make it happen. After all, in a world that never changes, you can never make your mark." I want to be snarky and point out that this guy obviously has no idea how these games are designed, but I think he pretty much nails what every MMOG player really wants out of a game. Now, if only it were feasible within the bounds of money, time, and talent.
It's that bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a good idea (Score:1, Insightful)
sheer genius (Score:5, Insightful)
People never tire of making that analogy, do they? But it's probably about the most worthless analogy you could make. Reducing an activity to stimulus/response may seem clever, but the trouble is that it works for pretty much every human behavior imaginable. And it certainly works for every leisure activity.
The problem is that games are supposed to be fun. You're going to have to work really hard to come up with an alternative criteria. And since fun is pretty subjective, there's really not much room for criticism.
Art, literature, poetry, drama and film all have associate bodies of academic criticism and pop-derivatives. So there's a semi-objective framework from which you can criticize these works even if they are popular. Everyone rushes out to see "Titanic", but it still had some really, really lame dialog.
Unless you're going to make a similar attack on gaming (e.g. lame dialog, bad graphics, etc.) it's really hard to make any criticism that doesn't reduce to petulant whining. There simple is no cohesive theory of gaming criticism (outside of technical elements), and so before you start slinging criticisms you need to build the framework. I don't see that happening in this article.
So basically, it's just whining.
-stormin
Let's cry about it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Money? (Score:4, Insightful)
Other MMO's have/might get it right (Score:3, Insightful)
Players never face moral quandaries and never get to choose between an upstanding act and an evil one.
Everquest allowed you to do this on a daily basis. EQ2 as well. Vanguard (will be released Q1 2007) will have this element as well.
And on storytelling
And Vanguard is doing away with static spawns. It should be a good thing
Enough of the generalizations. (Score:5, Insightful)
Warcraft succeeds because blizzard realizes something the pundits don't, people still play games for fun.
Logging into an unknown situation isn't what most gamers want, if so many other games would have done well that haven't. For the most part players cannot be trusted, especially those who want anarchy and the like. Oh yeah they will repackage it as something other than anarchy but that is all they really want. Fun at someone else's expense drives that other off.
His ideas for character customization are fine, many would like that. Housing can wait, if ever. The game doesn't need it. As for the morals section, most players still wouldn't care. They will do the task presented. While it might be interesting to have the choice to cheat a NPC what real point is there? A lot of his ideas are best suited to PvP aspects of the game.
For the most part he seems to be lamenting that WOW does not have features he found interesting in another game. It goes without saying that that other game obviously is lacking in the rest of the department that he'd rather play WOW - just with some things added. WOW is a very good game. That people want to add features to it only proves that point. Unpopular games rarely get lauded and have recommendations placed to them as much as WOW does.
Look at it this way, there are games that do offer what he wants, and some are coming that will also. Will they succeed? Well it really comes down to one important factor : Is it fun? WOW still passes that test more than any other game for a majority of MMORPG players.
For everyone claim of WOW being lame I just have to ask, with population numbers like it has what does that make the other games?
Bicycle Repair Man! Thank goodness you're here! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough to say (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
All Games Are Lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Motivation??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's cry about it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Attention Seeking/Copy Grabbing for circulation (Score:2, Insightful)
If there's anything thought provoking about this article, it's made me wonder how WoW stacks up in profitability versus OFFLINE RPGS.
How much money did Neverwinter Nights make?
It's almost unthinkable that an online RPG could reach that critical mass, it seems like only yesterday I was outraged when I bought Ultima Online and learned it had a monthly fee.
Does anyone have that kind of information on hand?
Translate, please. (Score:1, Insightful)
Zonk, it takes about six seconds to re-read the portion of the article you were responsible for writing. Maybe you could spend that extra time to at least give the illusion that you aren't typing with an Xbox360 controller in your other hand all the time..?
Re:sheer genius (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I don't like that analogy... Personally I like to call WoW and EQ the games they are...
"Kill things over and over again so you can kill bigger things over and over again."
That is the problem I have with WoW, EQ, and various other Diki mud derivatives. Its solely focused on killing AI Mobs.
Ultima Online was more fun even though it was dated until they removed player interaction (Player killing and thieving). Sure many of you can't stand PvP, but in truth static quests, bad scripting, and poor AI will never beat playing against a human mind.
Even if you took the PVP away from UO, it still had crafting, housing, and plenty of non-combat activities that WoW and EQ lacks.
And the fact you only had to spend 3 months to generate a character with casual play rather than 6 months of hard core grinding.
Re:It's that bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
D2 is much better technically, creatively, and for the genre (turns out that's what most people like) IMO.
Re:It's that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't always want what they say. (Score:5, Insightful)
By their very nature as rule-constituted software systems, games will tend to instrumental play. There is already one exception: Second Life, which is already available. My question is: why hasn't the world flocked there? Could it be that, despite protests to the contrary, we like a well-defined achievement path, and enjoy finding efficient methods for progressing on them? Could the grind be part of the pleasure, even if it doesn't "feel" like it is?
Re:sheer genius (Score:5, Insightful)
New pet peeve: my style of game play is better than yours
I suppose I shouldn't be to harsh. This is just a public message board, not a peer-reviewed academic journal. But it's still annoying when people try to pass off personal preference as some kind of objective value statement. in this case you say "Sure many of you can't stand PvP, but in truth static quests, bad scripting, and poor AI will never beat playing against a human mind".
Aside the question-begging (does non-PvP have to involve bad scripting?) what I found truly obnoxious is the false idea that you can either play against an AI, or against a human. Believe it or not, some people don't see that question purely as picking your opponent, but they turn your dichotomy on its head and ask "who can I play with ?"
I get that you like PvP. And I'm not going to try and tell you that you shouldn't. But your myopically conflict-oriented viewpoint isn't the only one out there, you know. A lot of people like WoW because they enjoy cooperation. I love to shoot my buddies with a rocket launcher in the original Halo, but I also got intense satisfaction out of playing cooperatively with them against hordes of AI. Now you could play team vs. team, but A - some people don't enjoy "killing" each other, especially in an RPG where you actually do some type of damage to the person you "kill" and B - it's (so far) impossible to wrap massive PvP into a story line with any kind of script.
So in the end, you're no better off than the original article. You're trying to pass off personal preference as objective criticism.
-stormin
Wow is about raiding/PVP. This guy is a retard. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. 90% of the people who play this game don't give a rats ass about the story and when presented with a quest, skip the text and just try to finish it as fast as possible as the means to level up or get an item that they need.
2. The real appeal of the game is the challenging raid encounters and the social environment that has evolved around beating said encounters. People end up in every social guilds that all work together to defeat very difficult content. It's like the same reason people play team sports, there is no story around the sport that makes it interesting, it's the strategy, the socializing, the working together that makes people keep playing team sports. Also, imagine a team sport where once you have mastered one level of the sport you are presented with new and even more difficult challenges. If your "team" is good enough and cohesive enough, there is even the thrill of being able to spend months working on encounters and being the first group of people in the world to beat them. This teamplay/challenge comes into play in both PVE and PVP aspects of the game. This is what bridges the gap between the FPS/RTS type players and the RPG type players out there (being able to fullfil a class based roll in a highly strategy scenario and evolve your class/gear over time).
He clearly has misconceptions about WoW and would like to play a game that involves more role playing gayness and less strategy/teamwork/progression.
I don't want an f'n house. I want to be challenged 100% of the time.
You've never had a good DM, have you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dice Rollers are numbers wranglers who want a good game of chance. The most common sub-species is the Hack-n-Slasher, but that's just because most rule sets lend themselves to that kind of dice rolling. In games that have skill rolls, you'll find these guys rolling for damn near every feat up to and including getting up in the morning. "An 18?!? I spring from my bed and land in my shoes in one smooth motion! Hurrah!"
Problem Solvers like puzzles and planning. These are the guys who calculate exactly how many miles your party will average per day trekking across the Great Arid Waste and know exactly how much food and water to pack. When the party stumbles across a series of levers and switches in the dungeon, these are the guys to call. "Gruntmore the Dwarf pulls the red lever, goes through the blue door, pushes the star shaped switch, coems back out, pushes the green lever to a 45 degree angle disabling the secret blade trap and we all go merrily on our way!"
Role Players like to have long, drawn out in-character conversations with every shopkeeper and passing peasant they encounter. Whereas Dice Rollers will do whatever it takes to win, and Problem Solvers playing stupid characters will still come up with genius plans, these guys are apt to do utterly stupid things if they think that's what their character would do. They also tend to talk about their characters in the first person. "I leap from behind the tree and run screaming at the horde of orcs- What? Yes, I know the plan was to sneak up on them, but I'm overconfident with anger management issues. But you should really say that in character..."
But perhaps I missed your point, were you saying RPGs are about item finding or RTSs are? In any case, I think the real trick to either is actually basing it on a good simulation of some sort, but having story telling hooks that can effect the sim in the scripting interface, and have those hooks have flexible triggers and random details so that the same basic plotline can be activated from many different starting points using characters and locations tailored to the individual players. But I understand how hard it would be to scale a system like that up to WoW levels.
The real problem with WoW is that it isn't an RPG and it isn't for people who traditionally like RPGs so the players who would bring real quality to the game are driven away by all the Azkiker4921s and l33tWariers in the game.
Re:Let's cry about it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a second... (Score:3, Insightful)
Asheron's Call had new earth-shaking player-driven events every month, and they had - what - 1/100th of the income and staff that World of Warcraft does?
World of Warcraft is making tens millions of dollars a month in subscription fees alone, and has an unimaginably large staff.
Asheron's Call made significantly less each month, and yet they'd make sure that every month there was something new and player driven. In some events, they would even have developers and admins manually control NPCs who helped or hindered players in person for the quests.
So don't tell me it isn't possible. I've seen it done much better with many less resources. The WoW team is just making so much money without doing it that they don't feel the need to. If WoW was struggling at 30k users and barely paying for their servers, you can bet they'd try harder with monthly dynamic content to try and get a larger market share.
Some sympathy for what he says... (Score:2, Insightful)
I feel Blizzard did a lot right with the game but there is one major flaw: they did not create end-game content for the solo player or for small groups outside of PvP (which I don't really consider "content")
I am a casual player in theory but when I would get involved with my guild in raid groups, the only way I could get a possibility of an upgrade was to go to every raid every night, which often lasted 4+ hours. I eventually got very sick and was unable to work or go to school and this made me realize how ridiculous a game World of Warcraft is. When it requires that you spend 4+ hours in order to accomplish anything, you know something is wrong.
I want a game where I can spend 30 minutes playing and feel like I've accomplished something. And pretty much the only games that satisfy that are single player games at this point.
A Problem with the Genre not Wow? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You've never had a good DM, have you? (Score:4, Insightful)
These players tend to spend more time on character creation than playing. They plan out all their stats, profession changes, skills to practice, etc (depending on the game of course) long before they begin their first mission. Often perfectionists, but nearly always they want to create something-- to build something that wasn't there before, usually different than anything else and customized to their liking.
I think there's a little of this trait in everyone you mentioned, but nearly every hardcore MMORPG player falls into this category. Levelling and more often finding good items fuels this player type. Diablo II did (imho) a better job of feeding this kind of player, with ever stronger items and more varied builds. WoW does it by having a pretty well-defined "best" gear, but making sure to continually add new, better, gear over time.
As I think about it, this player probably fits pretty well into your Problem-Solver type, but it removes a lot of the roleplaying aspect of it. Rather than finding ingenious solutions to in-game problems, players now compare DPS in offline calculators.
Re:Article autor has it very wrong. Explanation: (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when my server had this event (Proudmoore US, 10th to open the gates) i was not in a raiding guild, but i quickly realised that the people that desperately wanted these 2 instances opened were the raiders, and they would pay to do it. I spent alot of time grinding for cloth and leather and selling it for the inflated prices all the required commodities jumped up to. Also considering i was on alliance, even a level 20 could capitalise since Alliance had Copper Bars (lowest kind) Light Leather (Lowest kind) and linen bandages (lowest kind). I basically paid for my characters epic mount by level 40 due to how i chose to get involved with the event.
Also, had your server community wanted to do it, it could have become quite a large social event. Medivh US, the first server to complete the event, went about it as a coordinated server wide community event. While some of their methods may have gone against the whole "War" part of the game (ie the large alliance population funnelling what the horde required through the neutral AH for cheap) it brought their entire community together,and most were damn proud when they came out on top.
Yes, it could have been better, much much better really, but i wouldn't call it pointless simply because you or your server chose not to participate in the ways that were open to you.
Re:sheer genius (Score:3, Insightful)
So what, pray tell, is the ultimate point of the game in the first place? If the answer is "to have fun" (and it should be) and if people have fun leveling up their characters (and several million seem to) than it seems you have no point.
-stormin
Re:Article autor has it very wrong. Explanation: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at the materials that need gathering. Then look up some of the research on economies on games like World-of-Warcraft. Ahn'Qiraj may have been merely a sink to pull crafting resources out of the economy until there was a player base to support the crafted item economy, or at least provide partial value to selling crafted items.
After all, crafted items to work well need a large player base to sell the items to. However on a new server the population is small and most people are in a tight level band. So rather than flooding the market with worthless skill up crafted items, it pulls the mats to make them into the war effort. Then when there is a population 0-60, ensured because even the top level items have been collected, the gates open and the sink disapears.
Doesn't make much sence when the population was in place, but the event remains for every new server which leads me to believe it is about creating an artificual sink during a specific period of server population pattern, and the requirements are nothing more than a self-regulated test to determine when to plug the sink.
WoW is an adventure theme park ride (Score:2, Insightful)
Very exciting, thrilling and just like in the movies but only if you allow yourselve to be swept along. If you pay even the slightest bit of attention you notice that all collapses are rather weak and obviously designed to be pulled right back up once the show is over, that explosions don't ever destroy anything and that in fact you are in carefully constructed machine designed to "collapse" over and over again only to be reset each time the audience has left. Sometimes even before the little cart has left the area (never ever look behind you in one of these rides)
WoW is like this. Put blinders on and it almost looks like your in a real RPG. There is a world out there waiting for YOU the hero to explore, creatures to fight, villains to slaughter, things to blow up. But they will reset in a few moments for the next audience only WoW never got the timing of the little carts with tourists right so the reset may trigger while you are still watching the show.
On the dock of the first main area for the night elves is a dude whose wive is ghost. The story itself is not that bad but this ain't a rpg. It is a adventure ride pretending to be an rpg, so you do not actually get any choice except to get out of the ride. But if you follow the ride there is only one conclusion wich is the same for everyone. Since you will pass this spot a lot you will more then likely see other players on the same ride. You might even be "turning in your quest" while someone else is seeing the touching reunion scene.
Offcourse single player RPG's are in essence the same. But here at least the "reset" for the next adventurer is hidden from your eyes. Only on replay will you suddenly find this magical world with all the same people wanting you to do the same thing you already done in a previous life.
But in a MMORPG you will be the 1000000th to discover the dying soldier who has been dying since game launch 3 years ago and will be breathing his last breath for years to come, get a unique blue stone for deliviring a broom (eq2) just like everyone else who got the same unique blue stone for the same broom.
It is kinda hard to then feel unique.
Is WoW wrong for being like this? Well, no. It is just the way MMORPG's play. While other ways are possible they are far more difficult to implement. Remember, Star Wars tried to be different and look how it ended up, a crap WoW clone desperate to get even a fraction of the players.
Second life and Eve Online are often mentioned but both are pathetic compared to the subscription numbers of WoW.
Theather gives you a far more personal experience then an adventure theme park ride BUT just how many theather productions can compete with the visitor numbers of even a small themepark?
Because if you can allow yourselve to ignore the obvious resets and that you are just the 1 millionth customer being services you get a fairly good fun experience.
It is just like life. We like to think the mega superstar waved at US in the 100.000+ audience, that the actor acted for us, that a <fill in your country here> audience really is special to a performer, that we are the best lover of your lover and we most certainly don't like to know that we are the 100th and that number 101 is already waiting in the hall.
But lets not forget that WoW is already amazing customized to you the player. An awfull lot of the NPC talk mentions your race and sex and proffesion. A feat many a single player RPG cannot even handle.
WoW is the current leader, it is not the most ambitious but it shows what can be done succesfully with todays technology and todays audience.
Todays audience? Why yes. What after all is the point of writing complex plots even allowing you to make complex moral decissions if the majority of g
To the author: what is the piece's purpose? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, if you just want to let off steam, get feel-good feedback, put a few ideas out there, then perfect. You've done your job.
But if you want to make a change, if you want big game companies to start listening and innovating and implementing your ideas, you've got to frame it all differently by talking to them. Not the fanboys and the serious gamers. Sure you might be saying what fans want, but you have to present it for the companies.
I don't work for any game companies, but these feature suggestions lack the justifications that they would look for. These guys want to deliver quality product on time and on budget. A big part of that involves balancing the pros and cons of implementing features.
Look at customization for example. I would love to trick out my avatar too, but the cons are huge. Large gatherings would generate massive lag (because that kind of data compounds fast), lots of users can't benefit much (using older computers with poor graphics), and not to mention the Myspace factor (give non-designers design power, get migraines). Suggesting possible caveats in the article (and possible solutions) goes a long way toward answering objections before they're even raised.
For big time MMOG devs it all comes down to this: Any feature is worth it, so long as the return it makes from users signups and/or retention is greater than the cost of development/maintenance. Show directly how each feature accomplishes these goals and you just might end up as a creative consultant. :)
Re:All Games Are Lame (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll also have a lot of users who leave their mark by creating giant penis statues. Enjoy.
Re:Let's cry about it... (Score:2, Insightful)
I would argue that WoW is the most well-implemented MMO out there right now. The problem is not the quality of the implementation, but the underlying algorithms that govern gameplay. This is where I lose interest: the game does not really take advantage of the possibilities presented by an MMO. The game world is almost completely static. Sure, it's a well-made static online world, but that doesn't take away from the fact that nearly everything in the game is set in stone.
Re:It's that bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
You couldn't be more wrong. WoW end-game is incredibly rich. In fact, in many ways its almost a separate game. The problem is, its not accessible to the casual player. End-game consists of a series of raid instances, with a max raid size of 20 or 40 people. Progression through these instances is somewhat linear in difficulty, although this is not universally true, and the newer instances tend to be far more interesting than those that were available at or shortly after release. However, they do all require a large group of people, it wouldn't be possible for any one person to solo the fights. EQ did some of this as well, of course, but EQ end-game raiding tended to be filled with hours of tedium "clearing" obstacle content. Wow has a magnitude of order less tedium between bosses.
The richness comes from the fact that such content is designed to be increasingly difficult when played without the equipment that tends to drop once the fight has been successfully accomplished. At first, the difficult is quite simple. In general, the only way to challange intelligent human players is to either (a) present them with human opponents, (b) make the automation considerably superior to human player character in terms of vitals like damage, health and mana, or (c) increase the sophistication of the automation so that it can react more like a creative human opponent (ala Unreal bots).
Option A is not economically feasible outside of player-vs-player content. Due to the complexities of the game (support classes, special abilities, etc), option C is probably a bit far-fetched at this point. That leaves B, and this is
As end-game progresses, Blizzard added an interesting twist to this: Encounters start to involve aspects which make them impossible to complete using the general formula that most players have become accustomed to from levels 1-60 (which typically involves having monsters attack a resilient player, while others kill the monster or heal the one being attacked). The more difficult end-game content requires (at least at first -- better gear later usually reduces difficulty) a large group of appropriately geared players who are exceedingly familiar with the AI mechanics, as well as excelling with their own toon's abilities. Many fights have multiple viable strategies that others have used, but finding the right one for a particular guild/raid-composition, practicing and perfecting it can be quite a challenge. There is typically very little room for individual error. Sometimes, even a single player, out of forty, having a problem performing a needed function (often a non-intuitive one) can be enough to snowball into a wipe (the term for everyone in the raid dying, and the specific fight resetting). The complexity and originality of these encounters is astounding; it may even be the single true innovation in the game (rather than just distilling the fruits of prior MMOs). It's interesting that so much design work has gone into this aspect of Warcraft even though, out of six plus million subscribers, only a small percentage will ever get to experience very much of it.
From level 1 to 60, Warcraft is a very, very easy MMO. This is a big part of its mass appeal. Beyond the basic five-man level 60 content, unfortunately available only to the non-solo player, it becomes much more difficult. currently, the pinnacle of such content (Naxx) is trivial for none (and experienced by few), if only for the fact that there does not yet exist gear powerful enough to significantly reduce the difficuly.