Tuesday 26 May 2015

Gaming: Vanilla WoW: My Thoughts

I have been away, but you my readers have not been forgotten, oh no, for I have many gaming stories to shower upon thee from the previous couple of weeks...

I didn't necessarily plan to not write a blog post for nearing a fortnight, but in doing so I felt the need to write something interesting, and so here we go...

World of Warcraft, I don't play World of Warcraft any more, I pretty publically derided the whole approach Blizzard had taken around the time Wrath of the Litch King was released, and yes I played that expansion, but my guild of friends fell apart, my main honcho and I (Hi Chaplain) re-rolled on a new PVP Server and well, it never really took off.

With the casual ease one could get heroics, compared to the skill and time dedication needed to get gear in vanilla, it became far more pew-pew than an RPG, and indeed the player skill base around me started to reflect that, PVP videos stopped being things like level 60 hunters roaming wild, or even the annoying rogue naked evisceration videos... No they all became just inside battlegrounds, where everyone is doing the same thing, on the same ground, in the same patterns, over and over... Dailies the same.

So, Looking at the power of my then level 80, and the planned level 90 and eventual 100 I just didn't feel the need to pay £15 a month to play.  Instead I went and got married, which, so far, has been a more fulfilling adventure.

And this is the shambled Blizzard have brought on themselves, I saw it coming, those who didn't include I supposed the millions of subscribers they are shedding, the title retains 10 million subscribers, probably more than enough to keep it alive (well definitely) but I hope their now having still 10 million does not tell some suited executive that the game is a success, one current player described the current Warlords of Dreynor (I can' even spell it, I'm so uninterested) expansion as a menu fest, clicking through menu after menu.  From what I gather, the idea being you have your own garrison now... and you need followers, so you alone you gather your NPC followers?... Through daily, or weekly, or regular, repetitive, time sucking tasks...

Yeah, that's pretty much where I got off Wrath, with the monotony, and it just seems that monotony has carried on...

If we look back at WoW, about the original game, what can be say... Well, it took time to gain levels, it really did... Level 1 to 2, was 400 XP, the nightsabers (for example) in the starting zone were 100 XP, so kill 4 and you had your level... It took a few minutes.. and the other half of that first quest got you half the next level and so handing in the first quest you had been introduced to the "ding" of level 2, gathering XP and then getting a large XP boost for the hand in...

Spin forward again to the last time I played (you can find it in this very blog) I went to a now ruined Human starting zone, killing the wolves and kobolds, just the first three quests, I never needed to do the rest... level 9...

In the same amount of time it took to get between level 2 and 3 originally, I was level 9 in the current retail release.

I'm pretty sure I could download the game now, today, and level a DPS character even more quickly.

And that's so sad, the original release of the game, the starting areas, okay were not perfect, but they were pretty damn good.  Good fun, and they engaged you.  For starters, as a real early player, you had to read the quest text and travel around and you didn't just make XP you made experiences that I simply don't see the game offering today.

Okay, new lands are new lands, but should a new land have been +20 levels higher than the original release?...

I think perhaps it shouldn't have been, or more rightly the value of the early experiences should not have been devalued, why should a quest I did in 2005 reward 1200 XP, suddenly reward 3000 XP in 2015?... Simply to speed up the levelling, to cut players from that early experience...

And why?... Well, the answer for Blizzard to their customers, and to be fair amongst the customers ourselves, was that no-one was any longer interested in the starting zones, they had had their day, no-one was there any longer to help with Hogger... or to complete the quests, so first it was dumbed down, and then it was changed completely in Cataclysm.

But that didn't invigorate the players, it made some go abck to look, new players had an even easier ride, but they had a different experience to those of us whom had been there before.

And the difference was the experience we'd had, the original game was not completely finished, we know this, and I don't think the vanilla game was ever completely finished as an RPG, instead because of it's success from launch it got corrupted by the numbers of people, so we never saw the real first game design be realised.

You can see this in the match of the original art to the world... Look at Thandol span, a dual span bridge, to a tiny thin paved road each side of the span?

What traffic jams would have been there for the amount of traffic between Lorderon and Stormwind?... What traffic did the Dwarves of Ironforge have to pass North or bring South warranting that span?... Even with one span fallen and one partly blocked by rubble there's no way that span would ever be needed... But it was in there...

The fortresses of both factions, I don't think ever reached their potential for PVP use, Theramore never tempted many... Menethil simply ended up a ganking spot...

The best open world PVP was around Southshore, and I remember groups of 20+ fighters all rallying to the cry in Ironforge "SS under attack" and we flew off to defend...

That stopped happening, as soon as battlegrounds came in, not because southshore or Tarren Mill were less fun, arguably they were more fun... But because players like ease of use, and it was easier to get more honour in a battleground than actually in the world.

And again, Blizzard, this devalued the fabulous job you had done with the world, those open world kills should have been worth more than farmed kills...

Just like that original starting experience should be worth more than just being skipped over...

Just like the game today should be more than just rising and repeating tasks...

As I said in 2008, the game did not need to climb up, it needed, with it's very rich lore and appeal to expand out, it needed the level cap to change slightly, and I think Burning Crusade was a very good expansion after vanilla, but some of the things which happened later... have lead the world of warcraft off it's own track.

For ease, for the numbers, for the majority...

But I find myself in a minority, I crave the old experience, the old feel... One can still find it, and find communities enjoying that, but they're not official, they are private servers... Something I'm at pains to point people at due to their legal frailty.

I would however, say to Blizzard, time lock servers... And for the love of god, time lock and free to play model them, the game is close to ancient, I'd personally love to work for Blizzard, to time lock a server to say level 70, TBD era, but then expand the game outwards from there, to add story and content to the fringes and see where it would go.

How might the Iron Horde make an appearance in such an expanded world?... Would the Dark Portal cut off the worlds, leaving only Mages able to portal between cities and the Iron Horde spill out of the actual Dark Portal...

It's an interesting question, and might have fitted the lore better than what feels like the battering it's taking in WOD... I dunno, I day dream about it... The nearest I might ever get is emulating a server for myself and facing the wrath of Blizzard's legal department; something I don't really want to do.

So I stay not a paying customer, not a free to play customer to Blizzard, I stand aloof, with none of their products engaging me... But I wish they did.

1 comment:

  1. Heh. Very insightful post. I landed here doing some research on some old WoW lore out of nostalgia, and I'm glad to find someone who shares exactly my views on this game, what it once was and could have been.

    Meaningfully enough I've experienced the same pattern as you with WoW, getting hooked in awe and amazement with Vanilla and definitely dropping out a couple months into WotLK, once fully acknowledged the fact that the game I used to love was gone forever.

    The first time I left Wow, a few months before TBC, it was not because I was bored with the game, but because I felt the need to get back to a normal life and no longer raid 5 nights a week, and some evolutions announced for TBC I was unhappy about just gave me the excuse I needed.
    At that time, NOT diving back in TBC was a permanent challenge for my willpower that did not hold for more than a few weeks after the release. These were glorious times when everybody wanted in.

    And yet. Even though Vanilla and TBC were two wonderful games, despite the genuine popular success that they have been and off which the license has been living ever since, there is no doubt that they have been little more than mere shadows of the true masterpieces they could have been, had the creativity of the development team prevailed over the mass marketing pressures.

    When someone tells me "But Blizzard were RIGHT in their choices, look at how they managed to keep 10 millions subscriptions 10 years after!", I always answer that had they had the balls to truly follow their ambition instead of faltering in front of the marketing wormtongues, it is not 10 million players we would be talking about, but 30-40 million. A game like LoL that is far less appealing has them. (Yes, it's free. But come on, monthly subscription was never an issue when Wow was the absolute place to be).

    The reality is, Wow for all its long-lasting commercial success - which seems to finally near its end as of late - redounds in the end as the story of a missed opportunity.
    And the bad news is that neither Blizzard nor any of the studios that attempted to reproduce Wow's initial recipe for success one way or another actually owns it. Vanilla's greatness relies on a freedom in creation and features inclusion that are no longer acceptable for the people who are paid to pretend they know what the players want.

    Most of us including yours truly, have foolishly considered at that time that WoW was setting a new norm and what would follow was bound to be better, refined versions of this type of epic adventure. This abundance mentality would leave a lot of old players cancelling their subscriptions and leaving in due confidence they could experience the greatness again whenever they miss it - except they couldn't, as the greatness was gradually replaced by the mass marketing chicken batteries.

    Yet to end up on a note of hope, I believe that amongst the millions of players who once loved WoW as it was back then, lie a few talented game designers who will be able to draw the right lessons from their experience back then and in their time, prove their ability to create something just as exciting.

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