saturn return to sender

So Blizzard is offering free 10-day trial accounts for World of Warcraft. Since winter break is here (which shouldn’t actually translate to less work for me), and because I was curious, and because I’m a fool, I downloaded it. It took a few hours of “what the hell?” but as you might expect I am now thoroughly being sucked in.

We’ve had MMORPGs (= Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve tried one. I am impressed. For decades William Gibson and the like have been predicting massively-shared virtual worlds in which people can become lost, and they’re very nearly here. I think they’re going to be everything predicted; they’re going to be huge.

This one is brilliantly executed. I tried Second Life a few months ago, and maybe I didn’t give it a chance, but it didn’t do much for me. WoW has many of the social elements of Second Life, but is also and primarily an RPG. It’s like dice-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons on speed and hallucinogens and GHz of computing power and with people from around the world. The environments are beautiful, the level of freedom and autonomy you have enormous, and so far, the game is well balanced in terms of challenge versus progress. Character development is also well done: there are a huge number of combinations of paths you can take, and they all seem to lend their unique advantages and disadvantages.

And then there’s the social aspect. I’ve kind of been a loner so far, so I don’t even know half of what’s possible, but there’s an overall spirit of cooperation in the mode I’m playing. (I think there are more competitive “realms” in which you can play, too.) It’s enormously easier to complete quests when you share them with other people. I love that nearby players will help out if you’re getting your ass whipped by a monster. As a druid, many spells cost me next to nothing, so I can bless random passersby with a little temporary status boost, and random passersby sometimes do the same for me. It’s an odd sort of warm fuzzy, but I wish I could do it in the real world!

Granted, I am starting out as a night elf. It may be that if you start as an orc, people behave … accordingly?

I can shapeshift. It is OMG TEH COOL.

I am way behind on my net-speak, though. I blame grad school.

It’s also a dynamic world that can be updated and tweaked more or less constantly by the designers. They have several cute holiday-themed bits in the game right now. Mistletoe at inns (if you kiss the “winter revelers” you get some sort of status bonus for a while), christmas trees, etc. There’s a machine in Ironforge that transforms your avatar into a cute pudgy elf in a santa costume for thirty minutes. (As opposed to my native form as a night elf, who is of course completely bad-ass all the time.)

So. If you have any inclinations towards D&D or sword-and-sorcery fiction or RPGs, STAY AWAY. STAY FAR AWAY.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.