WoW Journal - 14-April-2005

This week I'm not playing at full speed. Monday I was playing D&D v3.5, my character being Murtog the Magnificent, the worlds greatest mage, at least that is what he thinks. As he is currently only level 4, he sometimes has problems of persuading others of his magnificence. :)

Tuesday and Wednesday I was playing WoW in the evening, but just for relaxation, without trying to be terribly efficient. I mainly did quests of level 40 to 45, which were effectively a bit too low for my level 48 warrior. But I did them for the fun, and for the faction, as it was all quests that gave positive faction with Booty Bay. Part of the quests was in a little cove in Arathi Highlands, where a Booty Bay pirate ship had stranded. The other quests were in Stranglethorn Vale.

The only difficult quest was one to kill a level 47 elite giant, for which I joined a pickup group. We were only 4, the others in the group were about 5 levels lower than me, and we didn't have a healer, but we won that fight anyway. But as is typical of the WoW pickup groups, you do the one difficult fight together, and then split up. A bit later I grouped for a while with a level 42 druid, helping him to kill trolls which I also needed for a quest. But the rest of the time I soloed.

Playing like this, soloing most of the time, doing quests and killing monsters that are relatively low level, would not get you anywhere at level 48 in another game. In World of Warcraft I still gained about half a level in two evenings, and I dinged level 49. I never had a character higher than level 42 in any other game, because everywhere else leveling slows to a crawl at a certain point, and you simply don't advance any more. But in World of Warcraft I haven't noticed a big slowdown. You level very quickly to level 10, quickly to level 20, and from there to level 49 was pretty steady. And for all that I hear, that pace continues up to level 60. And that is fine with me.

There are some people who believe that letting people reach level 60 in a reasonable time is bad, because the players at level 60 would then get bored and quit. I don't think that is true. People quit at all levels, because they are not having fun any more, and not just at level 60 because they reached a virtual "game over" screen. There is still lots of things to do at level 60, dungeons, raids, and, if you absolutely want, PvP. And if you don't like to continue at level 60, you just start over with the next character. I would guess that games like Everquest lost more people because these players felt they would never reach level 60 than they lost people who actually got there.

I have no idea at what point I will get bored with World of Warcraft. I first played it in the September beta, 7 months ago. Since December I'm playing WoW full time, first on the US servers, then on the European ones. And that is already a good bit longer than most MMORPG I played, with the exception of the first Everquest. Up to now I'm still happy.

Yes, I consume content in this game faster than new content is added. But in comparison with all the other games I played, WoW isn't adding new content any slower. There are new dungeons and things added in the major patches, and sooner or later Blizzard will announce the first expansion set. I happened to see a world map of Azeroth from Warcraft 3, and it had a third continent, Nortwond, which would make a rather obvious expansion set.

I'm also obviously unhappy whenever I crash, or the servers are down for maintenance. But that happens a lot less often than in other games, especially since I'm on the European servers. Finally I'm on a server where regular maintenance happens on a weekday, during the day, which means that most of the time I'm at work while the servers are down. Regular maintenance is 4 hours once per week, which is less than what I'm used to from other games. And WoW is more stable than previous games. Not quite ideal yet, and people who never experienced the disaster of games releases like Anarchy Online or Star Wars Galaxies are complaining loudly.

So right now I'm not looking for a new game, although I pre-ordered Guild Wars to have a look at it. But I'm not yet convinced that Guild Wars will be the next big thing, World of Warcraft is a hard benchmark to challenge.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link