World of Warcraft Re-Review

World of Warcraft is now over a year old in the US, and out for nearly a year in Europe. The hype has cooled down a bit, and playing the game for a year has given everybody a much clearer view of its strengths and weaknesses. So this is a second look at the game, a re-review, describing how the different features played over the long term. With World of Warcraft being such a big game, be warned that this article is going to be long.

I’m not trying to give a score to World of Warcraft in this review. WoW has 5 million subscribers now world-wide, most of them playing this game already for many months, and it would be difficult to pretend that WoW isn’t a very good game. Nevertheless, while a point could be made claiming that WoW is the "best" MMORPG out there, by popular vote, it is definitely still far from perfect. WoW does a great job of being accessible to the broadest audience possible, but it is not necessarily the best game for everybody.

Let’s start with a discussion of technical features. The graphics of World of Warcraft have a unique style, which isn’t liked by everybody. On the positive side the graphics are functional, you can usually easily identify every item and monster in the game, and you don’t need a $500 graphics card to play. On the negative side World of Warcraft is definitely not the best looking game out there, and risks looking horribly outdated in 5 years time.

When discussing technical features like bugs, lag, and downtime, one has to be careful with what to compare World of Warcraft. WoW scores generally well in these areas if you compare it to the other available games, because the "industry standard" is abysmal. Compared to a hypothetical perfect game with no technical issues at all, WoW still has room for improvement. The number of bugs is low, both absolute and relative to the competition. Lag is a problem whenever a large number of players assemble in one place, like in cities, battlegrounds, and raids, but this lag can be significantly reduced by running on a more powerful computer with more RAM and a better graphics card. The most annoying technical flaw is server downtime. There is a weekly maintenance of several hours, which is scheduled at a time of low traffic. But some servers experience occasional unscheduled downtimes, connection problems, and crashes. And as these tend to be caused by overpopulation, they happen during the busiest time. World of Warcraft has hundreds of servers, and these are not totally identical in hardware, so some servers or server clusters have more of such problems than others. On the positive side, the most server problems happened during the early days of the game, when Blizzard was overwhelmed by the success of their game. As the number of players stabilizes, the situation improves. The servers are up more than 95% of the time, if you count the scheduled maintenance as downtime, and more than 99% if you don’t. Obviously it is still highly annoying if the 1% downtime happens in the middle of your raid, but sometimes you just need to remember that a game server doesn’t need to have the same sort of reliability as a life support system. Another technical feature to discuss is the modular user interface, which is easy to modify with add-ons. Wherever the standard UI has shortcomings, such add-ons become quickly available from third parties, and Blizzard sometimes even integrates the best ideas for modifications into the standard UI by a patch.

Moving from technical features to game design features, I want to start with a general observation: World of Warcraft is a relatively "easy" game. A big part of its success is due to the fact that it is accessible to a large number of people who have never played a MMORPG before, the famous "casual" gamer crowd. That does not mean that playing well is not rewarded in World of Warcraft. The best rewards in the game are reserved for the small group of players who are the most dedicated and best organized. But if you don’t belong to that group, you can still advance at a reasonable speed and up to the highest character level in the game, even on a casual play schedule. The big improvement of World of Warcraft for the new players, in comparison to other games, is that the tutorial never really ends. If you just take every quest you see, you will always have something to do, you will always know where to go, you will always be adequately equipped, and you will reach level 60 one day. Another important point of WoW game design is the presence of lots of carrots, and very few sticks. You are rewarded often, and punished only rarely, and lightly. Dying is no big deal, causing only a small loss of time and money. Forming a group with a weird composition of classes, or a wide range of levels is possible. Soloing is possible. Obviously there is an optimal way to play which would advance you the fastest and give you the best rewards, usually a well coordinated group having tanks, healers, and damage dealers of similar level. But if for some reason you chose or are forced to play in a sub-optimal way, you will still get some advancement and some reward out of it.

The major feature that makes World of Warcraft so accessible is the quest system. With an emphasis on the word "system". Other games have quests, but nowhere is the quest system as pervasive as in WoW. Quests not only cover nearly every corner of the game world, but they also serve to send you on to the next zone of the appropriate level. Many players spend most of their time on quests. Other games often see players killing the same monster for hours, because that is the easiest way to gain experience at that level. In World of Warcraft the quest reward of experience points, money, and items is so interesting, that it is better to only stay in one area until you finish your quests there, and then return to the next settlement and get the next bunch of quests for the next area. Thus players are distributed over all areas more or less evenly, and there is no conflict over favorite "camping" spots. The disadvantage of this system is that you sometimes seem to be playing on rails. You have the freedom to stray from the path of quests, but it takes some mental effort, and not everybody is willing to do so. Getting a group together for an area or dungeon for which there are no quests for your faction is very hard. Most quests are for soloing, so forming groups is not as much encouraged as it could be. Elite quests often require a group, but then the group often disbands after the quest is finished. This mode of play suits many casual players just fine, but leaves MMORPG veterans yearning for more social interaction.

World of Warcraft offers all the basic tools for social interaction: A chat system, a system to find a group for dungeons, a group system complete with different loot modes, a raid system, and of course guilds. But of these, only the loot distribution system is modern and innovative. The chat system is basic, and advanced options like setting up your own chat channel or opening additional chat windows are badly documented and not obvious. The group finding system with meeting stones is so bad, that it is hardly ever used. Raids are only bearable with special user interface mods. And the guild system only offers the basic functions like a guild chat, tabard, and ranks, and is a far cry from the web-supported guild management system of Everquest 2. Blizzard promised some improvements for the social interaction tools, and the latest patch 1.9.0 is already a small step in the right direction, but this area is definitely not one of the strong points of the game. Especially a better group finding interface would be sorely needed.

In the early days of World of Warcraft some people predicted that a lack of social interactions would ultimately be the doom of this game, as making friends in a game is known to add significantly to a MMORPGs longevity. Fortunately it turned out that WoW isn’t that bad. On the way to level 60 people are already encouraged to form groups through elite quests, and instanced dungeons, where the highest concentration of the best items in the game is found. And at level 60 the casual soloing play style comes to a screeching halt, you stop advancing by quests, and you either start over with another character, or you organize yourself into a guild to attain the high-level raid content of the game. Over 90% of all players over level 43 are in a guild. As forming a group, and especially a raid group, requires some effort, it is only logical that this effort is rewarded more than easy soloing. It is possible to play a lone wolf in World of Warcraft, but that will keep you from reaching all the content and getting the very best rewards. The desire to see everything and get the best stuff encourages people to overcome their reluctance to form social bonds with strangers. Friendships form, and at the end WoW isn’t that much less social than other MMORPGs, thus saving its longevity. Of course that system has its disadvantages too: People who can’t or don’t like to go on raids feel excluded from the high-end content, and reaching level 60 becomes kind of a disappointment. And lower level people who join a guild often find that most guild activities are for level 60, and then they feel a need to grind through the lower levels quickly to get to the point where they can play with their friends.

When discussing the possible longevity of World of Warcraft, one major point is the huge amount of content this game has. The world is large, and unlike some games that advertise their huge world size, it is well filled with landmarks, things to explore, monsters to battle, and treasures to attain. Every zone has a distinctive flavor, everything is handmade, there are no endless, boring, randomly created landscapes. There are over 3,000 quests, over 30,000 items, and a huge number of different monsters to fight. Leveling one character up to 60 takes about 500 hours, and with 9 classes and 8 races distributed over the two factions there is a lot of replayability. All the classes play very differently from each other, and the talent system gives every class at least two viable ways of further specialization. The classes are well “balanced”, not in the sense that they are all equally good for everything, but in that classes which are better for one play style are less good for another. For example a defensively specced warrior might not be ideal for PvP, but you sure want to have one in your PvE dungeon group. All the character classes and specs are interesting in one way or another, so most people have several characters on their accounts. After playing for over a year, I still haven’t played all character classes beyond the newbie levels. On the other hand the type of content I feel I’m running out of is dungeons and quests, after about 1500 hours of play. Fortunately Blizzard is adding more content, with regular patches, and the announced Burning Crusade expansion. By having made the time needed to reach level 60 relatively short, in comparison with other games, they have left themselves a lot of room for expansions that raise the level cap. But with the first expansion only coming out a full two years after the game was initially released, Blizzard is a lot slower than their competitors, and they need to speed that process up.

One game design feature of special interest to me is a game’s economy. Here World of Warcraft is holding up reasonably well. Previous games often suffered from "mudflation", items becoming worth less and less, because more of them were added to the game world every day, and few if any ever were destroyed. Items in World of Warcraft have a limited life, because once they are equipped they become soulbound, and can’t be handed down or sold to lower level players any more. WoW is doing less well on the second part of the economy, money supply. The higher in level you are, the more virtual gold you earn per hour. On the older servers over half of the players is level 60, and money is plentiful. The resulting inflation is most visible if you look at the black market "exchange rate" between WoW gold and real world dollars. While selling gold in WoW is a bannable offence, there are nevertheless lots of gold farmers selling on the internet. But while in the early days 100 gold went for over $100, prices are now down to less than $10. Related to the game economy is the crafting system. Other games often made crafting a rather tedious chore of thousands of identical mouse-clicks. World of Warcraft has made crafting much simpler and more accessible. The difficult part of crafting is now the resource gathering part, once you got the resources the crafting itself and gaining skills is very easy. The downside of this is that with money being plentiful and many people wanting to skill up tradeskills quickly, resources are now often worth more than the items you craft from them. Nevertheless crafting is an interesting alternative occupation for times when you just don’t feel like killing monsters.

I’ve kept the discussion of the most controversial WoW feature for the end, player-vs.-player (PvP) combat. In spite of being based on one of the world’s most successful series of multiplayer real-time strategy games, PvP is not the strong point of World of Warcraft. When WoW was released, there were no PvP rewards at all, which caused most players to quickly lose interest in such an unproductive occupation. Then Blizzard introduced PvP honor points, and a PvP rank system with rewards. That resulted in huge PvP battles in areas where Horde and Alliance had settlements close to each other, like Hillsbrad. As there are no negative effects for killing players of a much lower level or number, a lot of griefing and ganking happened on the PvP servers. To make PvP more fair and organized, Blizzard then introduced battlegrounds, of which there are three types now. Unfortunately the honor point system was created to give out points relative to the performance of all other players of the same faction on the server. Casual players quickly learned that they couldn’t compete against the hardcore players, and would never get to the higher ranks and the interesting rewards. So nowadays the battlegrounds are mostly empty, only the small ones being occupied by a few PvP fans “farming” honor points. During low-traffic hours the battlegrounds are completely empty, and even at prime time they hold less than 5% of the players. There is no obvious solution to make WoW PvP a success. One fundamental problem is that there are about twice as many Alliance players than Horde players, presumably because the Alliance has the better looking character models and starting zones. Blizzard is trying to fix that by giving the Horde a sexy looking race in the Burning Crusade expansion set but it remains to be seen whether that works, and how long it will take to repair the huge imbalance. With the player-vs.-environment (PvE) part of doing quests, slaying monsters, and visiting dungeons being so excellent in World of Warcraft, it seems that PvP is forever condemned to being a minor secondary activity.

In summary, World of Warcraft is a very good game, with a particular strength in PvE questing for the casual player. It is probably the ideal recommendation to anybody who wants to play his first MMORPG. With a huge subscriber base, one expansion announced, and others planned, World of Warcraft will probably be the market leader for several years to come. But with several new MMORPGs on the horizon that either cover different genres than fantasy, or have strengths in areas where WoW is weak, it’s market share will probably erode over time, while the market size is growing.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link