Tuesday 15 February 2005

Pic of the day: The further journeys of Itlandsen, the wandering Paladin. (Yes, I used the same name in DAoC. I would not be surprised if I meet people here who recognize it, although most likely the ex-DAoCers are scattered across different servers, of which there are quite a lot.)

World of Warcraft

Well, I know most people who could even imagine playing this game must already be doing so, so I'm a bit late. After all, it's been out in the USA since late last year, and here in Europe it sold 280 000 copies the first DAY, 380 000 by the weekend. That's far more than the total estimated MMORPG market in Europe, according to Blizzard's press release. They are very satisfied with themselves, and I can see why.

The European launch went better than the American, where the servers collapsed because of the unexpected pressure. The European servers are holding up ... well, some of them. There is a good number of servers that are just plain full, especially PvP servers but also one "normal" server (only consensual player killing like dueling, although from the popularity of the player killing servers you have to wonder which is the normal here). That one server, incidentally, is the one where an acquaintance of me has a guild that seems really cool (Path of Righteousness). Oh well. Perhaps the less populated servers were added in the days after the release of the game? I didn't get it until after the weekend.

Even so, I did not get my account created the first night because the registration web server collapsed. Probably too many people registering. It got better in the morning – even Europeans don't play online games in the morning. Well, most of them don't ...

The next evening, the newbie areas were swamped with new characters, just pouring into the least-loaded server. We're talking about crowds here. I can't complain, being one of them, and besides it was the same (if not worse) when the DAoC cooperative server was started, and to some extent even in City of Heroes, although CoH had a nifty invention called "zone instancing": If the number of players in a zone exceeds a certain number, a new plane of reality is created on the same server, and new arrivals are shunted into that (and existing players can move there by mass transit, heh). When traffic slows down, the zones merge again. That way you won't see people squabbling over too few enemies. I won't say there was actual squabbling in WoW either, but you basically had to compete for the kobolds: First come, first serve.

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OK, onward to the game itself. It is cute. That's the short of it. Even the monsters are ugly in a cute way. There is an irony in this, that CoH which is based on superhero comics looks eerily realistic except for the heroes and some of the villains. While WoW looks like a cartoon. Don't get me wrong, it is highly detailed, at least on a par with the competition. Evidently there are hundreds of different patterns just for trees. But they all look cartoonish. It may look like a bad thing when you read it like that, but the truth is that it is all uber cute and gives the game a much needed comic relief. With a world utterly embroiled in war and overrun by monsters, it could easily get too depressing. It is not. There is an immediate fun factor. You start the game and look around and you think: "Fun! Cute! Pretty!" The colors are vivid (well, except for the snow-covered areas), landscapes and houses are pretty. You feel that you want to like it before the game has even begun. (Well, at least I do, and probably others as well since so much of the game's success is due to the rumors spreading from the beta testers. Advertising has not been exceptional for the genre.)

The user interface is simpler than in Dark Age of Camelot (which was fairly similar to EverQuest) but less obvious than in City of Heroes. For instance, it took me a day to find out how to speak in the General (broadcast) channel as opposed to local. I found nothing in the manual, not even when they got along to explaining chat commands on page 136. Yeah, a pretty big manual, and pretty good, but you need a manual too. It is not completely obvious, and there is no tutorial like in CoH and Rubies of Eventide, where you meet a series of NPCs that explain the user interface from movement to combat and spellcasting. The game could have benefited from such a tutorial, but of course you would only need that for your first character, and then mostly if you don't read the manual.

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At the heart of the game is a strong focus on quests. The developers dismissed the tradition of having obscure quests where you had to spend time looking for questgivers. Nor did they adopt CoH's unique system where each hero is assigned a contact which then introduces him to other contacts depending on his origin and interests. Rather, the land is full of people giving out quests, appropriate for your level. When you qualify for a quest, a bright yellow exclamation point appears over the head of the NPC so you readily see it even if you just pass through. If you have finished a quest, the NPC has a bright yellow question mark so you can find him and receive your reward. (Rewards are always handed out, either by the questigiver or another NPC, they don't just appear when you have met the conditions like they usually do in CoH.)

The newbie quests are local, but eventually the quests will set you wandering. You get small doses of experience points just for exploring as well, but most likely you will be exploring because you have been sent to deliver something or fetch something or kill something in a new area. (Like DAoC, the game doesn't have zone walls ... the transition from one zone to the next is smooth and happens gradually in the background while you wander along. So you don't really think of them as zones, just areas or regions. You will however get up the name of a new area when you arrive there, and the first time you discover it you get a small message and a little XP.)

Any number of reviews will point out the flying mounts such as giant birds that you can ride from one city to another. But this only works with large cities, and even then you first have to have arrived there by foot and talked to the flight NPC. While it makes for great screenshot, flying is not a big part of the game like in City of Heroes. Coming straight from CoH, I find the lack of transport powers slightly frustrating. Yes, it is a beautiful landscape you are running through, but you are not running at superspeed and after a while you lose interest in the hundreds of different trees. I suspect an intentional time sink. This game lets people level faster than any of its competitors as it is, so there must be something for people to do. A moderate amount of running helps slow things down a bit.

There is pretty much promised an expansion at some later time that will add new levels, and I presume these will be slower. But the high-level content of this game is not level grind, but PvP combat. Even on the non-PvP servers duels are implemented from the start, something that is only now slated to appear in City of Heroes around a year after its start, and which took even longer to appear in DAoC. People want duels, for some reason. I suppose artificial intelligence really is no match for natural stupidity, as the saying goes...

Even the "normal" servers have optional ethnic wars, but you have to go to great lengths to get it: Travel to enemy territories and provoke them into attacking you. This is surprisingly efficient ... I was in a newbie zone and people were all up in arms about some lvl 25 invaders. In truth, our strongest attack against them would probably be /hug, it's not like we could actually fight them, but some of the kiddies were quite eager to try. I didn't see how it proceeded, but I understand that there are certain in-game extras unlocked for those who do enough PvP, even on the "normal" servers. On the other hand, if you keep ganking newbies (or generally people many levels below you) you will earn "dishonor points" that will make the civilians stop talking to you, even those of your own race. I haven't seen that though, and I feel convinced I never shall.

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In my next article, I will look at some actual classes and powers, and how skills and levels work in the World that is Crafted for War.