I’ve had a long-standing love/hate relationship with that genre of gaming known as the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). On the one hand I love the idea of taking the classic pastime of Pen and Paper RPGs and translating them into a video game that can be enjoyed by hundreds or thousands of players all over the world at the same time. On the other hand I’ve found that just about every MMORPG becomes dreadfully boring after a few months of play.

I was there when Ultima Online was released and I’ve played almost every MMORPG that’s been released since either as a beta-tester or after buying the game when it was released. This includes some of the big names like Evequest, Dark Age of Camelot, Ashron’s Call (1 and 2), and City of Heroes. Each one has managed to improve on what came before it, but most of them still managed to fall down in the same areas and I ended up abandoning the game well before ever hitting the maximum level possible. With EQ I never got a character past level 20 even after returning to the game several times when new expansions were released. With Dark Age of Camelot I got one character up to level 36 before giving up. The games just failed to hold my interest.

So it’s no small statement to say that World of Warcraft has managed to fix a lot of the problems that I have with MMORPGs and the proof of this is in the fact that my primary character, a Dwarf Hunter named Balfour, is currently level 55 – a mere five levels from the game’s cap of 60. Not only am I definitely going to make it to the maximum level possible, but I’ll probably do it again with another character or two as I already have a Night Elf Druid named Sanctus at level 20. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock then you probably have at least heard of WoW in passing as even the mainstream press has given it a lot of attention, but in case you haven’t then here’s a bit of background info. The first three games in the Warcraft series were Real Time Strategy (RTS) games where you took on the role of a commander who had to build up a military base and gather resources so you could assemble an army of various units that you would then use to beat the living snot out of either a computer or human controlled opponent. The last of this original series, Warcraft III, managed to meld some RPG elements into the traditional RTS mix that made for a very compelling combination and an excellent storyline. Taking that setting and storyline and making it into a MMORPG seems like a no-brainer and the folks at Blizzard apparently thought so as well.

Thus it came to pass that World of Warcraft was born and you went from commanding whole armies to controlling one of the units itself. On the Alliance side you can choose from Human, Dwarf, Gnome, or Night Elf and on the Horde side you can be Orc, Troll, Tauren, or Undead. Each race then has a number of different classes that you can pick such as Priest, Warrior, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Hunter, Druid, Mage, and Paladin. Not all races have access to all classes and the Paladins are exclusive to the Alliance while Shamans are only found among the Horde. The storyline picks up not long after the events of Warcraft III with the shaky truce between the two opposing factions that formed to combat a common enemy—in the form of The Scourge—starting to crumble. Nothing like old feuds boiling over to keep things interesting.

I could probably write volumes on the things that WoW has done right, but I’ll limit myself to the big things that have been pet peeves of mine in other MMORPGs. Probably the biggest annoyance that the folks at Blizzard managed to avoid: Grouping up into parties is not forced on you through game design. It seems as though the Conventional Wisdom among MMORPG makers is that players won’t really enjoy the game unless they experience it with others in a group that goes off on adventures together so the games are designed in such a way that you will eventually get to a level where you pretty much have to party with other players if you want to continue to make progress in a reasonable time frame. For the first 10 or 20 levels or so you may be able to play solo reasonably well, but then the game suddenly slows to a crawl unless you search out others to go kill stuff with. WoW doesn’t have that requirement. Sure, there’s plenty of quests and areas that you can’t do solo, but there are also plenty of the same where you can go it alone. This means that it is possible to play a character from level 1 to 60 without ever grouping if that’s what you want to do. Now some of you may wonder why someone would want to play a MMORPG if they don’t want to party with other players as that’s kind of the point. The answer ties into the next thing Blizzard managed to fix.

You don’t need four hours of play per session to enjoy the game. If you have only 20 minutes to spare, you can hop into WoW and do some monster bashing or a small quest and log out feeling like you actually accomplished something. This makes it more appealing to casual gamers. In other games you can spend 20 minutes just trying to find a party to join and then spend another 20 minutes debating over where you’re going to go or what quests you’re going to work on. The fact that you can solo so much of the game is what makes this possible. In EverQuest if it took me more than 15 minutes to find a group I’d just quit and go play Counter-Strike instead. With Balfour I’ve probably spent more time soloing than in a party, but I do enjoy grouping with others to take on the bigger quests that have the cooler rewards. The cool thing is, I can make that choice instead of having it forced on me by the designers.

They chucked the traditional death penalty. In most other MMORPGs dieing, especially at higher levels, can really suck. In EQ you lost some of your experience points and had to run all the way back to your corpse to retrieve all your stuff. Die enough times in a row and the XP loss could be enough to drop you down a level and even a single death could wipe out the XP gain of the past two hours. This meant that you were less likely to take risks out of fear of losing any progress you’d made or dropping down a whole level. In Dark Age of Camelot the XP loss would stop once you hit the base amount required for your current level. This was even sillier because it meant that you’d only be willing to take chances immediately after gaining a new level where a death wouldn’t big such a big deal. Yet other games went with an “experience point debt” where you wouldn’t technically lose any XP at all, but would have a period where you’d only get partial credit for any XP earned until the “death debt” was paid off.

Blizzard decided to scrap all of those methods and make dieing more of an annoyance than a penalty so you’d be more inclined to take on risks and explore the game fully. When you die in WoW you appear as a ghost in the closest graveyard and you have two choices. The first is to run back to your corpse where you can instantly resurrect with half you usual hitpoints and mana and some minor wear and tear on your equipped weapons and armor that can be easily repaired back in town. The second is to speak with the spirit healer in the graveyard and be resurrected immediately without having to run across the countryside to find your corpse. This second option is more painful in that you will have resurrection sickness for 20 minutes or so which reduces your travel speed and lowers several attribute traits until it wears off (meaning you’re not gonna want to do much of anything until it clears up). In addition to that, all of your items, equipped or not, will be reduced to 25% of their current durability rating which makes for a much more expensive repair bill at higher levels. Most folks opt to run back to their corpse for this reason and the game makes it easy for you by marking on your minimap exactly where you died. This system is so much better than how the other games handle character death. It can still be frustrating, but it’s not traumatic the way it can be elsewhere and it allows you to be more adventurous.

Finally, Blizzard minimized character downtime. Harking back to EverQuest again, the primary way your character healed or regained magic energy after a fight was to sit on his ass and wait for time to pass. The same was also true in DAoC. At higher levels this could be a lengthy wait with EQ having recovery times upwards of 20 minutes while DAoC kept it to around 10 minutes. Sitting down speeds recovery in WoW as well, but I have no idea how long it would take to just sit and wait as I’ve never had to do so because in WoW you can actually do things to heal yourself more quickly. One way is to eat food to recover health or drink beverages to recover mana. There are even recipes that you can cook your food with for increased benefits such as a temporary boost to some attributes. Or you can make bandages and apply them to your wounds. Lastly, you can drink potions to instantly recover some amount of HP or mana. Each method has pros and cons: Eating can only be down outside of combat and only to yourself. Bandages can be done in combat though being hit while applying them does diminish their healing properties, but you can apply them to others in addition to yourself. After applying one bandage you have to wait a while before you can administer another. Potions are fast, but in limited supply and have an even longer cool down period before they can be used again than bandages do. All of that adds up to you spending less time on your ass twiddling your thumbs and more time whacking the crap out of monsters.

Again, the reason so many other games don’t have these options is to encourage people to group up as you’re going to want to have a good healer class around to help bandage you up quickly so you don’t sit on your ass. Usually that class will be in the form of the Cleric or Priest and sometimes the Paladin will have some minor healing ability. In WoW Priests are certainly the best healer class, but not the only one as Paladins can fill the bill decently in a pinch and even Druids and Shamans make pretty good healers if they want to. Plus everyone can just sit down for a snack if worse comes to worst. Rather than diminishing the role of Priests in the game it actually makes them more diverse. In DAoC it was possible to develop a Cleric that specialized in fighting undead rather than healing, but doing so pretty much ensured you’d never be asked to join a party as the only Clerics people wanted in their groups were healers and that’s about all you got the chance to do when in a party as a cleric. Because they’re not the sole providers of health care in WoW the Priest class can be more than just the guy who stands around healing folks and hoping all the monsters don’t decide to turn on him. Resurrection is normally the sole province of Clerics/Priests as well in other games, but Paladins, Druids, and any character with the Engineering profession can do it in WoW. Engineers do it by building “Goblin Jumper Cables” which have a small chance of exploding when used. WoW‘s game design is all about options and keeping the action going and this is why it’s selling so well.

So those are the four big gripes I’ve had about other MMORPGs that WoW manages to get right. In addition to that, the game itself is simply amazing to play. The graphics are relatively low in polygon count, but the rich textures and amazing art design combine to disguise this fact. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously either as there are all sorts of silly touches that make the game amusing ranging from the Stormwind bank tellers who’s first names combined turn into “Olivia Newton John” to the dwarf mortar team that shout out lyrics from AC/DC songs. Quests, always important to telling the story of the game, are very easy to find as each NPC that has a quest that you are an appropriate level to undertake will have a big yellow exclamation point over his or her head and the NPC that ends a quest will have a big yellow question mark as well. Sound is top notch and the background music sets the theme for different areas appropriately.

As great as WoW is, however, it’s not quite perfect. It has had some serious growing pains as a result of it’s unprecedented success that can make being a fan a pain in the ass. Blizzard underestimated the respond the game would receive, though they did try to plan for it and bought enough hardware for what they thought their needs would be over the next year which they planned to roll out over the course of the year as needs dictated. Well, they ended up deploying all of that hardware within the first two months of operation and even had to take the game off store shelves for awhile until they could get things stabilized. Even now it’s not unusual for the servers to experience various network connectivity issues from time to time that make getting in to play impossible for hours at a time which can be pretty annoying when you’re paying $15 a month above and beyond the $50 the game cost to begin with. Servers with very high user populations tend to have a lot more problems than lower populated ones and Blizzard has recently started offering the option to move your character on a high population server to a lower one to folks who want to make the shift in hopes of balancing things out a bit more.

High populations can cause problems on the client end as well. The number of possible armor styles and textures that any particular character can have is huge so anytime you’re in an area where there are a lot of other players your PC has to load in a boatload of additional graphics to display things properly. This can lead to Hard Drive Lag where your system is so busy loading up data from your hard disk that it locks up the game for upwards of a minute or two while it retrieves the data. This is compounded by the fact that one of the more popular features of the game, the Auction House, has only three incarnations: One for the Alliance in Iron Forge, one for the Horde in the Undercity, and a neutral one in the city of Gadgetzan. Going into Iron Forge on a Saturday evening can be a painful experience as your PC grinds away trying to load in the graphics for the couple of hundred different people that might be present. Having 1GB or more of RAM seems to help offset this problem quite a bit, but Blizzard is also trying to improve their code to help offset this problem. Additionally there are plans to add in more auction houses in other cities that are all linked together so folks won’t have to congregate in one spot to make use of it.

The technical issues Blizzard has been having since the game launched has been enough to get more than a few people to cancel their accounts, but these are all things that will be worked out in time. EQ had similar growing pains and it didn’t have the enormous response that WoW has received with its debut. Like others before them, Blizzard will eventually iron these issues out. Still, it bears noting that not everything is peaches and cream.

In the end, all the stuff that makes WoW so great ends up overshadowing all the problems that come with it. If you’re a fan of MMORPGs then chances are you’re already playing World of Warcraft, but if you’ve never given one a try before then there is no better game to start with. It’s the best of the lot so far and it looks to only get better with time.