World of Warcraft Beta Dissected

larsoncc writes "Fatman Games has published an absolutely massive hands-on preview of Blizzard's PC MMO title World of Warcraft, now that the game's NDA has expired with the commencement of the public Beta. Will MMORPG players drool over the chance to control a Succubus? Yeah, I know - obvious answer!"

Comments

what i've heard

[rabbot]

From what i've heard from beta testers so far, its pretty much the same lvling treadmill we've gotten used to over the past few years. It's going to need something revolutionary to make me go out and buy this game, not the Warcraft name alone.

Re:what i've heard

[roche]

From reading that article I have come to the same conclusion. This really does not surprise me though. After constantly hearing about how each new game was going to completely revolutionize the MMORPG genre, I am finding it almost impossible to believe the hype. I think Star Wars is what did it for me. Tales of non static spawns, dynamic content and a non level based system sounded like a dream come true. When everything was said and done though, it was basically just the same ol MMORPG.

A few months after SWG came out, I kept hearing whispers of how WOW was going to completely change everything everyone thought about how a MMORPG operates. After reading this article, I can see that the hype machine was/is in full effect again.

Re:what i've heard

[Jerf]

From what i've heard from beta testers so far, its pretty much the same lvling treadmill we've gotten used to over the past few years. It's going to need something revolutionary to make me go out and buy this game, not the Warcraft name alone.

The levelling treadmill is a fundamental result of trying to apply the levelling system to MMORPGs. Anything that tries to apply the idea of levelling runs into two fundamentally conflicting forces:

• 10% of your customer base accounts for 90% of the logged in time, and
• 90% of your customer base (and by extension, income) doesn't do that.

You need to make the game fun for both groups, because the first one is loud (and will impact whether anyone buys the game at all disproportionately), and because the second one accounts for the majority of your cash flow.

Any system that rewards the player for spending time in the game, or, equivalently, requires significant time in the game to advance in skills, will always have the same flaws modern "levelling treadmills" do. Until you do away with the level idea as the central organization of the game, MMORPGs will not advance significantly over what they are now. (I'm not saying they have to go away completely, but they can't be the central number used in every RNG computation.)

It's not something that can be designed around, it's fundamental to the genre and the technique. Fortunatley, all hope is not lost. I know of at least two systems that eschew the levelling treadmill: Puzzle Pirates, which uses head-to-head puzzle competition as its combat technique, and Planetside, which I've heard is more FPS then level-based. (Could be wrong. I haven't played either.) Until these alternate techniques go mainstream, MMORPGs are going to be stuck in the same rut they've been stuck in since Ultima Online.

Re:what i've heard

[sweetooth]

It's still a leveling treadmill IMO, they have shifted the xp rewards from killing lots of beasties to finishing lots of quests. Kinda reminds me of AO where you would do as many "missions" as possible. The major differance being that the quests tie into the story line and culture of your racial or character class. This being a focus is a diversion from many other games where you are either treadmilling by killing the critters cyclicly for xp, or are doing quests that only loosly relate to your character or the games story line. The first Asherons Call handled the quest issue fairly well as 90% of the quests you do are tied to the montly story line and those contributed to the major story arcs more than half the time. You still get stuck on the killing the same critters over and over path if you really want to advance though. That's a questing for items system where WoW is more of a questing for everything system. So far after putting in about 60 hours into WoW I don't think that it's any more or less enjoyable than any other MMOG, it's just polished. I hate doing hundreds of quests that don't mean much to my character as much as I hate killing hundreds of critters repeatedly.

Re:what i've heard

[Paolomania]

Er... Maybe I've got my dates and timelines mixed up, but I think action RPG's were around on consoles for quite a while before Diablo came along...

I think I see where you are coming from, after all the original Zelda was out in the late 80's. However, I personally make a distinction between these two types of games. The main distinction in my mind is one of control: In Zelda style games, yes you gain stats and items, but the game most certainly lies outside the RPG genre in that it relies on player skill in executing individual actions - moving in and timing your sword strike, aiming your boomerang, etc. In Diablo style games, you gain stats and items as well, but your control is abstracted up one level into the tactics domain - you may control which moves to execute, but it is your character's stats and game mechanics which determine the success of the individual attacks.

Re:what i've heard

[drinkypoo]

Interestingly I've played all of those games and more besides, since about 1990. I've gotten to watch some amazing changes in Nethack over that time. Let's not forget larn, and ularn - ularn remains one of the best known roguelike (among those who know anyway.)

The difference, and it is a huge difference, is that Diablo is realtime and none of those others are. The closest text-based game I can think of off the top of my head is The Kingdom of Kroz, a game which showed up in PC Magazine some time ago as shareware, in which you run your little text-based guy around the map in realtime, whipping monsters and solving little puzzles. Kroz is the link between rogue and diablo, which are members of different genres.

Graphics are not the deciding factor because they do not necessarily alter the style of play - though they do. Nethack has a player-centric input method, everything you do acts on you. Even shooting something is not to the enemy, it's from you. Otherwise, you could shoot arrows at monsters not in line with you. Diablo is object-centric, where you move toward an object (or a mouse click, which is arguably an object) or you attack towards a specific enemy, not just in a given direction.

True the background is more or less the same shit, but since it's all stolen from dungeons and dragons, which primarily comes from white european mythology, at some point you have to draw lines. And I personally would draw a big fat one between rogue and diablo.

So?

[BigChigger]

Maybe he didn't write it for lay persons. Do you expect a physics paper in a scholarly magazine to be written for lay persons? Just because you didn't understand it, does not make it bad.

FWIW, I did not understand most of it myself.

BC

Re:Evolutionary

[Rallion]

I haven't played the game, but from what I understand, "doing nothing" is exactly what Blizzard was avoiding when they made this. No long travel times, and some kind of engagement in combat. Alpha testers were supposed to never for a moment stop asking themselves, "Am I having fun right now?"