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

[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.