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World of Warcraft Launches
The last major MMOG launch of the year hits retail stores today. World of Warcraft finally goes live after years of debate, development, and a more than six month Beta test. The usual suspects have details on the game, with Gamespot already having details on upcoming content and Gamespy laying out personal experiences from the test and interviews with the developers.
1st!
and i'm really happy that WoW is mac playable at launch date. I don't own a mac, but it's something mac fans will appreciate
Maybe you should check the prices for other MMOs before you make such statements...
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I am gonna go ahead and wait for "patch 1"
THEN
say good-bye to the wife and kids for a few months.
eve-online is also doing their huge expansion titled "exodus" today as well..
One of the most anticipated expansions in MM games for a while... large download (519M) but not as large as WoW which is 2.1GB
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
didn't I call in sick today?
:(
It's sitting at home installed, and I'm sitting here at work
I was all looking forward to this game coming out, but City of Heroes snagged me instead. Not that I'm not interested, but I have friends, a supergroup, etc...
Which brings me to thinking: how long until we get some kind of trade-in service for MMORPG characters? What if I could trade into the WoW universe some portion of the time / XP I put into my CoH character? What if I got a bonus to what I got for each friend I brought along? Seems like a good business to me. You give away something worth nothing for extreme goodwill and extra subscribers.
And hey, you could even sell the characters on eBay if you wanted! Hehe.
adam b.
Unfortunately I discovered that the WoW downloading client acts as a pseudo bittorrent client, which caused my school to shut down my internet connection for seven days. For anyone else out there who is going to a school with draconian downloading rules (such as University of Florida and their ICARUS client [previously featured on slashdot]), be warned.
I Showed up about 11:00pm last night, figured that the line might be half way around the building, Turns out the line went around the building twice, took up most of the parking lot, and then for good measure it went down the street a couple hundred yards. Talking to the Fry's Employee, he said that they had 2 or 3 truck loads of games on the way, but doubted thier would be enough for everyone. The poor guy seemed rather alarmed and stressed seeing several thousand gamers surrounding the store. According to him, the line started forming around 1pm. Although everyone seemed to be in a good mood, I didn't stick around.
That price point is fairly common (range) with MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games; I assumed you didn't know the acronym since you posed the question).
MMORPGs are one of those things you are either interested in or not. And whether it's worth it depends on which side you're on. I subscribe to Final Fantasy XI for $12.95/month and I can't complain. That's just two fast food meals.
I was playing a bit this morning on my lunch break. (wanted to snag my SN before someone else did) and I have to say I'm impressed. So far very little lag at all, including the n00b areas. That and they went with a distributed download for the initial patch, and it seems as if they might have done alright estimating bandwidth/demand on the first day.
Can one not consider them all overly expensive?
Especially when you fork out 60 bucks for the game in the first place.
Why can MSFT pull off XBox Live for 50 bucks a year, but the MMOG guys can't do it for much less than 20 bucks a month?
XBL no doubt sucks more bandwidth and does a shitload of backend work.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Pirates , the classic Sid Mier game launches today as well. It's a remake of the classic game.
I love Blizzard, but WOW is nothing new.
Its swamped with quests where you seek out an object/NPC, or kill a sequence of monsters which lowers the tedium some.
The combat system involves clicking on some action keys, but isn't too complex.
Graphics are nice.
This game is one big level grind with Warcraft Lore in it. It may seem fun to some, but I was bored the whole time I betaed it. Maybe they'll introduce fun stuff down the road, but this game isn't what the market is thirsting for.
God spoke to me.
I was a BETA tester for WoW since early January, pretty much one of the very first groups in after it went to Beta level. Despite the pricing issues I have with any MMORPG, WoW was a lot of fun and it is the first MMORPG that I have considered purchasing.
I haven't made my mind up yet (again, the pricing) but if you're in to that kind of thing, Blizzard has done an excellent job with WoW its nicely polished and as always its graphics are beautiful. Its a lot of fun and very addictive!
This is not a sig.
Well, that's after you pay $50 for the game + box + first month free trail subscription.
Hrm, "free"... Gee, Blizzard marketing department, thanks for offering us a free month of game play in exchange for buying a $50 game that is useless without that subscription.
Ugh. Between creepy marketing like that and everyone else jumping over to a Half-Life 2, both publiched by a company that still sells Counter-Strike for $30 when they've disabled the ability to play it at all (without installing a DRM platform under a different license, of course).... I'm really just getting ticked off. I'm probably alone in saving my money and avoiding both of those games, though.
For now, I think I'll stick to working on games that are free for everyone and occasionally play UT2004 and a few budget titles without these restrictive licenses.
EQ set the standard but they long ago raised the price. The trick is to prepay for 3-6 months and save money. That is what they want you to do at least, keeps you locked in for a longer period of time.
'Same speed C but faster'
The speed of the vitriol about the cost of online games was truly amazing! We got some speed typists here.
It's a religious debate as to whether or not it's worth it, so I won't weigh in. I'm just amazed that there were people hovering over their keyboards with "OMG I can't believe that anyone would pay $15 a month for something like this more like $0.15 twice a year is what I would pay!" in the paste buffer.
adam b.
I participated in the open beta, and I must say, I was quite impressed. I've played EverQuest, but got sick of the grind after making level 30. I was unfortunate enough to play Anarchy Online on launch, what a nightmare that was. But once it got patched to the point of being playable, it was quite fun. However, it never really offered the community aspects that make an MMORPG worthwhile, so I gave that genre a rest.
Then, I decided to see what all the fuss was about with WoW. I downloaded the open beta client (took me only 4 days) and started playing. I was hooked right from the start. Just getting into the game was a snap, it took less than 45 seconds on my Athlon 1.4GHz, compared to several minutes for EQ and AO. Even creating my character was fun and easy to do, and once I got into the game the environments were beautiful, everything ran smooth (on my dated equipment), and the quests were easy to find and fun to complete. Not to mention the fact that grouping and making friends is a breeze. Unfortunately, the open beta ended 5 days after I finished the download, so I only made it to level 8 with my warrior (and that was with playing one hour a day).
I don't think I'll be buying the game, but the only reason for that is my addictive personality. While I never became much of an EQ addict (though I've seen some of my friends become zombie-like creatures who have sacrificed school, jobs, and even marraiges to get that piece of uber-loot), I can definately see myself getting sucked into this game, and that wouldn't be good for me, my studies, my relationship with my fiance, or our baby daughter. Otherwise, I'd probably be up to level 15 by now!
Get a free Nintendo DS! No BS! http://www.ds4free.com/default.aspx?r=64402
Wow, it looks really pretty. I bet the gameplay is pretty fun too. But you know what the basic problem is: the people. It doesn't matter what kind of look and feel they put into it when the world's largely populated by screaming frustrated adolescent asshats who use "Jew" as an insult, "U" as a pronoun, and punctuate every sentence with "LOL"
... tho perhaps that's just EQ.
Even if one just avoids people like that and approaches it from a pure gameplay point (that is, game mechanics over character, an attitude that can better bear the aforementioned asshats), you still end up playing in one overall league, and that's the power gaming munchkins who squeeze every bit of actual fun out of the gaming experience by very quickly reducing it all to cost/benefit ratios of weapon/spell damage outputs and multipliers, often to the point of converging on a single attack or combo. (Try playing UO without every other bark being "Corp Por")
To say nothing of the soviet-style queueing up (enough with the soviet russia jokes) at spawn points so that your character may have their standardized ration of fun
MMORPG's suck, and it's the players that make it so.
Not saying all MMORPGs have to have a one time fee, that's not doable, but it should be cheaper at least than my crazy webhosting deal I get for like $7 a month. There needs to be an MMORPG price war, but I don't know how one would be initiated.
Quick coffee crazed idea; but I'd love to see a MMORPG client and server frameworkd developed under the GPL, and then the servers would be run by third parties who charge for access.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
XBL only provides matchmaking services, friends lists, stats, messaging, etc. It does no actual game hosting unless publishers pay extra, and so far I don't think any have. Its bandwidth costs would probably be comparable to Gamespy's or AIM (though with far less users but in a more secure environment). You average MMOG provides continuous bandwidth during gameplay, patching, user interaction, and huge database services tracking monster, players, levels, etc. I doubt it costs that much to play, but the fact is that people are willing to pay the price, and they seem fine with the user base that the costs provide. If they don't get enough people they'll surely lower the costs, and if demand is high enough they'll probably raise them.
I wonder... Valve wants to distribute through steam because they make more profit. They're forced to also do retail because they have publishing agreements with Vivendi. I wonder if part of the upfront cost in buying the retail box for a MMORPG isn't due publisher demands? If Blizzard were free of Vivendi, could they release the client for free or at a markedly lower price?
Whenever I see something like this, I always think back to when I played multi-player MechWarrior (or whatever the equivalent name of it was) on the GEnie network. They charged several dollars PER HOUR. People that complain about $15/month crack me up.
Not to mention the multiple server farms and extensive updates to the game. I think that if you buy a $60 MMO then you should get the first 60/15 = 4 months free. Or free download with a 4 month contract. Either way. Then I might consider it. But $60 and a 1 month trial is BS. I will not pay that much to try a game out for 30 days. I also feel that a 7-day trial (with rollover of course) would make a lot of sense.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Don't forget you can get these if you don't want to pay online especially for young people who don't have credit cards or parents won't let them. Ask your friends, family members, etc. for them as Christmas and birthday gifts.
EB = $29.99
Walmart = $29.82
Are there any more U.S. stores that sell these that I didn't list?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Why can MSFT pull off XBox Live for 50 bucks a year, but the MMOG guys can't do it for much less than 20 bucks a month?
Because Microsoft doesn't need to make a profit from it maybe? The whole Xbox business unit leaks money like a sieve, but they don't care because they're making headway into the industry. Game companies don't have such luxuries.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
$15 is a lot if you are a casual gamer.
I would love to be a casual WoW player, but only if it were something in the range of $5-$7, or an hourly rate that would, if used as as much as the average player, would equal out to $15/month. So if the average player plays 40 hours a month, i pay $0.38/hour or so.
Ok for those who complain lets try something few understand, PERSPECTIVE.
.50 9.00 last I checked.
1 Movie: $9
1 Popcorn and Soda: $9
Movie Runs 2 hours.
That's $9 an hour for entertainment.
Assume for the moment you play an online game 1 hour a day on average.
$15 dollars a month or $15 dollars for $30 hours.
That's about 50 cents an hour.
Now lets add in your DSL\CAble Bill to help this out.
$60 dollars a month or about $2.00 an hour to play. Still cheaper then a movie.
To further the study you could factor your inital $50 purchase of the game over, say 2 years to better tune this.
Even at $100 dollars a month that is about $3.40 per hour and is still cheaper then going to the movies. And thats assuming you can get in and out of the theater for only $18 bucks.
But, to be fair and balanced, a good quality basketball, football, or baseball setup can run you a 1 time $80 bucks and factoring that over a 2 year period throwing the old pig skin, playing softball, or doing a little boot hockey can be a hella cheaper then a video game.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
A) You're paying $50, but that's retail. The company has to get the game in the hands of the players, and electronic distriubtion isn't (quite) here yet (the install for EQII came on 2 DVDs and was 6-7GB). So it has to go through the retail chain, and everybody along the way has to make money off of the transaction.
B) First-month attrition is fairly large. This makes it non-cost-effective to distribute boxed copies for free in anticipation of recouping the expense in subscription fees.
C) 'I shouldn't have to pay to buy it and then pay per month' is a specious argument against playing these games. Either you feel you get your money's worth in entertainment value, or not. How the expense is chunked is irrelevant. If you anticipate not liking the game enough to justify the initial expense, wait several months and most games have 7 or 14 day trials available for download.
D) From an accounting standpoint, you want the inital investment in development recovered as quickly as possible, and the monthly fees to cover overhead, future development, and profit.
Yes, I know exactly what kind of infrastructure is involved.
I also know how fat game publishers like their profit margins to be.
It's expensive, sure, but not ($60 + ($15 x months)) x (1 million subscribers) expensive.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I really want to see this mammoth supercomputer that costs 15 million a month to operate.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
*Shrug* It's all about how much value you think an entertainment source has. Personally, I'd gladly pay a few extra bucks for some rich gameplay drawn by professional artists than play another cheap Tetris clone on Gnome.
Considering, also, that Blizzard tends to support their games for a long, LONG time (you can still play WarCraft II on Battle.net) I think it's a fair price.
I remember playing Neverwinter Nights (not the current one, but the original gold-box SSI game) on AOL and paying $5 an hour to play. That was back when you could buy a gold-box game for $20-25 - and I was only making something like $10.25 per hour at the time... I got over that real quick. Moved to Shadows of Yserbius on The Sierra Network and got something outrageous like 60 hours of game play for only $90 per month...
$15 a month doesn't even faze me anymore...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
but by the same token, maybe you should consider one's relative interest in playing a MMO game before you make such counter-statements.
i agree with the grandparent, not because i think it is overly expensive in and of itself, but because i have very little interest in online gaming.
i play games as an escape, so the idea of joining a community in order to play a game seems somewhat counterintuitive to me. i certainly am interested in some of the titles out there, but i find the cost prohibitive. it's not worth it to me to invest "just" $15/mo because the whole concept is iffy at best (to me).
as an aside, comparing a relatively low $15/mo fee to a $50 new game price tag is meaningless to me (and others, i suspect) because i rarely purchase new games anyway. i buy almost every title used, and rarely pay more than $15-$20. to give a sepcific frame of reference, i have purchased a brand new $50+ game exactly ONCE in the last two years.
so from my perspective, i could spend $15/mo on the SAME game, or i could spend $15/mo for a new game EVERY month and enjoy an ever-increasing game library. i happen to choose the latter, just as many others happen to choose the former.
(this is just my personal perspective, so please step away from the flamethrowers)
Typical MMMORPG player - always blaming macros for the superior skill of others.
j/k.
Of course it doesn't cost 15 mil to operate, but the ONLY reason to make an MMO is big profits. The risks for creating an MMO are gigantic compared to other games. You're talking about companies spending 10 - 20 million dollars to develop the thing and they better pray they got it right or it's all down the drain. Building an FPS is much cheaper. MMOs are an entirely different business model for a game company and they're scared shitless whenever they do it.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I've made a pact with my soon to be wife. After the first of the year, I will only have a budget for gaming of 1 video game a month, with no option to save up (I.E. If I dont buy a game this month, I dont get 2 next month.) I'm actually hoping to get this down to 1 videogame every 2 months, but thats wishful thinking (although possible if I can get into more betas). I'll put this money back into more tangable things like my savings and my portfolio. Our at least buy toys with more long term investment (guitars and such). I have even looked at going outside for a change (gasp!).
Now if I could only stop playing video games so often, I could pick up more side work, maybe bring in more then 1-2 k extra a month.
compared to my $29 for DSL isn't really a good deal.
Umm... unless you buy the DSL only for playing WoW, it's pretty much pointless to include it as a cost for playing. That's like including the cost of your car every time you budget for going to a movie.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I tested the game for around 8 months and logged more than 35 days and several hundred suggestions, alongside countless bugs.
The bottom line is that the game was released prematurely, to the detriment of the product.
In the week before release, Blizzard completely revamped two entire classes (warrior and paladin), and in the process made the previous months of testing these classes in high-level content completely meaningless. There is a new "queue" system, which controls access to actually getting onto a server and playing. Despite assurances that the queues would not be visible in retail, new players are finding that they have to wait for over an hour in a queue before entering the game.
Battlegrounds, PVP rewards, and the honor system were supposed to be in place months ago. None are actually implemented yet.
Raid content was added, but of such obscene difficulty that groups of 40 players with the best gear in the game got absolutely thrashed. Limited success was generally achieved only by spamming abilities that will probably be adjusted in subsequent patches (druids and moonfire stun).
Hero classes, once heralded as a different sort of end-game, distinct from the raid encounters, have not been mentioned officially in months and may never appear.
Why was the game released before it was ready, by a company that has earned a reputation of never doing that? I have it on fairly good authority that Vivendi offered Blizzard employees profit-sharing if the release happened before the end of the year.
Blizzard's post-release support has traditionally been extremely spotty, though they are no different in that regard from the rest of the industry. Before now, however, their saving grace has been that the game was actually reasonably close to finished before it hit store shelves.
That aside, you do get a month free with purchase, and its up to you to justify it.
Vivendi Universal Games lost a lot of money last year, and the year before, and so on. See http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/09/14/news_61073 51.html.
They really need some "wow" to boost the bottom line this year. I'm sure that there was pressure on Blizzard to get this door for the holiday buying season.
Hrm, "free"... Gee, Blizzard marketing department, thanks for offering us a free month of game play in exchange for buying a $50 game that is useless without that subscription.
Yes, that's how marketing works for an MMORPG. The thing you pay for in the box is the work that went into developing the game itself, reimbursing the company for the server hardware, reimbursing the company for the optical line installation (or co-location setup costs), and knowing Blizzard's heavy Microsoft strategy: OS licenses and database server licenses. The amount you pay per month is goes to the employees needed to maintain the server and the money needed to pay for the optical lines (or co-location monthly fees).
The free first month is really deceptive marketing: the first month's fee has already been figured into the product price.
Ugh. Between creepy marketing like that and everyone else jumping over to a Half-Life 2, both publiched by a company that still sells Counter-Strike for $30 when they've disabled the ability to play it at all (without installing a DRM platform under a different license, of course).... I'm really just getting ticked off. I'm probably alone in saving my money and avoiding both of those games, though.
For now, I think I'll stick to working on games that are free for everyone and occasionally play UT2004 and a few budget titles without these restrictive licenses.
I don't agree with the way Valve (yes, I'm blaming Valve here, not Vivendi) is handling Half-Life 2 registrations. However, they are correct in that piracy is rampant. I still don't play on getting HL2, though.
As for game development, it's a fact of life that 3D games take more time and money to create than 2D games. It's a fact of life that the bigger the game, the more resources it takes to develop. The first M in MMORPG stands for Massive for a reason: the game world is extremely large. Given these, it really isn't surprising that MMORPGs are expensive when they first come out.
On the flip side, most computer games cost the same amount up front as WoW does, so you're either paying less for WoW itself, or the first month really is free...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Gameplay wise, I thought the quests were better than the auto-quest mulch you find in DAOC and SWG and the UI is fairly easy to use too. The crafting was so-so but at least you could make things that had value. The first ten levels were pretty easy to solo in the beta, but it got a bit harder then. I didn't play much longer because the beta ended.
I haven't played EQ2 but I'm not exactly bowled over by its pedigree. I hated EQ (when I realised that the fun had been replaced with grind and Verant didn't care about the top heavy player population), and I saw nothing about SWG to suggest EQ2 would be any better.
Having said that, I don't think I'd pay $15 for a monthly game either. It would have to be a bloody good game, and it would have to be a free download to warrant me bothering.
I know you're trying to be funny but I'll take your commetns as straight. If you only have 3 hours a month to play games then why the hell would you play any MMORPG even if was free/free? There's no point. Just play some solitare and go about your obviously full life.
The vast majority of people who play MMORPGs spend at least a few hours a week on them. Even a weekend-only player would spend 5 hours total playing. Any less than that and there is no point as you'll have forgotten what the hell was going on in between sessions!. At 5 hours a week you get 20 hours a month and that makes the monthly fee less than a buck an hour (Grandparent's mom aside). Tell me what entertainment you can get at a buck an hour these days. And for that trifling fee you get access to a continually evolving game as many MMORPGs have free expansions (EVE launches a huge one today...w00t). Frankly I just can't understand the "I don't wanna pay a monthly fee" argument coming from any but the most light-weight players.
MMORPGs cost money to develop that's the money that you spend to buy the game. MMORPGs cost money to run (server farms, routers, bandwidth bills and such) which is part of the monthly fee and they cost money to evolve which is the other part. Unless of course you'd rather have the software developers be payed in cheese-doodles and AOL CDs and the game run on hard-ware looted from abandoned Nortel facilities.
-Pinkoir
No, you don't remember correctly. Games are organized via XBL, but the actual in-game data is hosted "peer-to-peer" (i quote that because it's not strictly p2p. One xbox is in host mode and the others talk to it).
Have you ever noticed, playing on XBL, every once in a while you'll get a blue screen (i tend to die during these, so fitting) with a message that says "Connecting to Session", then "Setting Up Game"? This is when the host box drops out (or perhaps is voted to quit hosting because of lag) and all the boxes get together, decide on a new host, and sync up game data.
There's no reason XBL couldn't act like a firewall broker (ie. ultrapeer mode), but trust me, XBL does not host the Halo 2 games.
On Apple Input Peripherals: They're okay, I guess, but I was really hoping for a one-key keyboard and a 109-button mouse
For us in the UK...
We cant buy a US subscription, so we have to wait until January for the game to be translated in French and German.
THEN we cant play on the US servers, without getting a US address and credit card and buying a second subscription.
AND the preorder starts on Friday but the only retailer knows nothing about it and the stock of pre-order boxes are not yet in store.
What the hell is the point in paying $15/mth for a worldwide MMPORG when it's not worldwide! I want to play with friends both in the EU and in the US, so WoW is right out the Window for me. All they have to do is make it possible for those in the EU to play with those in the US and bang... they get my money... but no, the bl00dy publisher (Vevendi I believe) are so stuck on making a bigger profit that it's not possible to do that.
They can go to hell as far as I am concerned.
Beep beep.
Now if I could only stop playing video games so often, I could pick up more side work, maybe bring in more then 1-2 k extra a month.
But you are getting married, right? I am afraid you'll have to cut back on your video games and you won't have extra bandwidth for more side work.
I honestly think they should do something like this with WoW, only maybe on a per-server basis. As it is now they have PvP, PvE, and RP servers.
They could easily tag a few of them as 'Hardcore' servers (to use Blizzard terminology from Diablo II) and introduce Perma-death into the game. I'd keep a character on those servers, just for the fun of it.
Check out WoW's resting system... basically if you leave your character in an inn, and log out for 8 hours, when you go to fight you'll level more quickly. It seems they took the casual gamer into consideration (like me). I played the open beta casually and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
there, are a few who are trying. Its just that the ridiculous up-front costs make it hard to attract the money.
I hope you included the price of your DVD player, your TV, and your electric bill in that calculation. :)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Enjoyment being equal, seems like the MMO is quite a good deal. Even if you take the initial purchase price into account ($50, in this case), $65 for 40 hours is $1.63 an hour, which is still cheaper than a movie.
Yes, I realize you have to have a computer and an internet connection, but if you already had those, then their cost is sunk and can be ignored when deciding what to do with your entertainment dollars. Stop acting like it's ridiculously expensive to play an MMOG.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Good, stay with gnome-games (less idiots begging for shit in my games).
To all the idiots crying but but in 10 years if they turn steam off your fucked. Oh fucking well. in 10 years people will be saying WTF is half-life2!? oh that game, why not just play half-life 15: The moron expansion.
People love to cry ohh gnoes it's not free!! Free the beer, Free the speech. Everything should be free. Wrong asshole, it's called making money, you don't like it, go live in the fucking woods with RMS (I hear he has a wonderful guide to getting laid you should read up).
Have fun with your free beer (generally tastes like shit as the person who made it usually doesn't know how) and your free speech (of course untill you disagree with them then you need to STFU, works both ways asshole).
You keep working on Tetris clone 600,000,000 (it has purple blocks now woot woot!!) Before you start opening your pie hole about how it's a shame they charge money for a product, simple fact you don't like the license, don't fucking play it. Cause right behind you a million other people are willing to buy it, and play it for a couple months before moving onto a new game.
oogly boogly!
I hopped into the open beta a few days before they stopped taking applications and played my little heart out for near a week. I had a few days I couldn't play at all, but I had one day I played for 12 hours straight so it kind of balances out. Here's what really struck me about the game. I'm not going to mention what everyone else has already said (i.e. you can quest for xp), but I'll stick to what leapt out at me.
Technical
The game was fairly smooth but somewhat choppy so I had the detail turned down for most of the test. Come to find out that I can turn the detail settings all the way up in every aspect except for draw distance and get remarkable framerates. My system is no slouch (P4/2.8HT, 512MB, GeForce Go FX5200), but it's still good to know.
I ran WoW in a window the entire time I played it. It was remarkably smooth, and tabbing in and out of the game never had a problem. Blizzard also thoughtfully coded the game so that when it is not focused, clicking in the window gives the window focus, but the click DOES NOT go to the UI. Thus, you won't try to click a Start Menu entry that disappears out from under you, resulting in you attacking a herd of 840 ravenous orcs just begging for a reason to stomp you like yesterday's grapes.
One feature that cannot be emphasized enough is the customizability of the UI using XML. The regular interface is surprisingly bland and you'll run out of clickbar space in your first ten levels (probably your first four if you're a mage). Instead, you can grab an alternate UI (I suggest Cosmos) which is simple to install (unzip the Interface directory to the Addons directory), then restart the game. This adds hordes (hehe) of customization options to the interface, as well as useful features you will wonder how people do without.
Gameplay
You can jump. I know this doesn't really seem like much, but it's so fun. It feels like I'm playing Jak 2 or something, jumping through the treetops of Teldrassil like a Bawlz addict on E, marvelling at the amazing colours and visual textures. I myself took great pride in being able to leap from the top of the great tree Aldrassil to the ground, bounding from branch to rooftop on the way down, to land safe and healthy among the 'jumpers' (corpses of those that fell to their deaths). This serves no practical purpose, but it's a lot more fun than walking everywhere.
Getting around is easy, and you actually get experience for finding new-to-you places. It's not much, but it's free. You can travel by walking, you can fly by griffon, hippogryph, wyvern, or something else, you can have a mage teleport you if you ask really nicely, you can take an underground rail, a ship, or even a zeppelin. It's fun to explore, sneak around, find new monsters, and kill them.
You can have up to ten characters per server, and I think you can be on 5 different servers (don't quote me on this). Suffice to say, you'll have more characters than you'll need, unless you're some kind of sick weirdo (or you are actually unwell and spend a lot of time in bed).
The game is very social, but differently so than Final Fantasy XI, which is also very social. While FFXI is social by forcing grouping, WoW is social despite not forcing grouping. I only grouped once, and that because some guy thought I was a chick and I wanted to use him as bait to finish a quest. That being said, every area has various chat channels (i.e. Teldrassil General, Darnassus General, Darnassus Defence, etc) so you can talk to those around you who don't mind random chat, but if you don't like it, you can leave the channel (I guess). Thus, even though I am wandering around on my own, I can still chat with people around me, ask questions, answer them, ask if anyone wants to group for a quest, etc. I can pop in for 30 minutes, chat and kill, and leave. Easy.
PvP
I have no idea. I guess you can kill other people. They say it's fun.
Classes
The classes are varied, and t
Those that play and complain about grinding out levels or crappy questing really need to analyze why they are playing these games in the first place. I play to have fun. Sometimes I find it fun to mindlessly sit there and swat at rats for hours on end. Most of the time I don't. When I don't I stop playing or find another game to play. WoW is more fun for me because the journey (leveling) is more important then the destination (uber toon). I enjoy trying to get there in WoW. The quests are fun and the terrain/graphics are enough to keep me coming back. I guess that's why I also ride a motorcycle. Because sometimes it's about the journey, not the destination. Who wants to get there fast, I'm enjoying the ride. LouSir
If you are looking for information on World of Warcraft, we have pretty much everything about the game listed in great detail -- quests, items, mobs, spells, skills, talents, maps, etc.
http://wow.allakhazam.com
--Allakhazam
That's not a general XBL feature- Only Halo 2 can migrate hosting like that (AFAIK).
This will sound dumb to some(and most people shouldn't care), but since then I haven't decided if its morally right to play a game that advocates gangland violence. Vice City was my favorite game of all time, with the good vehicle physics, car chases, quests and storyline.
Yet I didn't buy San Andreas because I have moral issues with playing a villian. I think its wrong to get joy out of running over people, assasination, and prostitution, even if its just fantasy. Its sort of sick to have a desire to shoot RPGs into random people's cars. Now I still really want to play the game because I know its quality, but the morality of it all is at question for me.
Beyond my own personal debate... I think a lot of thought needs to go in to how games like these could affect America's youth too. When I was young, I played Atari and they had rules against violence. Now there are 5 year olds growing up, doing virtual bank jobs, giving them an ego boost that they can do criminal acts. I don't have the answers, maybe just default back to it being the parents responsibility.
God spoke to me.
Not always. EQ2 was almost flawless. Same with CoH and DAoC.
The store you buy from is taking about half of whatever you paid for that game (in this case, probably about $30-35).
Take the cost of stamping CDs and boxing and shipping them out... of the amount of that $60 you paid that the company will see, your first month's cost ends up being much closer to the normal monthly fee than it does to what you paid.
And honestly, it's sort of like a Tivo - which many people here seem to love. Pay for the device (in this case, the game), then for the service. You can't use your Tivo without paying the extra monthly fee. Sure, they offer a lifetime subscription, but it amounts to paying for 2 1/2 years up front on a device with a 90 day warranty.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
And as a customer, he has no need to be. He's just specifying the conditions under which he will part with his money to play these games. If nobody can meet his conditions and make a profit, then he doesn't buy the games and they don't get his business.
I'd be willing to bet all of us are ignorant about the infrastructure involved in many (and maybe even most) of the things we purchase. That doesn't disqualify us from making individual decisions about what we consent to buy. If I decide that something is uneconomical for me to indulge in, giving me a detailed accounting of why it is as expensive as it is may be informative, but doesn't really change my balance sheet at all. This is the very basis of the free market, and it is a good thing.
Sheep who is too corwardly to post with his real name huh?
Either way, I do what I want, play the games I want. If you think crying outrage about $15/month to play is going to keep your world free, I suggest you wake up.
oogly boogly!
EQ didn't set the standard- UO did. UO was $9.95, and EQ didn't think they would pull enough people away if they were any more expensive, so they too were $9.95. That was the baseline price until a few years ago, and now they all mostly hover around $15.
.. unless you marry a girl who loves games. My wife and I play everything from Tetris Battle Gaiden (via ZSNES over our network) to Ragnarok Online (wizard+priestess == ownage) to Wheel of Time (with friends) to Tales of Symphonia (on the Gamecube).
A non-trivial percentage of our monthly budget goes into games and gaming simply because it's something we both enjoy doing. I can't imagine being married to someone who -didn't- love playing games...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
They may do this, I don't know. I haven't played an MMO since UO's first couple of months in 1997.
Why not charge $50 for the game but give two or three month's free time? After all, usually when you buy a game you don't play it too much after the first couple of months.
Why not sell directly from the website? Sell a stripped-down version in a jewel case for $25. Don't include retailers or box manufacturers, etc.
I think it would also make sense to have "tiered" servers. Maybe $20 a month gives you the nice fat pipe, servers with more employees playing roles, scripted events, etc. Maybe you get a badge. For $15 you have the regular game. For $7.95 you've got a server that is often filled and maybe you have to name your characters after products. "New Tide with ColorPlus Bleach(TM) defeats a dragon! You acquire 1,000 Gold and one Sony Walkman(R) for your castle."
I mean, YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates is completely free as in beer (it might have a 30+ day trial period).
I think it would be worthwhile to sell super-premium "lifetime" memberships (realistically limited to 3 years). Instead of charging $50 + ($15 x 36), charge $295. You get a (Chinese made, $3) pewter statue, a t-shirt, a poster, aguide, special gold stars next to your name, etc. Meanwhile the MMO maker gets 6 times the revenue instantly. I can see this being a litmus test for bad games however -- if you haven't earned trust, who's going to plunk down $300 in hopes you're around for a couple of years?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The server wait is unreal. I logged in at 9pm and there is an 820 ppl long line waiting to get in to the game. It is now 9:30 pm and I still have a 430 position in the queue. I think they are having a pretty rough launch. The ppl on the official forms are pissed. I hope I can get on soon.
Tip for the compulsive gamer: never ever buy a game when it first comes out. It'll get cheap eventually, trust me. Minus the very odd exception (usually only limited edition boxes of games I've been waiting a long time for), I never have to pay more than $20 for a game, and sometimes as low as $10 or so! All you have to do is stay 6-12 months behind the curve of what is the latest and greatest. The additional bonus is that, at least for PC gaming, this saves you money on hardware too, because you don't have to upgrade as often. Buying games for half the price means you get twice as many to play for the same amount of money. You'll have so many games to play, you won't mind waiting the 6-12 months for the stuff that just came out.
For $7.95 you've got a server that is often filled and maybe you have to name your characters after products.
It's sick fucks like you that keep me coming back to slash dot. Product placement in MMORPGs!
"I tire of this quest for the Golden Nikes®. Let us go to Castle Qualcomm®, where I might get a Coke® and a Big Mac®, and perhaps have my coat of many logos repaired."
"But Sir Viacom®! You promised Princess Exxon®!
Aren't they already doing this in the SIM games?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Unfinished, but in active development:
Planeshift