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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to take you seriously when you complain about using "U" as a pronoun, etc. when you use the term "asshat".
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
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.
*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.
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.
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.
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.
there, are a few who are trying. Its just that the ridiculous up-front costs make it hard to attract the money.
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
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.