World of Warcraft Gamespot GOTY 2004

Gamespot's annual awards have drawn to a close, with the Reader's choice awards finishing up tomorrow. Announced on Wednesday, Gamespot's Game of the Year for 2004 is World of Warcraft. Relatedly, there is an interview with the WoW composer at World of Warcraft Guru, and a piece on Wired.com about Virtual Trade and Blizzard's efforts to combat the trend. Finally, Blizzard's annual holiday festivities have resulted in a hilarious holiday mp3 being made available on the official World of Warcraft site.

Comments

Blizzard did it right

[Holdstrong]

For years I have been playing MMORPGs.... and I come away from every single one of them (Ultima Online, EQ, and SWG were the ones I played) saying to myself, "jeez, ya know this game would be sooo much better if they just did X, Y, Z." Well, Blizzard actually DID the X, Y, and Z. It is almost like they were eaves dropping on the conversations of all of us gamers over the past 5 years. Everything we have been saying about these massive online games over the years they have addressed in one way or another. They took the bad parts and either dropped them, or made them good. They then went ahead and added all of the obvious features we have all been asking for and wondering why they havent been around. Its a gamers game. One that if I had the ability to make my perfect game... it would have been this. It really is fantastic. Blizzard might not have put out a groundbreaking new genre game here... but they did somethng even better. They took an already existing genre and finally did it right.

Re:IGN and Gamespy GOTY

[Pluvius]

Pfft. Gamespot is far less of a corporate whore than either IGN or Gamespy, though I'm still boggled as to how they gave WoW GOTY honors over all of the other great games that came out this holiday season.

Rob

Half Life 2

[Castaa]

WoW over Half Life 2? I'm not so sure about that. HL2 is more ground breaking than WoW, IMO. WoW is a very polished MMO. But what is new about it?

HL2 is breaks new ground of because the environments are more than pretty window dressing. One is constantly challenged to look at the world and think about what is available to allow the objective to be accomplished more efficiently. This in addition to HL2 being a very polished FPS.

Re:Half Life 2

[cowscows]

I'm all for innovation, but really, "breaking new ground" is not the most important part of making a fun game. Not to take away from HL2, cause I know lots of people are having lots of fun playing with it, but even if you think it has more new ideas than WOW, that doesn't mean it has to be a better game.

I could design an new, innovative racing game that you control with your computer's microphone by yelling TURN LEFT when you want to go left, or BRAKES! BRAKES BRAKES! when you want to stop. I doubt anyone's done that before. Of course, no one's done it before because it's a stupid idea.

Innovation is vital to the game industry, but gameplay is even more important. And gameplay can sometimes take a lot of iterations to get right. WoW is an impressive example of learning from previous attempts and really getting a lot of it right. And that's what makes a fun game. The word "polish" I don't think helps, because gameplay is more fundamental then all the details.

Re:Time is Money

[Dachannien]

Well, that quote gives a horrible explanation of why selling items/accounts is bad. Why is it bad?

One, people who sell items or accounts tend to try to farm them incessantly. This leads to perpetually-camped spawns dominated by one person, along with unfair play tactics against others who want to come in and take their turn. Now, this is much reduced in WoW because of the way loot occurs in the game, but in many other games (EQ, for example) it can be a pretty severe problem.

Two, there is a great potential for fraud when items/accounts are sold, because there is no secure transaction between the exchange of money and the exchange of the account, and because the seller can usually keep themselves anonymous. Admittedly, this lends some support for these transactions taking place at large sites like eBay or IGE, where their reputation is at stake whenever a fraudulent transaction takes place, but "for-sale-by-owner" accounts are still not uncommon.

Three, inexperienced players driving experienced characters leads to grief and annoyance within the high-level community. The level and gear of a character are supposed to be a reflection on a person's experience at playing the game, not just some number which affects the character's abilities. Sometimes, eBayed characters stick out like sore thumbs as they ask stupid questions (e.g., 57th level night elf druid yells, 'omg how do i get 2 teh boat in darnasuss!!!'), but in other cases, it takes several bad play experiences for the eBayed character to build up a reputation as being played by an inexperienced player and thus get blacklisted.

Four, some eBayed characters already *have* a reputation as a bad apple. Somebody with no consideration for other people - but with some skill at the game mechanics - levels up a character, but then can't get a group in the high-level instances to save their life. So, they sell the account and start over, pocketing some money in the process. The problem is, the unsuspecting buyer logs in for the first time and is greeted by rude tells and harassment because the character has a reputation of being a complete ass. What's more, nobody will believe them when they say they bought the character (choosing instead to think it's the original owner trying to lie his way out of the situation), and the admission of being eBayed brings down one's reputation further.

By the way, there are other reasons related more to fairness that I'm not really going into detail on here (such as the concept that every player should put equivalent effort into the game, or that success should not be based on one's RL means, since this is a game).