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WoW: The Hard Word

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has got many MO players in a state of eager anticipation. Some are holding it up as the great hope to answer frustrations and disappointments with current online games. The reasoning for this is simple - it’s Blizzard. Blizzard is a gamer’s game company which has created three of the most successful PC gaming franchises in existence. It also has extensive experience managing online communities (Battle.net), and has yet to produce a bad game. It’s almost a given WoW is going to be special. It already looks fantastic (though after seeing Half-Life 2 everything else looks strangely dated), and more importantly the gameplay sounds innovative and intelligent (and reasonable - more on this later). I grabbed one of the developers on the WoW stand at E3 this year and hit him with a few hard questions about the game.

My biggest concern with MMORPGs and the online community in general is the ability for the immature and spiteful to ruin the gaming experience for others. There is a lot mean spirited players can do to make things difficult, even in a non-PvP environment. The Counter-Strike community is perhaps the worst example of what can happen when smack talking, leet speaking foolishness becomes the norm, and the MO community is unfortunately not far behind. Mature gamers in the CS community fed up with the juvenile stampede have hit back by banding together and offering carefully policed servers, but MO players are at the mercy of the games’ designers.

So with PDA in hand I visited the Blizzard stand at E3 intent on asking the hard questions. Sure the game looked good, but how was it going to be different to everything that had gone before it? And how was Blizzard going to deal with the problems inherent in online communities. Would guilds be able to keep each other from critical content as they do now in Everquest for instance? Will players have to mindlessly camp random spawns in the hope of completing some goal? It was the unexpecting Geoff Goodman, who is currently designing WoW’s monster spell system, who had to field my questions. As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult.

True to their promise, Blizzard have designed WoW from the ground up to accomodate all types of players: casual and hard core. Geoff said the great majority of character experience will be gained from questing, as opposed to the endless killing of mobs. The quest system is extensive and by far the biggest part of the game. There will be both solo and group quests, and rare items to be won. Far more than a side benefit, questing is the heart of WoW. Taking down monsters solo or in groups will still offer experience gains for all classes, but not as much as quests. A player will be able to log in for half an hour, move forward in a quest, and log out having achieved something measureable.

But would the quests be the usual dull kill and collect tasks so overdone in RPG games? Absolutely not, said Geoff. All of the quests are carefully integrated into the game world, and made sense within its context. As an example, he told me of one particular quest which requires a dwarven player to man a gun and repel an invading hoard.

That was all well and good, but what about the horrible tediom of having to wait for particular monsters to spawn in order to complete quests (aka camping)? Again, no way said Geoff. Camping has been excluded from the game by design. Rare and desired monsters will spawn at random times and in totally random areas. There will be no way for players to know where or when they will appear.

Hmm, he had an answer for everything it seemed. So I pulled out the big gun - one of the toughest challenges MO designers face. What about top end content and the nasty competitive practices of guilds blocking other guilds from it, pulling dirty tricks to get to it first, and generally turning the game into an exercise in brutality. How would WoW deal with that while still offering deep and meaningful content for the guilds of high playtime, hard core players?

Geoff’s answer to this one was a little less certain, but intriguing. While he emphasized Blizzard were working hard on lots of top end content, their solution to competition for that content was to allow unique instancing of areas of WoW. Much like the way Diablo worked online, guilds would be able to seamlessly spawn areas of the world and have complete control over who was allowed in to them. In this way, two separate guilds could enjoy the same encounter at the same time without stepping on each others toes. The feature may also be available to single players, possibly opening large portions of the world up to be instanced for solo or companion play, though nothing has been decided yet.

PvP is still being sorted out, but Geoff thought it was likely there would be PvP arenas for players and guilds to challenge each other, as well as some general PvP areas which may well be included in several quests requiring players to brave the dangers of open battlefields.

It was all sounding pretty good, and I was almost satisfied. There remained only one issue to deal with.

“There will be no XP loss on death,” Geoff announced proudly. “At the moment there is temporary stat loss, and that’s probably how it will be when the game ships. Also, items and equipment will not degrade.” That was it. I was sold. Someone was finally listening to players and making design decisions based on gameplay instead of trying to screw every last second (= money) out of them.

I tried to get some indication as to monthly charge and whether there would be a near-Australian server, but Geoff wouldn’t be drawn in. He did say there would be an open beta after the closed beta, so there is hope for all non-US residents to get an early look at the game. As for me, I no longer need to hear or see anything else.

  posted by monty · at 9:39 pm · filed under MMO Games