World of Warcraft
Just a comment from myself to define WoW in a line:
The game is clearly aimed to players of EQ, FFXI and DAoC. It’s like throwing in a shaker all those games, with a bit more intelligence and concrete talent.
Nothing new? Sure, I just learnt how to set my expectations really low.
I finished to upload a page with 58 “quality” screenshots I’ve personally taken during beta.
I’m a good photographer :)
World of Warcraft represents a step forward on this idea, even if it doesn’t accomplish the interaction. We don’t have anymore horizontal levels, instead the verticality is present and largely used. You don’t walk on flat terrain, nor on random hills. Each small corner of the world is designed with a sense, there are uplands, long slopes, peaks and so on. You could find a small town on a lake, bordered by high mountains and, on top, a castle, accessible only from a tortuous road and a bridge on a chasm. The terrain isn’t anymore boring and random, instead it has a strong role in defining the environment. Not anymore as the “background”, but as the “subject”. Finally.
Random comments about World of Warcraft I’m writing in various threads (specifically over at Grimwell) that could be interesting for who still hasn’t tried the game:
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WoW surely gives you a lot, a lot more tools than, say, DAoC. Where you really are limited in what you can do. This makes the combat more creative and strategic, in particular if you consider the death system that pushes you to try something new in how you fight.
I’m playing mostly solo and I didn’t even care to grab many skills that are group-related (that are under the berserk and defensive stance, which I don’t use). Right now my default behaviour is:
1- Charge a mob (it stuns it for a pair of seconds and builds up my rage)
2- Use the shout that weakens the mob’s attacks (with the rage I got above)
3- Land two normal attacks
4- Use the shout that boosts my attacks
5- Apply DOT
6- Spam the damage style
6a – Use the reactive style when it lights up in the interface
6b – Use the stun style if the mob is a caster and casting effects appear on it
Parry, dodge and block are done automatically.
Things change depending on the zone. For example if I fear aggro or if I fight more than one mob I’ll use an AOE attack or a semi-root style that prevents the monster from fleeing and calling for help.
Then I could use some rare health potions if things go wrong, reduce downtimes with food, use ranged weapons to finish a fleeing mob, trigger the damage shout at the end of a combat so I’ll gain effectivity for the following fight…
This is all gameplay for a solo player. And I love it.
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About the mechanics..
– The shouts don’t depend on the stance.
– The styles are, so the stance you use will affect which style you can perform.
– Switching styles empties your rage.
– There are talents that give you possibility to keep rage when switching styles.
The rage is basically the endurance in other games, I wrote a lot about it in my article on the death system that I linked in the other thread. The fact that you begin the combat with an emptied rage is *wonderful*. Because in other games you want the fight to END SOON. The more you fight the more you’ll lose power and possibilities to win. In WoW this is revolutionized. As you go on with the fight more and more options open to you. It’s a positive direction that pushes you toward the combat and makes it way more appealing and fun.
Geldon is right. They didn’t simply add more and more styles with a simply different effects. Each interaction has a SYSTEM below. And it’s not about the classes even if that’s what is most obvious. From the map system, the quest system, the interface. Everything has its own depth and it’s not just a tool to fill a space.
Just in the last patch they added something wonderful. Now the question mark above the head of NPCs changes color depending if you are ready to finish the quest or if you still need to accomplish the goals. If you select a quest and you are done with its goals a green point will appear on your mini map to let you locate the NPC easily. Both in and outside buildings.
And just to make other examples: it’s true that 90% of the quests are a mask for the average grind where you have to kill 50 mobs and collect specific loot. But there are also quests using, again, specific systems. For example there’s a quest where you create a spell, evocate a ghost and follow it through a level till a secret spot where you’ll get a new mission. Another quest (I did two days ago) was about an NPC that buffed me and told me to run in a dungeon filled with mobs and come back in no more than an hour (and a clock appears on your screen). Another mission was about escorting an npc till a specific point and defend him from ambushes. Etc…
you can get quests from NPCs, placards or even dropped items. Often you have packages that you can read (like letters)…
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What I mean about the “story” is simply that you don’t kill mosters in WoW because they feed you of exp. But because there’s a quest that tells you to do so, it has a stupid story but at least something. In another forum we are discussing about camping and grinding. This in WoW doesn’t happen because it’s the quest to tell you what you have to do next and where to go. All the world assumes a sense and you are pushed to do stuff and explore as part of your experience.
Yes, a real impact on the world is also my ideal aim but WoW is already doing something. At least. And it is 100 times more fun than grinding in another PvE game.
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AFFA:
I’m confused. Here you say that MMORPGs are boring when you have to repeat things over and over. And yet on the Warcraft Hype thread, you describe a “default” attack sequence, which, presumably, you repeat over and over with great enjoyement.
It’s mitigated by the fact that I fight different mobs for different quests/purposes. Move through different zones that are /completely/ different etc…
The grind in WoW is masked by a story and a purpose. Even in Baldur’s Gate you keep fighting in the same way but the gameplay changes. In DAoC I speak of grind because for whole levels you have to camp a specific monster. In WoW you don’t camp anything because you do everything inside the scope of a quest and what the quest tells you to do.
Tobold also commented about creating “exit points”. Quests not only allow you to do this (encapsulating small play-sessions with their own purpose and sense of accomplishment). but they are also the reason that push you forward to reach and see the next step.
Do not compare SWG with WoW. One had a NDA, the other not.
My personal hype about the game comes from something I touch and like. I already commented that both the graphic and gameplay are worst than they were six months ago so it can even be true, at this point, that they’ll ruin the game for release. But it’s still not hype, it’s about a concrete game, concrete design and all the rest I can analyze and comment.
At this moment I still notice identity between the hype and the real quality. The fact that the game has no NDA is really helping the fans to have exact and not fancy expectations.
In the last few days I’m commenting how horrible is still the communication between devs and players in this genre, in particular considering how the community is an important, positive resource. This is a quote from a dev of World of Warcraft:
randomguy:
guys, 50 people out of thousands is not a glaring trend. this is what some companies call acceptable losses.tigerclaw (Blizzard dev):
Some companies might say that. We don’t like the problems indicated, and we’re working on it. Please don’t assume that if you don’t see a fix in an hour, or a day, or a week, that the issue has been dropped or forgotten. This issue is important and it is getting real attention here.
I want also to thank sturbo, the client coder, because he’s doing a wonderful work. He reads attentively the messages and always answers with extremely informative posts, explaining what he’ll do, how the client works and where he thinks the problem is.
At the end I don’t care if he’ll manage to solve everything. What is important is that I know that he’s doing his best to do so. Thanks again for not have just ignored all the messages and the discussions. You are doing an awesome work.
I imagined to write a short article about the difficulty in a MMOG since it’s what everyone is talking about after the last patch. Everyone is commenting that the game is now harder, perhaps because of bugs, perhaps because of the design. Some players like this change because they think WoW was way too easy till now. Quoting “El Gallo” from one of the boards I follow:
I will stick to my guns on the “game was too easy” issue (play a warrior as my main btw, and no I was not talking about just 1-on-1 though if you pay any attention you rarely get more than 2 on you except for a few spots and that is still easy to handle). Soloing needed to be a little harder (not more tedius, just harder so you have to think a bit at least once in a while).
Like I said, I wasn’t calling people crybabies in WoW because they don’t want timesinks, I don’t want them either. The problem is that they want a game where it is literally impossible to ever lose no matter how shitty you play, which I don’t want. Godmode isn’t fun.
Other players, instead, are commenting that the game now is too hard and, consequently, not fun as before, in particular when compared with the earlier phases. There’s also another small part of player, more experienced with MMOGs, commenting that this is a good change because the game should aim to incentivate the group play, obviously at the expense of who just wants to solo.
Now I’ll focus in particular on the first two types of comment because the third is too complex and involves more reasoning about the structure of the design. And noone wants to read me babble for a whole page about it.
So, my point is quite simple: the “difficulty” in a MMOGs cannot exist (at least within this model). Why? Because these games are designed after the “Risk vs. Reward” model. This means that there is no “set” environment for the designers to balance the content and its difficulty. The advancement isn’t difficulty-based but repetition-based. That’s why we often talk about treadmills and grind. When WoW was “easy” you simply fought higher levels mobs, often aggroing more than one and still winning. Now that the game is harder nothing will change from the difficulty point of view. You’ll simply have to aim at lower level mobs, one at time.
Eno, what is really important for the game is the “pace” of the levelling. The only difficulty, in fact, is about how fast you are able to advance. How fast you can advance while playing solo and how fast you can advance with a well balanced group. It’s a content-based difficulty where the more the game has to offer, the more the treadmill can be long. The designers of this game should tweak and balance its content by considering two and only two elements:
+ The “pace” of the game
+ The difficulty of the quests
The “pace” of the game is about the compromise between the fun and the sensation of a “grind”. Even if WoW is quest-based often there are insane collect quests that are just masks for the most obvious grind-play. So the difficulty, the experience coming from monsters and the experience coming for quests should be balanced considering the “pace”.
Then they need to consider the difficulty of the quests. They need to check if the game has enough quests to offer for who plays solo and, integrating with the point above, check the difficulty, the reward in experience and the “pace” to determine if the game is well balanced or feels as a grind.
The whole discussion is about the content. What makes EQ (or DAoC) and WoW different is the quest system. In other games you grind, in WoW you follow a story. So, is this “story” well balanced both for groups and for solo players?
My comment (I joined in Beta 2) is that WoW really feels less fun to play.
1- It was more fun to play because the quests had a well-balanced difficulty. They gave way more experience than they do now to the point that now camping and grinding, as in every other mmorpg, is becoming more rewarding than questing, disrupting the MAIN strength of this game. Plus, I find myself involved with more and more quests that I cannot solo and I spend *too much time* searching something I can do, to discover, at the end, that it wasn’t worth the pain because I’m receiving gimped experience and gimped loot.
2- It was more fun considering the combat system. An easier game allowed the players to aim “high” in the Risk vs Reward model. This meant that you were able to aggro and fight more than one monster and still expect to win without dying or fleeing. This resulted in a more fun gameplay where the content was accessible. Killing an high level monster or chaining low level monsters allowed the experience to flow more naturally, excluding again the sensation of grind. Moreover the animation system worked. It was in synch, not perfectly but at least way better than how it is now. WoW’s combat is already too chaotic and having all the animations, the splash damage and the sounds out of synch is making it even more messy and, consequently, less fun to play.
P.S.
Please make the game harder. Read: Not boring
I link this message because this player shares my point of view. He tries to suggest ways to really deal with the difficulty, trying to suggest a different model aimed to utilize the potential of this genre. His design ideas could be weak or silly, surely out the scope of this game, in particular at this point of the beta. But he still tries to explain that in a time-based environment an harder difficulty is simply equal to more grind:
Right now it seems blizzards goal has been to try to make the game harder, by reducing the power of players. This was not needed IMO. Player power was fine before this patch, and continuing to decrease (if they decide to) will bring this game down to the ground with the rest of the boring grind fests.
World of Warcraft is patching. If you hate Blizzard’s bittorrent client you can use a simple .torrent file usable with any client of your choice.
The file is here.
I’m downloading but I have a crappy connection and I’ll need to wait a few days before I can test if there are improvements. The patch notes aren’t thrilling. I hope a lot more has changed without appearing in there.
In a pair of days I should repost here the list of the announced and still missing features. Hoping they won’t be forget.
Why I keep looking at the screenshot I made six months ago and they look *better* than what it is now in the game? As the time passes the game becomes uglier, more graphic errors, more glitches between the various clothes, more polygons compenetration, more errors in the animations.
The animations. In Beta 2 We had more different animations. For example my dwarf had a different animation while performing a style when moving. He left the axe with one hand and the axe was going to hit from below with an oscillating, slower movement. This animation isn’t anymore in the game, not even replaced with a new one. Same for the falling animation, we had TWO different animations, one for a small damage, one for a high damage, both discareded completely from the game. Everything was in synch during combat! The combat was fun because everything was completely smooth, with proper animations reacting to your movements and the actions of the enemy. My character now performs all the animations out of synch. Out of synch with the splash damage, out of synch with the sound etc… Animations like block, dodge and parry are now not only out of synch but also less smooth and not integrated with the flow of the combat making the action even more chaotic and messy. Other animations like when sitting are now ridiculous if compared with the game six months ago.
Look at the screenshot. On the left you have the game six months ago, on the right you have the game now.
In the first image, look at the posture. Six month ago the posture was dignified, beautiful. The head looks high and far away, the shoulders are high. The arms more open with the hands more relaxed. The proportion between the forearm and the rest of the arm give a lot more dynamism to the old model. Same, and in particular, for the legs. The legs are more open, more stable. This allowed also to not melt the legs with tabards and other clothes (non in the screenshot), now the legs are more chubby and less dynamic. If you look attentively from the waistline to the feet you’ll notice how the first model looks way better and even the textures were better placed (look the shoulders for example).
Look now below at the other two images. The first glitch is about the moustaches. Six months ago they were perfect. Now they melt with the left shoulder. The second glitch is about the feet and legs. Look at the position of the old model, again more dynamic, definite and stable. With the foot behind at 90 degree compared with the first. The legs were also more slim and better modeled and not blocky and rigid as they are now (and if you look at the waistline of the new model you notice a whole mess of polygons with absolutely no sense). Same for the arms. Third glitch, the back. Look at the back of the old model. Perfect, smooth, linear, following the profile. Look at the damn back of the new model. It seems broken in various point, all blocky with no sense. It’s absolutely impossible to understand the position and if you look the character from behind you’ll also see the polygons melting in various points.
Now. I’d expect a game becoming better as the development goes on, instead even the graphic quality is decreasing progressively. Not only they removed various animations but we have more and more errors and glitches. With the animations now more ugly and out of synch.
What the sense of this? Why even work on the graphic if the result is worst than before? In this case I’d gladly accept a rollback of six months, because the game was far better than how it is now. Not only the raw graphic quality is worse, but even the animations are involved, making the combat more chaotic than what it is already.
The game, six months ago, was more polished, smooth and precise. At least if we consider the graphic and the animation system. I really wonder if there were changes inside the team because this decrease of quality is unexplainable.
Look at the screenshot and make your own opinion. Mines are written here.
Stripped:
Fun factor. I agree with riggs. (i thinkit was riggs) who said endgame != fun, in WoW, you are having fun all the time. Even more so that CoH. Take CoH, give all the zones a VERY distinct feel, and make the quests WAY WAY WAY more interesting, and you have a base of how WoW plays.
Leveling in WoW is the most fun I’ve had in any MMO period. To give you an idea I’ve played: UO, AC, AO, AC2,DAOC, SWG, COH and I’m pretty sure 1 or 2 others I’ve forgotten. What makes leveling in WoW fun is that you ALWAYS have something to do. My quest log is constantly full, in fact, I have to abandon alot of quests simply to make room for new ones that look interestings.
In WoW by contrast, I’ve had fun at every single level of the game. That’s right no “I can’t wait to hit max level so I can start having fun syndrome”. Sure, there’s a bit of the old “man I can’t wait til I can get that piece of equipment” or “I want my mount now!” but in general that’s seperate from “these low levels are boring”.
