Points: 5
Cover Story: It Came From Outer Space!

Pat Foran


Total Points:
Red Ninja
Last Visit:
Milpitas, CA

What I'm Playing

My Friends

Why I love WoW.

As requested by 1up editor Tina Sanchez

Jan 11, 2010 6:52AM PST

It is an interesting question. What keeps me coming back? Why am I so devoted to this game I have played for over 100 days worth of real life time? Let me explore this question, and in the process, take you on a trip through the mind of an avid WoW player.

WoW has many things that draw me to it. At base, I am a hardcore RPG player, and the opportunity to endlessly seek new levels of power is a golden apple I cannot resist. But why this MMO, and not any other? WoW is a fantastic game from a fantastic company, Blizzard entertainment. Their attention to detail and pride in their work are exemplary, and indicate that they are among the masters of game design and development.

  The world of WoW is rich, lush, and engaging, and they make us actually manage to feel real emotion in this game. Now, for any game that's a real feat, but as a massively multiplayer game? That's incredible! When I turned in a quest to highlord Bolvar at the wrath gate, I was on a huge chain quest that stretched all across northrend and made me feel like I was having a real impact on the world through the use of phasing technology. I expected that I would be receiving a nice reward and being sent on, say, a fun vehicle quest, perhaps launching fire at the scourge as we assaulted the gate. Instead, my mind was completely blown. The screen went dark, a moment of unease as I worried if I had crashed the game, then...

My jaw literally would not pick itself up off the floor for a good full minute or so afterwards. I was struck by so much awe, that they had managed to insert a cutscene into an MMO seamlessly, that they had produced a cutscene of such caliber and polish using WoW's graphics engine, that it had been so amazing and pivotal in the story of the world, and that it had a real impact on the environment for the entire rest of my playing experience in the game. It had actually happened, this had really occured in a persistant world. It would never reset, I had played my part as the hero in this epic story, and my actions really mattered.

To find that feeling in a persistant world was absolutely mind blowing. I cannot praise blizzard enough for having the brains and talent to figure this out and pull it off.

But! That is only one part of the equation that is WoW. They have the most amazing and fantastic single player leveling/questing experience I have ever seen, and it makes me giddy just thinking about it. But what about the meat and potatoes of the game? the meta game that all players end up in at max level and for the majority of their MMO career?

Here again Blizzard shines through with excellence and a genius that seems hard to match. The economy in WoW is actually one of the unsung heroes of the world. It's very easy to destroy a virtual economy if you don't do it correctly, and exploits and tricks can stack the market in favor only of the profiteers and those who seek out and exploit every weakness in the system. Somehow WoW has managed to make a game with a strong NPC backbone of the economy in the leveling experience that gradually fades out into a completely player run, self-sufficient, intricate global economy. The fact that they have managed to seamlessly balance the economic power of trade and gathering professions without nuetering either is amazing. For example, just about every trade profession in WoW right now has a unique ability it can use to make a large profit. I only have alchemy and tailoring at max in terms of regular trade professions, so I will use them as my examples. In tailoring, I can craft cloth used for powerful craftable items on a 2-3 day cooldown. With the price of mats included, I can make a decent profit just by crafting it every cooldown. But WoW throws something even sweeter on top of it. I can specialize in one of the three kinds of cloth, and I get double results from that type whenever I craft it. That allows me to more than double my investment every couple of days!

And as part of alchemy I can transmute a lower quality gem into a higher quality one, a process that makes me a tidy sum of double to triple my investment. However, I am a transmute master, which means I can occasionly create not one gem, but 2-5!  My last transmute I gained 5 of the most valuable gem, granting me a return rate of over 1000%!  The fact that I can make these ridiculous returns on investment from nearly any profession without breaking the economic principles of supply and demand is mind boggling, and shows that blizzard has a really great handle on their economy.

What about class balance? WoW is the most balanced game in the history of MMOs. As an example I used to play FFXI, and right around the time I started playing, Dragoons with a specific build were a bit overpowered, so they'd just been nerfed. However, this build was the only thing keeping dragoons useful and when taken away they became the punching bag class. This persisted not for a couple months, but for THREE YEARS before they FINALLY buffed dragoons to make up for it. They let class balance fall into a state of disrepair for so long even when they had fairly easy knobs to tweak to get them back in the game, but instead they preferred to let it wallow.

By contrast, while WoW has certainly had its ups and downs (I used to play a retribution paladin at level 60), it has steadily moved more and more towards total class balance. At this point, you can pick just about any spec of any class and succeed in a difficult raid setting, as long as you are willing to put in the effort. The level to which they have brought this balance while still maintaining a very different feel for each class and spec's playstyle is truly masterful.

As an example, I went through several phases while trying to find a good melee dual wield dps class to play, so I currently have 3 high level versions of the same exact role. I have an enhancement shaman, a fury warrior, and a rogue. All three deal damage in very different ways, with a very different feel. My rogue spams his abilities whenever he can and uses tricks and talents to increase his capacity. My Fury warrior rushes into battle dual weilding two handers and takes slow massive swings and fewer but harder hitting abilities to smash into his opponents with tremendous brute force, and my enhancement shaman throws down self buffs, stacks free heals and lightning bolts, and uses a wider variety of spells and abilities to take down foes with lightning quick precision and speed.

As a raider, I have seen every single class in the coveted number 1 dps spot. Every class in this game has the potential to get there, and who you're likely to see there is even dependant upon which specific fight you're referring to! The equality of power in the game at this point makes it feel like everyone has an equal opportunity to show they have what it takes to be the best, regardless of what class or spec they play.

And speaking of raiding, this is perhaps the crowning jewel on the achivements of WoW. The amount of thought and effort that go into creating compelling raids and interesting boss mechanics is astounding. The final raid dungeon of the expansion (or so we're assuming) has just been released, and there are some amazing mechanics in place. In one fight they have managed to make killing adds and switching targets the true test of skill to defeat the boss, because if you're not fast enough they will reset to full health as a much stronger version of themselves, so it's a race to target and dps down the right adds at the right time before things start to spiral out of control. This is so foriegn from a "tank n spank" fight that it excites me just thinking about it. The boss we are currently working on throws oozes around the room, has giant slime pipes that emit glowing green goo you have to avoid while kiting along the path it spawns in, exploding oozes, a mechanic to force dps characters to kite rather than just getting a tank to handle the add, and constant movement to respond to new threats.  Oh, and in this dungeon you also get to fight ON A FREAKING AIR SHIP!

The masterful encounter design and expert tuning that goes into blizzard's most difficult dungeons and hard modes sets my soul on fire every time I see it. Nothing gets me going more than the adrenaline rush I get from taking on an extremely difficult boss and the rush as we get closer and closer to finally killing it.

Oh, and did I mention the amazing attention to detail in their world? The WoW engine is old. It was not designed to be a high end graphics engine in the first place, but rather a friendly engine to the computers of the time, 5 years ago. FFXI's characters and rendering look prettier and smoother than WoWs, but still, WoW's graphics outstrip all the competition. The artists have mastered their craft to such degrees that a trip through sholazar basin contrasts so much with a trip through un'goro crater that you would swear they were different games entirely. The layering, the textures, the doodads, the character art, everything has procceeded leaps and bounds beyond what was hinted by wow's beginning. The cliffs of Northrend never cease to amaze me in their detail,  the great redwoods of grizzly hills, the soft snow on the trees and the jagged mountain tops of the storm peaks, the shimmering smoothness and granduer of the titan ruins take my breath away. 

And running through all this in a constant undercurrent is WoWs incredible music. The music in sholazar basin and the green dragonshrine in dragonblight settles my soul. The sweeping drums of the storm peaks and the proud sound of the fiddle in the grizzly hills set the tone for those zones in a way that is almost ethereal, and I absolutely love them for it. WoW's music is expertly arranged and placed, and adds a layer of epicness that makes WoW shine above all other MMORPGs.

All of these things are part of, and effects of, the reason I keep coming back to Azeroth as my home away from home. The root cause is that Blizzard cares about their games and their gamers. They will never compromise in quality to meet a shipping deadline, they pour every ounce of their souls into WoW, and it shows. These guys love their game, and they want it to act as a reflection of themselves. This love shines through in every pore of the game, every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass, every splash of stream water as salmon swim up the mighty river to be plucked out of the air by bears. Every square inch of this world has been filled with love, and then polished until it shines with a light so bright it cannot be ignored.

THAT  is why I am so devoted to this game, and THAT is why I keep coming back. There is a bond between gamer and developer, and developers as gamers themeselves, that they have built, and that they have earned.

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