Okay so the title may be slightly misleading as this post is still about Video Games, however it has less Black Ops 2 influence in it, which I feel has taken over the blog a little bit lately. Some of you may have noticed the title of this post is in fact a segment from the popular British Comedy 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' which coincidentally is also the name of one of the Monty Python films (which probably wasn't that much of a coincidence but oh well.) As some of you may have already guessed the true purpose of this blog post is to talk about MMO's or more specifically MMORPG's and even more specifically World of Warcraft. A few of you may be wondering what I mean by the terms MMO and MMORPG, simply put they mean Massively Multiplayer Online Game and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game respectively.
Arguably the most popular in the past Ten years or at least the most well known of these MMORPG's is Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft. As many of you may know, World of Warcraft, takes place after the events of the previous Warcraft games, which were in RTS form. This has lead to some rich source material being fed into the game, with a rich and interesting Lore that expands with each of the new expansions, the latest of which is Mists of Pandaria. My love of the Warcraft universe started many years ago, about the same time I developed an interest in Warhammer. At the time I was in my early teens, and had recently acquired my first proper computer. The few games I had at the time were what I consider some classic PC RTS's. My first few games included the likes of Age of Empires: Gold Edition, Pharaoh and Caesar 3, so when I received a copy of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (which as you can see took a very different approach from the previous historical RTS's) I was eager to play through this fantastical world. Just to clarify, by the time I was introduced to Warcraft, the series had already grown and was on it's third game in the series Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. After thoroughly enjoying the original Warcraft as well as the sequels that followed, when a close friend of mine acquired the game World of Warcraft in late 2005 and invited me and a friend to come over and play, we were instantly hooked. And by January of 2006 we had acquired the game for ourselves.
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| Not a picture of my actual character, but my first character was a Tauren! |
A few of you may be wondering what this blog is actually about, well the truth is it is 'Mainly' about my experiences of playing World of Warcraft, however I would like to touch upon a few other MMO related topics, such as why hasn't the genre taken off on the Xbox for example. After obtaining my own copy, I began the long process of loading the game onto my computer, and once that was complete (and paying for some game time of course), I stepped out into the world of Azeroth as a noble Tauren Druid. After the introductory cut scene, the first thing I wanted to do was get stuck into the Druid's primary attribute of shape-shifting ... which I later found out I had to actually get to level 10 before I could turn into a bear, even then to turn into a bear you had to complete a quest ... damn, new players on World of Warcraft sure do have it easy nowadays! This was a trend across the classes in which upon hitting level 10 you would quest to get a specific spell, pet etc. Starting a new character now only has you do one class related quest to test out a new spell at level 3/4 on the practice dummies, but I do recall the old class quests as being enjoyable. In particular playing as a Troll Shaman and doing the quest for each element, each one being different from the previous (I haven't played Shaman in a long time, but I think they removed these quests, correct me if I'm wrong). The subsequent expansions The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were rather enjoyable for me, with raids such as Karazhan and Argent Tournament adding exciting new encounters (Karazhan more so than any other raid) and quests such as the Battle for Undercity (later removed in Cataclysm) adding to an enjoyable experience. The next expansion was Cataclysm, which shook up the existing zones of Azeroth and added new ones, was to me a bit hit and miss. The re-working of zones worked great in some of the zones yet others were still off putting for me, I found little change in Northern Barrens and as such found myself questing over in Silverpine Forest and Hillsbrad Foothills (the latter of which I used to avoid except for when I went to purchase my Frostwolf Howler) which since Cataclysm have become enjoyable places to level. Of course over time Blizzard have introduced new races and classes to keep things fresh, even offering old classes to old races (e.g Dwarf Shaman and Tauren Paladins two race, class combinations unimaginable before Burning Crusade).
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| Undead or Forsaken are former Humans now fighting for the Horde |
To me the appeal of World of Warcraft is the rich universe in which it is set, as well as the selection of races and classes from which to choose from all add up to an enjoyable experience. In terms of content you have the choice to PvE (player vs environment) or PvP (player vs player). PvE includes questing, dungeouns, raids and more recently scenarios where as PvP has the option to fight in either Battlegrounds (10 vs 10, 15 vs 15 etc) and Arenas (2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, 5 vs 5). Personally my preference is to play PvE, although I'm no hardcore raider and have been known to dabble in PvP. I won't get into too much detail here but what I will say for anyone who's thinking of starting out on WoW, my advice would be to try out a few battlegrounds and dungeouns whilst leveling to see how much you enjoy each.
Aware that this blog is become a slight bit on the long side, I am going to throw a few things out there that I will go into more depth on in a later post. The first thing is something that I guess you can also apply to DLC for games such as Black Ops 2, Skyrim etc etc, is whether paying a subscription fee for a game you have already bought is a good or bad thing. In terms of subscriptions I feel they are primarily a good thing, DLC however I feel it needs to be reasonably priced and worth it, more on that at a later date. Secondly the lack of MMO's on consoles, in particular the Xbox brings up questions on why is it not so successful when it's not on PC? A game which is looking to challenge that view is Defiance, which from what I have seen of it so far looks like a really interesting project. Finally is the continuation of an MMO universe, what I mean by this is, expansions and new releases. Does there come a point where you need to say stop! and start anew or is stepping up the challenge with new expansions the answer? Once you have reached the maximum level, attained the best gear, killed the biggest, most bad-ass enemies you can find, starting from square one in terms of its the same game with a number after the title can seem a bit like we've reached the end, and for an MMO I feel we need to see the world expand and change as we level up. Anyway those are questions for a later date, hope you enjoyed a fairly Warcraft based post, as always comments are welcome.
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