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On This Day In Gaming History...
| 2001, FunCom launches official website for new game, "Midgard." |
| 2002, Shadowbane's pre-order CD's ship. Those who pre-ordered in N. America get access to restricted races. |
| 2003, Chris "Vosx" Mancil starts the rumor mill running for "Shadowbane" due to a mispost on the Ubi forums regarding a sever consolidation with new maps and features for the game. |
| 2003, Lila "Jade Dragonfly" Yee, the Community Relations Manager for Asheron's Call 2 joins the "Mythica" team in the same role. |
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Previews: World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft, the MMO Game being developed by Blizzard Entertainment and published by Vivendi, building upon the past experiences of the Warcraft games, mixing RTS and RPG for what will no doubt be a game that stands alone.
Olaf tells us why, in his continued journies from deep within the closed beta! If you missed his first part, and second parts, be sure to give it a read!
World of Warcraft pt3 - Eric "Olaf" Hasselfeld (04-09-04)
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| The red-eye to Stormwind!
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Advanced Gameplay
So far we've gone over the technical aspects of the game and the basics of gameplay. Today we are going to get a little deeper into the gameplay, based mostly on experiences with my 20th level Rogue. The subjects will be the death penalty, questing and grouping vs. soloing.
Bring on the Rats!
As I have mentioned before, the starter areas for each of the races are well crafted. They have a unique look and feel that is conveyed in the different types of terrain and architecture that are on display. They are alike in how they play across the races, however, and they are akin to the 'tutorial' mode you might find in a non-MMORPG. They work well, and they serve their purpose. The regions are relatively small. The quests are simple. Class trainers are easy to find and your basic vendor NPCs are where you need them to be. Most of the mobs in these regions are non-aggressive, and non-social. These areas are designed to be straightforward and low impact and the quests can be completed in the order you receive them with little difficulty.
After about 90 minutes of gameplay, the quests in these areas will take your character to 5th level, and the last quest in each of them involves meeting with an NPC in an adjacent higher level region, a convenient and efficient gameplay devices that you will find repeated as you progress through the game.
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A keep on the border
near Westfall.
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It is at this point when the game begins to open up. The other regions in the game are much more freeform, and less sheltering to the young player. Tradeskills come available via NPC trainers, the regions are bigger with more quests, mobs and players to contend with.
Discretion is the Better Part of Valor
Being a veteran of the genre, I was surprised to find myself dead for the first time at the tender level of 6, the victim of unchecked Kobold aggression. These weren't the Kobolds I was introduced to in Northshire Abbey! These guys were mean, aggro and social. This would be an ideal time to talk about the death penalty in WoW.
When you die you are immediately given a dialogue box to release your spirit. If you don't have anyone in your party to resurrect you, and you don't have a Soulstone (no-rent items summoned by Warlocks that give 1 charge of self-resurrect) then you should just click to release. When you release you become a ghost, appearing at the region's equivalent of a bind stone. You have no control over where you appear. It depends completely on what region you die in. In ghost mode you run faster than normal, can breathe under water and are much harder for mobs to detect. Next to each of these bind stones are NPCs called Spirit Healers. These guys will resurrect you on the spot in return for some of your hard earned XP. You can't ever lose a level this way, but since XP is tracked on a per level basis, you can go negative XP in your current level if you die too soon. If you died alone in a dungeon, or someplace surrounded by elite mobs, then using the Spirit Healer might be a good idea.
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The entry hall
in Stormwind Keep!
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Resurrecting surrounded by hostile mobs isn't a good idea, and most elite mobs see and attack players in ghost form, which makes getting to your corpse a dicey proposition if it involves traveling near them. Should you choose to return to the scene of the crime, your corpse will be marked on your map with a cheery little headstone icon and a marker will appear on the mini-map showing you its bearing. Start running. When you get within range of your corpse (this range is set to be expanded as of the next beta push), you get a resurrect dialogue box. Once you are sure you have a safe spot picked out, click accept and you reappear with very low health and mana, but otherwise in one piece with all of your gear. Priests and Paladins, and perhaps Shaman and Druids, can resurrect players directly, bringing them back with varying degrees of health/mana depending on the class and the level of spell they are using. If you do happen to have a Soulstone on you when you die, your death dialogue box will have an option to consume it in order to res yourself where you died. This isn't always a good idea though...
For the most part the death system works well. The interruption in gameplay a death causes is penalty enough. Not everyone feels this way though, and some folks are lobbying Blizzard to make death more of an impediment, so that the game is more 'challenging'. I heard that in the alpha the penalty for using a Spirit Healer was almost non-existent but it was changed because people were using death to facilitate faster travel within a region. Oddly enough, when you are in ghost mode you do not have access to most of the interface. You can not open your friends list; you can't look at your quest log or your character sheet. You can run and you can chat, and you can check the map, that's it. Finally, player corpses litter the world for reasons unknown to me. When you die, you leave a corpse. When you get resurrected…the corpse remains in the game world for some period of hours. Thus, much to my chagrin, my pathetic attempts to curtail Kobold activity in the Goldshire region were on display to all passers-by.
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Dwarven Statues
Stand Guard!
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Questing
Mechanically speaking, there are only a few different types of quests. So far each quest I have done has been some combination of the following basic tasks. Of course we have the standard FedEx, where you are yoked with dropping something off or picking something up, and sometimes just traveling somewhere and speaking with a particular NPC is enough. Then we have assassination missions, where you are tasked with taking a trophy from, or just plain disposing of, some kind of boss creature. Next up we have the slaughter quest, where you must kill X of some specific kind of mob. There are also quests where your job is to protect an NPC as he/she/it runs a gauntlet of some kind trying to get somewhere. So far these have been the rarest. Finally, my least favorite is the collection quest. These quests require you to collect Y number of some odd thing. The problem here is that the drop rates are inconsistent and also that these are the only kinds of quests where groups do not share the rewards. Ideally these drop rates will be tuned as the beta progresses and this will cease to be a problem. But despite this issue the pros outweigh the cons already when it comes to quests.
In fact, the most significant improvement WoW brings to the MMORPG table is its take on that staple of fantasy role-playing. First off, there are a lot of them. And these aren't boring, randomly generated time sinks that some games offer. They are all hand crafted and, like many other things in WoW, they feel like they belong without coming across as clichéd. In each region there are a variety of one-off quests. Certain NPCs have something relatively simple they want done and you are the person they want to do it. A dwarvish brewer wants to experiment with his next batch of suds and wants you to grab some suspiciously named Shimmerweed from some unsuspecting Trolls. A bureaucrat left behind a personal bauble as he was running from a band of cutthroats who torched his farm, and wants it back. A lonely townswoman wants you to deliver a lunch to a patrolling guard for her. As I described, there are only a handful of different basic kinds of quests, but Blizzard put a lot of effort into differentiating them as much as possible by wrapping them up with nice flavor text.
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A Dwarven Hunting Lodge
in the mountains of Loch Modan !
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In addition to the types of quests I described above, there also are some that involve multiple steps across a story arc involving a particular region or faction. Most regions have one or two of these and they flesh out the game world very well. Each successive step in these quests reveals more and more about the happenings in Blizzard's post-Frozen Throne milieu. Further, some of the items you get via quests, like letters or reports, can be right clicked upon before turning them in to glean even more information about what is going on around you. Again this is strictly flavor stuff and has no statistical impact on gameplay, but it's another traditionally single player device that Blizzard has successfully imported into WoW.
The quests are not just interesting though. Unlike in much of the competition, leveling via quests is not only a viable way to advance your character, but encouraged within the game. Not only do quests drive you to explore new regions at mostly level appropriate times, but by providing meaty xp, cash and item rewards as compared to random mob farming, they encourage grouping (except for the collection quests)! It's genius. Finally, measurable progress can be made on many types of quests one chunk at a time. This is great for more casual players. The system as a whole works wonderfully, and it's a genre changing evolution. More than any other feature, it's why I think WoW is going to dethrone EQ.
LFG!
I know what the Ms mean, and it's not that I don't want to group, its just that I don't like the down time associated with getting people together, getting everyone on the same page and then finally getting down to business, especially when I might only have 45 minutes to play. In EQ, this tedium is magnified by requiring certain classes or skill sets for a particular encounter, or a 90- minute commitment from six people with very little time for interruptions or breaks. Thankfully, WoW does not have any of those issues, at least not up to level 20 and to the degree they were present in EQ.
So far, one of the strengths of WoW is its combat. Its fast paced and involving, especially for classes like Warlocks and Rogues, who have a variety of either/or combat options to choose from in each fight.
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Valuable intel
on my quarry!
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Early on, WoW is very accessible for the soloist. The newbie quests are doable almost always as soon as you are eligible to receive them. As you move on to other regions, the game's open environment means that you will inevitably start getting quests that you can not solo upon initially receiving them. Your quest log attempts to give you a little guidance on how difficult or easy a given quest is by assigning it a level, and then a color based on the quest's level compared to your own. The system is not perfect, and early on its frame of reference shifts dramatically once you leave the newbie areas, but you get used to it. Grey quests are supposed to be trivial, both in risk and (relative) reward. Oftentimes these quests involve mobs that you no longer even get xp from killing. In fact, if an NPC has a grey quest for you he won't display the yellow ! that is associated with a quest NPC. You can still get the quest by interacting with him, but unless it's something you are going to be doing anyway, or want to do for RP reasons or to get to the next step in a series of quests, grey quests are not worth the trouble for character advancement purposes. Green quests are a little riskier, but not generally hard. Unless it's an elite rated quest, these can all be soloed. Yellow quests mean you will be fighting things around your own level. Sometimes these can be soloed. Elite yellow quests are very hard, or even impossible, to solo for most classes. The last color is orange and this means stay away unless you have a good group. Orange level elite quests are damn hard, even for balanced groups of level appropriate players.
The second region (Elvynn Forest for humans, as an example) for each race has quests mostly soloable, although you might have to think outside the box a little bit for a couple and go out of your way to complete them in order of difficulty, shooting for the green ones first. You are introduced to elite quests at some point, and these are not soloable.
The third region for each race is about a 50/50 mix of quests that are soloable when you get them (I was 11 when I moved into Westfall, the third human region, for the first time), and quests you will need at least a partner for. You can, however, defer the third region of your race in favor of hitting the second region of an allied race. With my Rogue, I went to the Dwarven region of Dun Morogh after finishing up Elvynn Forest, and before doing too much of Westfall. The quests in DM were green/grey, but they were interesting and I also picked up some easy coin, and some much needed experience in skinning and leatherworking, my tradeskills of choice.
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VanCleef's warship docked
in a hidden cove !
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As you grow in level, and branch out to new regions the trend seems to be that the 'storyline' quests require groups, while most of the one-off quests do not. Initially, I was surprised at how restricted the solo game is in WoW. To solo my Rogue I had to travel around, picking and choosing my battles and finding myself shagging ass quite frequently as I would bite off more than I could chew in pursuit of a newly acquired quest. But, a lot of my impressions had to do with my prior experience as an EQ Necromancer. In that guise, I could almost always get better xp solo than the best of groups, and it was a class with a variety of 'get out of jail free cards' which meant death was fairly uncommon.
World of Warcraft makes more sense as a multiplayer game. You are rewarded for having a group and adding more people to it, and almost never are punished for banding together with people to do things. The other solo-limiting factor is the way the bulk of the xp is earned, from quest rewards. If too many of the quests were soloable in a given region right away, then character progression would be too fast and too easy. It's already pretty quick if you have a nucleus of friends/guildmates to draw on, because of the nice quest rewards. So, overall I am pleased with how the game handles soloing vs. grouping, and character advancement as a whole. I do wonder if this delicate balance will be preserved once the game gets more and more content added to it and the level cap gets raised. It strikes me as being too easy to powerlevel characters via quest rewards.
Next week's piece will talk about some specific gameplay situations, both solo and in groups, from the perspective of my Rogue. The final piece in this series will talk about tradeskills.
Part Four: It was Going to Be Tradeskills, It Changed!
Discuss: Yes, there is another part! Questions?
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