Burning Crusade

I bought the expansion for warcraft. I spent about a year and a half playing, from the month it came out, and still think it is by far the best game that’s been made. Burning Crusade though, just didn’t get me back into it. There was all of the complexity and limitation of the endgame, some of the reasons I left, and none of the magic and excitement I remembered as the best parts.

Leveling in Teldrassil, and seeing my first human player, knowing he was far from home, or having to run across the world to get sea lion form, realizing for the first time how truly expansive the world was, and hitting 60 of course. Those are the types of things that are highlights for me. Running Undead Strat for the 50th time, or waiting for ages as someone barks commands at me in molten core are what I didn’t like.

The expansion seems more like what I didn’t like than what I did. Everyone is 60 now, so there is a huge wave of people leveling. It’s not how you are used to leveling at all, when 3 people have to collect pipes it seems fun, and like there could be a storyline. When 150 people are doing it it just seems like an artificial roadblock.

My main problem with warcraft are the limitations though. There is only one metric for rating players, gear. Nothing else matters, and anyone can easily be placed on this very linear continuum. This is not like real life, in real life people can be doctors, or painters, or anything else. One can’t easily compare the quality of a doctor to that of a painter. They are just different, and that difference is interesting. In warcraft you can be different classes, but that’s not quite the same thing, there aren’t an infinite number of classes, and you can’t create your own. People like Joi Ito will tell you things like in wow there is room for all types of people to do all types of things. That is not really true, and he knows it. To compare fishing, or leatherworking to collecting gear is disingenuous, and for the people who claim that exploring is a key aspect of the game, that only lasts so long, the map does have edges. If you are someone who “plays” who has one level 30 something character, this may not touch on your experience at all, you would be in what I think of as the fun phase of the game, where getting new abilities, and exploring new areas is the main driver. Later it will be doing the same thing over and over for a new hat, and you will keep playing it not because it’s fun anymore, but because you are used to it, and likely have friends there.

Anyway, I sound bitter, but I’m really not. Like I said, I do think it’s the best game out there, but I’m ready for the next generation. Developers should learn from the problems, just as blizzard learned from mmorpgs before warcraft, and improve. And as far as second life is concerned, yes of course I have played that, but I would rather fish in wow than teleport around the circa 1996 computer animation style world alternating between buying t-shirts, and dancing in clubs. Newsflash, you can buy t-shirts and dance in clubs in real life, unless of course you are 13, very ugly, or are otherwise antisocial (read:furry), which in my experience sums up 99% of second lifers (the 1% are people like Lawrence Lessig, and Cory Doctorow, who play because it’s Important).

Wow, maybe I am bitter for some reason!