Full Disclosure
I have to get something out. This is honesty right here, folks. I’ve been doing something lately that I’m not proud of, and this pattern cannot continue. No, not cat juggling…
I’m talking, of course, about World of Warcraft. I can’t remember the last time I was actively involved in doing something that I was embarassed by. The kind of thing where I thought, “I hope she doesn’t ask me what I did last night, because I don’t want to have to make up some story about, uh, watching a TV show, the name of which I cannot remember.”
My friends know about it. One of them has had a positive response. The rest have responded with a somewhat mystified look. “One of those games, huh?” They had roommates or first cousins once removed who played Everquest and watched it take over their lives.
Every time I tell somebody about WoW, I preface it with, “I’ve never played one of these games before” - like that somehow makes the sin of playing one now any better - “and my friend and I have been talking about these games for a long time now - theorizing and such - and I decided I’d try one out.” Yes, this is research, friends. Research.
No more. Oh, I’m going to keep playing (at least until my free month runs out), but there shall be no more of this charade.
- I’m playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis.
- It’s lame to the rest of the world, but I have to say that I think it’s pretty cool.
- It’s fun to play a game again.
Thank you.
December 16th, 2004 at 1:15 pm
‘kay — now you have to explain why you think its cool. To me, the game is a limited world with preset actions and passable graphics. Its neat, but its nothing something I would play endlessly, night after night.
(This comes from a person who has been playing Half Life nearly every night, often screaming, “Dammit! That punk hit me with the toilet me when I wans’t looking! He’s camping in the bathroom!”)
December 16th, 2004 at 7:12 pm
I’ll be posting a fuller review on my site in the near future, but for now my $0.02:
Preset actions, limited world: so do FPS’, no? I think the primary difference is the basic concept of the gameplay: fast-twitch + strategy vs. skill-accumulation + economics + strategy. Not better or worse, just fundamentally different.
As far as graphics: yeah, HL2 blows WoW away :) But then again, none of the games in the Warcraft series have ever tried to look realistic; their cartoonishness is a large part of their appeal and conceptual cohesiveness, IMO. The designers set out to create a “swords-and-spells” world, and I think the fantasy-cartoon look meshes very nicely with that.