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Gaming: How Warcraft killed role-playing games.
Sun, 29 Oct 2006

While I'm not really in the mood for gaming right now, I do have issues of Retro Gamer arriving every few weeks and forming a pile, ever reminding me I'm a fan of the industry :) To the left, even mentioning in a blog title that beloved Blizzard could do wrong will likely get me lynched, so we'll see how it goes. To the other, people will mention that with Blizzard shipping the World of Warcraft expansion late (after Christmas) they're returning a holiday back to the addicts and letting other titles have a chance -- but I still think they've damaged the PC gaming ecology as a whole (just as GWAR damaged hairspray sales in California.) Oh, if you don't know what WoW is, no worries .. just go watch the South Park episode about it -- utterly accurate.

I've dabbled in WoW myself, but am clear these days; its definately a fun game and Blizzard have simply mastered the 'one more level' style of 'sick day at work' gameplay, just as Sid Meier roped people into 'one more hour' for his Civilization games. The problem is -- other games end, reward the player for skill over time investment, and simply are not on a subscription payment system. The monthly payments were a hard sell to players at first, but Everquest blazed that trail and with XBox Live and even the Anti-virus systems.. the consumer is ripe for it. (I will not say micropaym3nt5.) Naturally, the enterprising MMORPG companies know their hooked player base will play until reaching a personally defined goal and they will be damned sure to make that goal as distant as possible -- and not difficult either. Just long. In terms of weeks and months. EVE Online has a simple skill system where the characters abilities increase in a linear real-time fashion so everything is under rigid control - the developers know how fast your character can progress, period. While the fantasy games don't follow similar techniques, they aim for the same result -- if a character must jump through so many very elaborate hoops, and perform repetitive tasks over the space of months.. they know very much how quickly avatars increase in power and thus the developers can grade the difficulty curve.. tweek the strings to keep it just fun enough, fast enough, but not an ounce more. Like gambling.

Single player games (most games, until recently) have a different lifecycle entirely; some games you can beet quite quickly simply because you figured out the tricks, or guessed the mystery, or were good at its kind of puzzles. Sometimes they keep on giving, due to player mods or online multiplay like Quake, or any number of things. Long games were cool -- the Baldur's Gate PC RPG's were quite long, but of such good quality they're still played years later. So whats the problem? Long and short, games have been around for a long time and people like fast, and they like hard, and they like long.

The problem as I see it - Warcraft is played by millions, and is so fun for a little while that its being played to death. People burn out on its gameplay, and just cannot try on another title, for awhile. Like alcoholics avoiding the occasional cocktail, or parents avoiding Spongebob. Other folks must be like me -- play for awhile and you can see the games designers have mastered the RPG mechanics -- speed of character power growth, balancing of monsters to player strength, amount of exploration, player item crafting, neat things to fiddle with. WoW completely misses in many pieces single player RPGs have and lacks depth in many areas.. but with thousand of others online, its good to go. But after playing WoW, millions of people will be so fed up with long games, with long grinds, with games that make you level up to get anywhere.. that other RPGs, be there multiplayer or solo, will suffer. A regular game might take 10 hours for a character to get fairly powerful while WoW takes literally months of play.. but after WoW, no one will want to grind for even 10 hours. What was great fun is now ruined for awhile. Thanks Blizzard :)

I've been fiddling with Oblivion of late, now that I can tweak it to run well enough on my apparently lower-end machine (in gaming terms.) Its very good for single player open ended RPGs. A classic of the art, in the long train first started by Dungeon Master on the Atari ST, or Zork before it. I'd have loved Oblivion a year ago, but after a few months of mucking with Warcraft, I just have no patience for levelling up, walking around an enormous world. WoW has taken the sense of adventuring and wonder from gaming, and beaten it into a specific well defined set of formula.. the grind curve. When I see Oblivions beautifully crafted world of waving grass and shimmering lakes, Elven ruins and deep sewers.. I still see the game mechanics instead of the art form. I think to myself -- its so much fun, but can I even consider looking into a game that will eat 50-100 hours for me to even consider winning, when I've got shelving to build, basements to clean out, baby rooms to build? I can sure give hell to the Zulu's in Civ IV in a night or two, or gun down some Nazi's in Medal of Honour.. but an RPG? I worry.. has Blizzard ruined one of my favourite genres for years to come? (Or did Robert Jordan do that? Thankfully I'm free of his felching.) Oblivion is worth the money, with literally hundreds of hours you could invest playing.. but WoW has turned me off. And I can't even imagine -- those that gave their entire lives over to Everquest, Camelot, Warcraft -- they've likely given away their computers and bought motocycles.

Give me Quake, any day. Maybe I'll look into Battlefield 2142 or whatever that new game is.. give me fast and nasty, where skill is measured in cackles-per-minute .. like a boy with a match in a box factory. Downing the enemy is better than earning 150 reputation points for each victory, with 20,000 to go before earning the Wand of Testocules.

Or maybe I'm just burnt out in general :) Staring at the compiler for too many hours while pounding out code, and playing a game one night a week.. I need a movie :) Winter is when I usually get more coding and gaming done but thankfully the little one will rescue me this round!

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