I’m doing something here that may or may not stick, not the WOW thing exactly but something related to it.
Anyway, this morning, I did something I have not done in my many years of being a “gamer”. I opened a World of Warcraft Account. This is supposed to be the end all be all of MMORPGs so I figured that I should probably at least try it. I mean people make a living doing this apparently. Or at least Chinese sweatshop managers do. Also people break up with their families and lives for this game and forget to eat or feed their babies over it.
I generally steer clear of MMORPGs. It’s a pay per month grind trap. The new trend though is limited “Free to Play” style MMOs which either rely on micro transactions for income or limit how far the player can advance. I really am not up to a reoccurring $15 monthly fee. Yeah, I could afford it but frankly, I’d get more enjoyment out of an Audible subscription.
On to WoW.
The first task was to choose a character. I picked an Orc, because Orcs are pretty bad ass and being Evil is “cool”. I then had to choose a class, which I ended up with a Hunter. Hunters use bows and can do sort of some of everything, at least that was the impression I got. In other free form games, The Elder Scrolls as the obvious example, I tend to migrate towards a bow wielding magic using sneaky sort of assassin play style. Hunter seemed like it would work all right. Later research would show this was a good choice as apparently Hunter is a good class for “Soloing”. I really am not interested in befriending a bunch of strangers on my foray into this game right now, so Soloing is good.
After choosing my class, I got a little story about some names which sound vaguely familiar from Warcraft II and Warcraft III. I then get dropped into a small village with a pet to keep my company. Then I get to undergo a series of quests.
So my chief complaint about MMORPGs is the overall shallowness of it all. The joke is that they are nothing more than “a series of fetch quests”. “Go collect XXX of item YYY”. “Go kill ZZZZ of Enemy WWWW”. That was always the joke. I’ve only really played one MMO for any length of time, and it was Final Fantasy XI, which I hated. World of Warcraft, is like playing that joke. Maybe there is more later, I keep hoping there is more somewhere but so far, all I have done for about 3 hours, is wander through an empty desert killing XXX scorpions and YYY boars for various people. I also, made the mistake of picking the “best armor” options as my reward, which means I now own a pretty cool set of Mail armors, which I cannot wear until Level 40. I should probably add that my free account caps out at level 20. I am a GENIUS like that…
Anyway, I eventually got myself sent to another village where I get to kill soldiers instead of scorpions. Also, I died for the first time. The death experience seemed mostly inconsequential other than my pet ALSO died, and now I am lonely.
Anyway, I play to stick it out some more in this game but the overall time may end up being less than I had planned. I am already 1/4th of the way through my level cap and, honestly, I am rather bored by the game.
Stay tuned for more updates on World of Warcraft in the future.
