After many years of playing other games (SWG, COH, Vanguard, GW), I finally in March or so, decided to try out World of Warcraft. I got the trial, which went well enough that I bought the game and expansion (Burning Crusade) in a single boxed set. One of my oldest and dearest friends plays WOW, and after some months of trying to convince him to at least try some other game without success, I decided to try joining him in WOW. Below I will post my review of the game to this point.
I will state up front, and this is a huge caveat, that I have only gotten one character past level 20 (and one is just at 20), and even that one is only 25. I have not grouped up much, because my friends in game are all level 70. I have not raided, not done any PVP, and only done a couple of dungeon instances. So, my experience is mostly soloing in the wide world, doing quests as given for my level by the quest-givers, except for those that require groups (since I haven’t grouped much). I personally don’t enjoy “pickup groups”, so I don’t do them. Keep these facts in mind as you read my review, and it’ll be a fair one as far as it goes.
Graphics 8/10
The graphics are reasonably good in WOW. They are certainly nothing spectacular, but given the hardware (low) requirements, they are better than I would have expected. There is a definite “style” to it — most features are greatly exagerated rather than being realistic as they would be in a game like Vanguard. For example, if one stands on the steps of some of the blood elf buildings, the “banister” (which is normally designed to be used as a support for walking up stairs, and therefore in a realistic game would be approximately waist high) is well over the tallest character’s head. I have seen characters with weapons that (to scale) appear to be about 12 feet long and 6 feet wide. Such weapons are clearly unrealistic, but they fit within the style of the game. I will admit that this unrealistic/exaggerated stile is not really to my taste, but it doesn’t come into play frequently enough to bother me all that much. Graphical elements such as spell and visual effects are reasonably well done, again, within the scope of the game’s hardware requirements. Graphically and SFX-wise, this game is certainly no City of Heroes (which came out the same year, incidentally)… but it’s quite good even by today’s (4+ year later) standards.
Character Design/Development – 5/10
Character design is really where WOW falls down on its face rather badly. Visually, all characters of a given race and gender are basically identical except for some minor variations in hair style or color. For example, one tauren is more or less indistinguishable from another, especially once they have all their gear and armor on. This is in contrast to other games, just as old if not older, such as Star Wars Galaxies, where you could control every detail of your character’s face and body, or City of Heroes, where you don’t have that sort of fine control but, for example, there are something like 100 different facial styles to choose from. In WOW once you choose your race and class, you are going look the same as any other character of the same race/class (wear the same kind of armor, have the same appearance, and so on). And so, appearance-wise, all characters of a given type are nearly the same.
Another important element to character design, however, is the statistical or “game mechanic” side, and WOW suffers here as well. For a given class, your entire character progression for stats, as well as for all skills and spells, is pre-determined. When you level up, stat increases are automatic. Skills unlock every 2 levels, and the unlocks are the same for everyone. As there is no limit (outside of being unable to afford them, which I’ve not yet seen happen to level 25) to how many skills you can learn at a given level (of those that have unlocked), there is no reason not to learn them, which is the only semblance of freedom that one has. In other words, let’s say at level 10, the skill “Holy Warrior” (made up as an example) unlocks for your paladin. It unlocks for every paladin at that level, and other than you trying to be silly, there’s no reason not to take it (it’s cheap to buy, and even if you don’t use it, it does not harm you to possess the skill).
The only real way that any variety at all can be introduced into a character is via the “Talent” system. This seems wide-open at first, with each class able to choose talents from three different specializations. For example, Paladins can choose from the “Holy” specialization, which is about healing people and fighting undead, or the “Protection” specialization, which is shields and auras and such for tanking, or the “Retribution” specialization, which is all about doing damage (in COH we’d call it “scranking”). You get 1 point per level to level 70, or about 61 total points, so there seems to be some freedom here. However, if you look carefully at the talent progression and how one buys them and how they unlock other talents, you will quickly realize that for most classes and most play styles, the only real option here is to choose one and pour all, or most, of your talents into it. For example, for soloing, most people recommend a build that puts 48 or more points into Retribution, which allows you to buy almost all of the Retribution tree, and leaves no room to do more than mildly dabble in the other trees. Building a “20/20/20″ Paladin, while allowed in the game, really wouldn’t be very effective in the upper level game, so although it’s possible, no one does it.
The talent system is the real savior for WOW in this category, at least as far as it goes. If this were not here, all characters of a given race/class would be 100% identical. As it is, they’re about 75% the same anyway… but at least that’s an improvement. I’d give WOW a 1/10 in this category if not for talents. As it is, I think even 4/10 is pushing it.
Game system 6/10
WOW’s game system is one of the harder ones to rate. By “game system,” I mean things like how combat works in terms of tactics, button clicks, grouping mechanics, and the like, as well as how things like quests, mining, skinning, crafting, and the economy work. In terms of actual performance, WOW’s game system is bug free and rock solid. On the other hand, it’s not very interesting or engaging, at least to me. WOW seems to be built around the common, but really frustrating (to me) game design philosophy that “work = fun”. I think the problem here is the simplicity of the game engine. For example, combat is exceedingly simple and dull in WOW. You pretty much pick one guy about your level, and fight him one on one, mostly letting your character auto-attack, while throwing a “special” (skill, spell, talent) in every once in a while. For example, as my paladin, I start a seal on the target that makes him take double holy damage, then put a seal on myself that adds holy damage to my attacks. That takes 3 button presses. Then I sit there and watch my character auto-attack while I do nothing until the target dies. If I happen to get into trouble for some reason, I have 2 possible buttons I can click (realistically) — the Stun attack, which I can do once a minute, or the “break seal” move which will cancel the holy damage buff and do instant holy damage (lots of it) to the target. Then I can re-up the seal or something. There are some other skills and moves available, though not many, but there’s no reason to use any of them, as they all result in an overall decrease in DPS (which is the only thing that matters in a straight one-on-one combat). This is fun for about 30 minutes, and then becomes boring.
Similarly, quests are mind-numbingly monotonous in most cases. When they tell you to “go collect 10 bear paws”, you might thing “Well, 10 bears, no big deal.” But you’d be wrong… a given bear only drops a “paw” (despite the fact that most bears have four of them while alive) maybe 10% of the time. So “Bring me 10 bear paws” really means “kill 100 bears.” As each one takes roughly a minute to find, kill, etc, this is a good hour and a half long quest, at least if one does it solo. Also, the drop rates are low enough with some of these that a few times I’ve not been sure I was killing the right thing, because the quest item didn’t drop until I had nailed 8 or 10 of them. The very first time this happened I actually abandoned the quest thinking I was either wrong about the target, or bugged (the second day I think, so at a low level). I figured it out by luck shortly thereafter, where I was asked to get harpy claws or something, the FIRST guy dropped a claw, and then 10 or 12 in a row didn’t, then another dropped… and I finally realized that there must be a 5-25% chance (varying by mob/quest) of getting the needed drop… I then of course went back, picked up the abandoned quest, and started that one over.
By the same token, mining, skinning, and especially crafting are all insanely tedious. I spent several hours one time collecting copper to do crafting with, which let me make a small number of craftable items, none of which could be sold at auction, or used by me (I was too high a level to bother with them)… so it’s just grinding throw-away stuff. The skill-up process for crafting and gathering is so entirely boring and objectionable (and only soloable), that I just gave up on it entirely after a few weeks. Only Vanguard’s system is worse (and not by much). Skinning is not too horrible but all the other gathering professions are an exercise in tedium.
Finally, the main feature of WOW that most people seem to like is the “instance.” The problem here is that instances require a level range and group size, and if you don’t have that, you’re stuck. One can, of course, sit there in global chat for an hour shouting “LFG!” but as I refuse to waste my time doing that, I’m mostly left unable to do dungeons. I joined a guild of a friend of mine, but they are all level 70, and of course, there is no “sidekick” feature in WOW the way there is in City of Heroes (after 4 years you’d think they’d notice this excellent system and copy it, as they’ve copied most of their other systems from other games). This means of course, that I can’t realistically play through an instance with them. Oh sure, they can come into a low level instance and wipe the whole map for me so I can get a quest done, but I don’t see much of a point to doing that. By refusing to let instances scale the way theys do (to party size and even level within tolerances) in COH, WOW has made it so I basically can’t do instances. On the other hand, even if I did them, the ones I’ve been in have seemed like little more than collections of enemy gangs tougher than, but otherwise not much different from, the ones you’d find on the outside. The bad guys are “elites” inside the dungeon, so that means you can’t solo them (unless you’re way above their level), and have to be in a group against them. I’m sure when in a 5-man team in an instanced dungeon, the combat is much more interesting thant it would be solo. But outside of this one feature, the rest of the game system is an exercise in tedium. I won’t even mention how you can’t get a mount until level 40, and even when you do, travel time is still a huge time sink.
In the end I don’t consider the WOW game system to be anything special. It’s mostly a bunch of grinding, and I don’t see any real innovation here. Combat is slow and plodding compared to games like COH or the launch version of SWG.
Role-Playing – N/R
I can’t rate roleplaying in WOW, mostly because I am not on a roleplaying server. This probably would surprise most people, but the problem is that a good friend of mine (and several “friends-in-law” — i.e., his friends, who have now become friends of mine by association in other games) is on a non-RP server, in a non-RP guild. I’d much rather try my hand at RPing, although to be honest I don’t really find the WOW world all that interersting to RP about. But in any case, since I have not tried it, I cannot rate it. I did hop onto an RP server for a while at one point just to see, and although I saw lots of folks around, nobody seemed to be RPing… but it’s not a big enough sampling for me to say for sure.
Performance 10/10
WOW is one of the best-performing games I have seen. My system is way more powerful than it needs, and even COH doesn’t lag on my system (and COH is a major performance hog), but even given that, WOW is excellent with performance. Lag is rarely evident even with lots of players, NPCs, and PVP going on, and I can easily multi-task with WOW running plus a virus scan going on and so forth.
Sound 9/10
Sound and music are quite good in WOW. Their sound effects for spells are good, and when they bother to put a voice-over into the game (which is not very often) the voices are usually well done. Animals sound realistic, monsters sound monsterish, weapons and spell effects sound good. The music is quite nice and I like how each area’s “theme” is enhanced by having the music match it. This is one of WOW’s better features.
User Interface – 5/10
The WOW interface is hard to rate, mainly because it can be modified (”modded”) and the popularity of the game has led to thousands of “modders” with different add-ons to the game. When played “vanilla,” without any mods at all, the user interface, to be blunt, sucks eggs. In fact I would say that WOW, for all the trillions of dollars and billions of users (hyperbole) they have, has the worst user interface I’ve ever seen in any MMORPG — and that’s saying something, given the incompetent manner in which the Vanguard UI was programmed. WOW’s is not, of course, buggy like Vanguard’s, but it’s entirely feature-less. Even simple, basic functions like being able to use the mouse to move elements of the UI around, such as moving your hotbar or your character skills screen, are not avaiable in the distributed version of the game.
The lack of waypoints or any meaningful way to track and organize quests is also rather surprising, again given the age of the game, and the amount of money they have to throw at it if they so desired. Here again, perhaps they wanted to leave this to the modding community, but this seems like it is something that is required for minimal in-game functionality. The idea that they can expect you to remember where “Jacob Runesword” is perhaps days after you were given the quest, is just preposterous. This is something the game should have done at least at the base level. COH, for example, has a very primitive Waypointing system, but it’s enough to find where you’re going and find your way back.
Now, the flip side of all this is that, along with a very basic (almost ameteurish) interface, they provided users with the ability to modify it, as I said above. And a lot of users have come along and taken care of most of these issues. TomTom + Lightheaded deals with quest and NPC tracking very effectively. Cartographer lets you add map notes. Auctioneer lets you scan and track the economy. There are other mods that I haven’t installed yet for tracking tradeskills and so forth. Many of these things are what I would consider “base” functionality, and the fact that, again, even the mess that is Vanguard managed to do most of these things even at its questionable launch, let alone now, makes me wonder why WOW did not bother to include some of these things. A friend suggested that the very moddability is why WOW did not include them, and perhaps that’s the case…. But the idea that every time a damn patch is uploaded for the main game, I have to go to three different websites and track down about 12 different add-ons just to give the game the same functionality that Vanguard, COH, SWG, and GW all had up front, is not a point in WOW’s favor.
Almost all the points here come from the fact that it is moddable, and that the modders have done a sweet job on covering all the holes left by the WOW development team. If I were to rate the vanialla UI as it comes out of the box, frankly I’d give ‘em a 0.
Community – 7/10
The WOW community is huge and hard to rate. Many people have accused it of being a more immature community, but I’m not sure if I concur. There certainly is a huge amount of immature behavior on the WOW forums (both official and unofficial). On the other hand, all those modders out there who make, maintain, and offer for free all of those excellent mods like Auctioneer, Lightheaded, TomTom, Cartographer, TitanPanel, and so forth, are members of the community who are constructive, helpful, and doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts. Overall I’d say the WOW community is about average.
Fun – 5/10
My biggest problem with WOW is that it is just plain not very much fun. A friend of mine who tried WOW for the free month and then re-upped several times hoping it would be better each time put it well, saying, “Anytime I went back previously, it wasn’t a day or so before I started getting the feeling that the whole thing is one magnificently-produced timesink and not immediately fun enough for me to keep playing.” This is pretty much how I feel about WOW. It’s a nicely produced (other than the UI) game that is lovingly crafted to be a very high quality time sink, but not to be actually any fun. Oh, I’m sure the developers think it’s fun, and lots of players think it’s fun… but I really don’t.
I do recognize that what many people consider to be the “best parts of WOW” — Raids, PvP tournaments, and 5-man dungeon instances, are things I haven’t done much (or at all)… Though of course, other than the 5-man instances, those things really are not available to me until I hit level 70 anyway. The unfortunate decision was made long ago in WOW that basically “the real fun begins at level cap”, and most people just “grind” through levels 1-69 to get to the fun. I’m not a fan of doing “work” to get to the fun, and as a result, I’m probably not going to be long for WOW at this point.
One might ask why I play it at all… the answer is my friends (mentioned above). It’s worth a tedious game a few hours a week to interact with them. At one point I entertained the notion of one day hitting level 70 and playing with them, but it’s quite clear that I don’t have the stomach to do all the insane grinding that WOW requires in order to get to 70 (and by the time I get there, level cap will be raised to 80!).
Overall – 7/10
World of Warcraft is an “OK” game for an MMORPG… It does what most of the others do, and does those things without bugs, though also without a lot of extra bells and whistles (e.g., lame character creation, lame UI). It’s far too much work and too little fun for my taste, but milage will vary according to what people like. I know lots of people who are utterly addicted to it (whereas I have to force myself to log in a few hours a week in the hopes of interacting with one of my dearest friends — and would not log in at all but for him).
