Wednesday, June 21, 2006

A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

Also known as an MMORPG to us techie types. Go ahead and try to pronounce that fast three times, I dare you. I finally splurged when I saw World of Warcraft (WoW) on sale for $29 and decided to try one of these out.

I’ve been playing it for a week or so and I have to say it has its attractions. First of all it looks absolutely gorgeous and the music is pretty good too. You can get goose bumps when you first enter the city of Stormwind, the music flares up to a crescendo and the bold green words “Stormwind, Alliance Territory” come up on the screen as you’re running across the bridge and passing mammoth statues of the heroes of legend. Peter Jackson would be proud.

There are two sides, the Alliance and the Horde, eight races and a dozen or so classes to pick from so there’s quite a bit of variation and replay ability.

The game is heavily quest oriented so it’s not entirely running around and mindlessly killing stuff although there is plenty of that. So far there’s enough quirkiness and variation to hold my interest but we’ll see how it goes from here. With literally hundreds of players running around it doesn’t have the cozy, close knit community feeling of a Neverwinter Nights server, but it’s ok.

I don’t see the kind of character variation you have in the D&D oriented games, like Neverwinter Nights (maybe I should have waited for D&D Online to go on sale), but it’s passable enough. I started with a Warrior, figuring that would be the easiest to play until I caught on to the controls, but I didn’t really care for it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were lots of controls and options you could exercise during a fight, rather than just watching and praying, but somehow the Warrior character seemed limited. After bringing him up to level 17 I parked him in the inn in Stormwind and generated a Paladin.

Oh that was much better. The Paladin, closer to a D&D Cleric than a D&D Paladin, had lots of fun options you could exercise and I’ve managed to get him up to level 18. I don’t know if it was simply that I knew the game a little better, but the Paladin seemed much more powerful than the Warrior.

The game has the standard Bank but also an Auction House, where you can post equipment for others to bid on, and a Postal Service that you can use to send notes or even articles of equipment to other characters (including other characters of your own). I sent three care packages to a mage character I fired up just to try out the postal service. The only restriction I’ve found is you can’t send stuff to characters on the other side.

The thing appears HUGE and I suspect that I’ve only seen a tiny part of the game world. You just CANNOT run between places all the time, it’s way too far, so they have a griffin riding service that provides some spectacular views as, for a small fee, you wing your way from place to place.

To be honest my computer is a bit outdated and underpowered for this game. I could use more memory, a better graphics accelerator and maybe a faster main CPU but this only becomes apparent occasionally; 99% of the time the game runs fine and I can pretty much predict when it’s going to start stuttering and even then it’s usually only temporary.

I haven’t really done any partying but there appear to be a number of areas that are almost dedicated to cooperative activity. I have died a few times. Actually, a lot more than a few, the game is pretty tough for a solo player.

The way the XP and quests are set up, you are almost always pushing the edge in the creatures you’re fighting. For example, you get zero XP for monsters more than five levels below you so you can’t level up by killing wimps. I’ve found that I can usually take the current quest monsters one on one, and often even two on one, but if they gang up on you, you’re toast. The way you typically die is you’re fighting one gnoll and two more jump you from behind. Luckily, if you trudge back, as a ghost, from the nearest cemetery, where you’re placed when you have an unfortunate event, to retrieve your body, there’s no penalty (other than the time lost) for doing something fatal.

My one complaint is they just released an upgrade and I had a hell of a time downloading it. Usually this is pretty painless, but for some bizarre reason Blizzard chose a method which required me to modify my firewall settings before it would work.

I find the economics of this whole phenomena interesting as well. It was an EBGames advertisement, offering WoW for $29 that made me decide to try it out but I happened to be in Best Buy first and the game was $49. Now they claim to have sold over 5 million copies of this thing. Yes Virginia, 5 million. Assuming an average retail price of $40, that would be something like $200 million split between the developer/publisher and the retailer. You get one month of play with the purchase and after that it’s $15 a month. It’s unlikely that all 5 million are still subscribing, but there seem to be quite a few servers available so let’s say that one in ten purchasers are still subscribing, that would be 500,000 times $15 = $7.5 million a month or $90 million a year. Not a bad chunk of change and to further milk it, there’s a major expansion planned for sometime later this year which I think is going to sell for $39.

But then again Neverwinter Nights 2 is supposed to be available in September and I sort of promised I would help develop a module for it and host it on my server in place of the current NWN module. Oh well, we’ll see what happens. My scripting and area design skills are rusty anyway.

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