World Of Warcraft: Diagnosis: Video Game Intimacy Disorder.

Why would I risk letting those painful lessons of MMORPG love and loss come back to haunt me? Why would I let myself rebound into feelings of elevated love, obsession, and hope all over again for a new woman like World of Warcraft? Is it because of her intoxicating graphical beauty? Her intelligent gameplay? Or perhaps the promise of exploring her massive content? Doh. Well, actually its because I could either wallow in the misery and despair of irksome online gaming memories, or I could get up off my keister, dust off my panties and embrace trust. Blizzard has a pretty impressive track record for consistently banging out best-selling smash hits, a rarity in the gaming industry. In effect, Blizzard is an anomaly. Everything they touch has turned to gold, and if history repeats itself, so will World of Warcraft. Look at the meticulously painstaking lengths their design teams have taken (especially compared to their competition) to deliver bold, aesthetically pleasing (and highly stylized) graphics, truer-than-life animations, and powerful gameplay that inflicts intense emotional responses: curiosity, fear, panic, euphoria, etc. This is substantial feature that is often lacking in today's releases. I have literally experienced fear when I 'walk' into an area of a dungeon of Blizzard design and I see my screen fill up with minions of evil who have but one agenda: the end of me! The physiological change begins and my adrenal gland secretes a chemical that gives my index finger superhuman speed! A few short moments later, a blurred CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK and my task is done, having only escaped with a hairline on my health meter.

I start to breathe again.

Although my heart was pumping at a seemingly espresso-induced tempo, and the emotional strain may have cost me three years off of the end of my life, I gained a SWEET magic sword!

Man, tendonitis never felt so good!*

While reading the Battle.net forums lately, there have been some people out there who seem to have forgotten the gargantuan strides Blizzard has made in their commitment to the player (you!) to make immersive games that are just plain FUN to play and to replay, like the one I just described. Far too often online game communities allow themselves to collectively slip into a negative downward spiral by letting opinions of their previous experiences with game companies' products and customer service incinerate their hopes for a game as promising as World of Warcraft. Many have been burned before and some have taken a suspicious and/or cynical stance on just about every little feature that raises any question at all and have come to expect the absolute worst. What's even more wretched is that some of the readers who have not shared in these same experiences are reading post after post about how Game Company X screwed over other players. By reading all these negative rants, a few newcomers begin to assume other people's opinions as if they were their own, without really knowing firsthand by playing said game for themselves. Ranting is easy. Anyone can do it and most people have, but few have considered how they are affecting subjective personalities. I am no exception and write from my own intimate acquaintance with this form of subjectivity. Our personalities and outlooks on just about everything in life are made up of a mixture of experiences, teaching, and influence of others close to us in day-to-day life. The same can be said of the community forums we frequent, and they do have a subjective effect on our opinions of things, if we are not discerning enough. We all tend to become like the people and influences that we are around most, and it is too effortless to click into a forum and repetitiously view threads here and there promoting players' opinions of the impending doom to come for all of us. Eventually, if we are 'around' it long enough, we may find ourselves starting to adhere to that style of sinking thinking. Most recently, I was browsing several message boards in which just about every thread I read about the recent release, Star Wars Galaxies, expressed the same general criticism: that the game was just another big, hot, steamy pile of MMORPG.

Was it?

I went out and bought the game, played for awhile and ultimately cancelled my subscription after my free month had expired. I felt that there were several excellent, well-thought out ideas and gameplay features within the game, and the user interface was pretty slick. This was contradictory to what I had heard. Why did I cancel? I have a very aggressive playstyle (PvP) and I felt SWG was just a little too 'peaceful' for my taste. But that's just me. You should form YOUR own opinion based on your own experience. SWG has a lot to offer to many people. What I found out was that while I too cancelled my SWG account as some other players had, I did not necessarily agree with the general consensus. Today, SWG is nearing the 275,000 subscriber mark and is growing. It has the second largest player population next to Everquest. They must be doing something right. Unfortunately, the people who are really enjoying the game are playing the game and may not be spending as much time on message boards balancing out the negative comments.

Keep that in mind with World of Warcraft's community too! While, comparing WoW to SWG is like comparing apples to oranges, the same basic point can be made about the attitude of the community. Stay positive! Tremendous thought, planning, and design goes into each of Blizzard's masterpieces and WoW is not any different. The people on their development staff are hardcore gamers. They have played and are currently playing every MMORPG out there! (Blizzard team staff mentioned this to me at E3 2003). They know what works and what does not from their own experiences and have been reading the official forums regularly to stay in touch with their fans concerns and opinions. Granted, like the rest of us, they have been finding themselves having to wade through the overly prevalent and obtrusive off topic posts. Yes, World of Warcraft is designed around some core gameplay elements that did not originate with WoW (leveling, questing, and some other generic online gaming features), however, their take on gaming is to improve what needs improving and to keep what has proven to remain a significant source of FUN!

The topic of WoW's gameplay originality has given the naysayers on the Battle.net forums something to 'work' with, but consider what a realistic design basis this is. For example: there are a lot of prospective WoW players who have come from games like Dark Age of Camelot. Realm vs. Realm combat in DAoC was very fun, addictive, and at times heart-pounding, but it was not all it could have been. Some people felt there was a lack of purpose in its RvR. Others felt RvR basically became a zerg-fest (a no-contest attack where large groups of players 'blitzkrieged' single players and small groups). Still more complained that the style of fighting was linear and short-lived, with the outcome between similar level players being based on whoever got the first hit in or based on what class the individual player was ( mage > melee > rogue > mage ). Despite all these maladies, DAoC is often voted as having some of the best player conflict gameplay systems to date, usually, because of a lack of better PvP/RvR in its competition. Several online gamers (including myself) would be thrilled to see this style of fighting incorporated into WoW, but with significant improvements. Let's face it. Just about every MMORPG we have played has seriously lacked substance at some point or another, and by emulating key features, Blizzard can focus primarily on what we have been demanding: content! Most of WoW's predecessors have fallen into the pitfall of building everything from scratch. WoW's design team learned from early MMORPG mistakes and did not have to spend months or even years creating a skeleton from the ground up for their game. They have been focusing on fleshing out that skeleton with the real muscle, which is what fans of MMORPG's have been screaming for, for years!

As it stands, World of Warcraft has already taken that direction, which is reflected in a recent article in Computer Gaming World featuring Blizzard's new venture. The WoW community of fans has been all atwitter as its overclocked synapses process all the new answers featured in the October issue of CGW's ten-page preview at 40,000,000.5 MHz.

It was a shark frenzy.

Basically, the feature imposed even more new questions to its readers based on those answers. Immediately, praise of the new information was heard among the optimists, cries of death, doom, and despair among the pessimists, and the unblinking indifference of those who wished to wait and see what gaps the final release will fill between fact and fiction. In case you have not heard yet, CGW revealed some pretty interesting exclusives about WoW, summarized in this link by Craftstar.

As you can imagine, the speculative decryption of each and every miniscule morsel of the above information has commenced, and what is fascinating to me, is that these teeny, tiny pieces of data (when compared to the grand scope of the overall project), at times, somehow sprout colossal assumptions about the direction and ultimate fate of Blizzard's World. Some of these people are forgetting that its Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Give the developers some credit and trust them to make WoW to be insanely FUN before suggesting 'fixes!' I mean, sure many of the players have significant experience playing online games and have some great ideas and input, but it doesn't make them proficient in conceptualizing, developing, producing, or the completion of a mammoth project spanning 4-5 years with the collective thought and execution of a very experienced professional design & development team. Most of the suggestions I have seen on the Battle.net forums that originated as a complaint based on the most recent CGW news, have usually been requests by an individual to implement a fragmented 'solution'; a rough sketch of what looks like it might be a tree on a scrap of paper on a drafting table, but not a framed painting of a beautiful mountain forest hanging on a wall painted by Blizzard. Don't get me wrong, fragments of ideas can be fleshed out into something really amazing (Four years ago, World of Warcraft was nothing more than fragments of ideas) and some fans have offered up great ideas, but isn't it a little too early to complain and grumble? We haven't even playtested the beta yet!

Still, it's no wonder that many of you out there are suspicious and bitter of newcomers to the genre, having also loved and lost when it came to MMORPG's. Game Company X has ripped out your game-loving heart, thrown it to the floor still beating, and stomped on it with a spiky stiletto heel. Meanwhile, she walks away, snickering at her own genius.

Snickering, because you actually paid her to treat you this way!

The door opens, however, and a new woman enters. Being a creature of habit, you cannot help but be compelled to her. You still remain suspicious at first, cringing in terror in the corner and expecting more abuse. Her eyes soon gaze upon your perforated and broken heart lying on the floor. She stoops down, compassionately picks it up, and begins to dust it off. She starts to tell you the things you always wanted to hear: that she has over 100 dungeons, that you can play with her Gnomes, that her user interface has a simple learning curve!

She takes you in her arms and you begin to swoon while she speaks, her words fading into the background, because despite her rich, vibrant sound quality, you just can't get over her intoxicating graphical beauty, her intelligent gameplay....

....and what about that massive content?!

WoW.

What a woman.

Written by Mark "juBBjuBB" Medianowsky

E-mail juBBjuBB at: juBBjuBB@Warcry.com

* Tendonitis-inducing 'clickfests' will not be as much of a concern with World of Warcraft since it will not be so 'clicky' as some of their previous titles have been, as most of the functions and shortcuts are found on the keyboard or within the user interface.