Lost in a World of Warcraft
Conquering the Burning Crusade
Inside the Darkcrest Enclave in Zangarmarsh, home to the tribes of naga.
Tuesday, Jan. 23
HOW WOW RESEMBLES NEW JERSEY
Flying over the verdant plains of Nagrand in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
So I stopped in a bar in last Thursday during one of the brief breaks in my push to Level 70 in The Burning Crusade, the new expansion for World of Warcraft, and this guy asked me about the scale of the game's virtual world.
"So I get there's a few thousand people playing at the same time and you can see them and talk to them,'' he said over his beer. "But how big is it? Like how long would it take you to cross on foot? What would you see?"
I told him: "Well, on the ground it could take you a couple hours to get across each continent. And there's all kinds of different terrain like mountains, jungles, plains. There are big cities and then there are dungeons and lots of dangerous places, but also some beautiful ones."
He took a sip of his beer and thought it over.
"OK, I get it,'' he said. "So it's kind of like New Jersey."
That got a laugh at the bar (which was in Brooklyn). But it also got me thinking, not about New Jersey but about how a successful video game, more than other storytelling media, must be based on an engaging, cohesive setting. And that got me thinking that in trying to figure out why World of Warcraft has pulled in more than 8 million subscribers, nothing has been more important than the fact that the world itself is the star of the game.
Here's what I mean. In stories there are two basic elements: a setting and characters. In most linear media - books, movies, TV shows, theater - both elements are under the control of the creator: the author or director. And while creating a believable setting is obviously important in a novel or film, the stories tend to be told through the characters, the actors and fictional people who become stars.
Games are also about stories, but the key difference is that in a game the consumer is creating his or her own narrative, not following a tale that has been written ahead of time. And so the essence of great game design is in creating a virtual environment that players want to spend within making their own stories.
Think about something as simple as Pac-Man or Tetris. Those games are 100 percent setting; you the player provide all the character action. Think about the millions of young girls playing The Sims - a safe virtual environment for experimenting with family dynamics - or the millions of young men playing Grand Theft Auto - a safe virtual environment for experimenting with guns. In all of these games, the real genius has been not in great characters or fabulous graphics but in providing settings that draw in players like an inhabitant.
That dynamic is even more important in online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and may be the prime reason why the game is set to take in more than $1 billion this year. People who play such games can end up spending hundreds or thousands of hours in them over many years for two reasons: the other real people inside them and the overall virtual environment they occupy. The real people, once again, aren't under the game creators' control (more about that tomorrow). So the environment itself has to be fun to be in, great to look at and rewarding to explore.
And providing such an environment is the one thing that World of Warcraft does better than any other game. As I have spent most of the last week playing The Burning Crusade I have been impressed over and over again at how richly textured the world is that the team at Blizzard Entertainment has created and how much care they clearly lavished on making sure it is almost impossible to get bored. Everywhere you turn is a new spot to discover, a new monster to gawk at, a new problem in need of solving.
In fact I know players who spent most of their first few days with the game not killing monsters, not completing quests, but simply riding around taking in the landscape and at least some of the seemingly-innumerable nooks and crannies there are to explore.
There is so much to do and so much to see across Outland that I did nothing but follow quest chains around the continent all the way from Level 60 to Level 70 and I still barely touched one of the game's high-end zones. In most games, players often feel like they've run out of content. That was almost never a problem in the original World of Warcraft and certainly won't be one for expansion players any time soon.
Geographically, my journey across Outland began in Hellfire Peninsula, a scarred wasteland filled with demons and crazed orcs. From there I journeyed west into marshy Zangarmarsh, where I confronted tribes of naga, and then into Terokkar Forest. After slaying the wild beasts on the savannah of Nagrand I journeyed north into the high Blade's Edge Mountains and took on the ogres there. And then it was into the otherworldly, floating Netherstorm, home to nether dragons and ethereal princes.
Next I'll hop on my gryphon and head on south to Shadowmoon Valley. The air might be green and there might be demons everywhere, but hey, I'll just tell myself I'm in New Jersey.
Monday, Jan. 22
ACHIEVING THE TRIUMPANT 'DING' AT LEVEL 70
Every few years it seems there is a report out of South Korea, where gaming is practically a national religion, about some young man who sat down to play an online PC game, didn't get up for a few days, and literally keeled over dead.
To my knowledge there haven't been any episodes like that in the United States – yet – but I can now say I understand how those young men felt. Almost.
As I wrote on Friday, last week the first expansion pack for World of Warcraft, the world's biggest online game, hit shelves and screens around the world. The big draw in massively-multiplayer online games like WOW is that they bring together thousands of people into one shared real-time virtual world. And so when a new expansion arrives, providing a bunch of new areas to explore, a natural land rush mentality can emerge among some players as they compete to conquer the new content.
In the new World of Warcraft expansion, called The Burning Crusade, that has been the race to level 70. Since the original game was released in 2004, characters have been capped in power at an arbitrary level 60. The main attraction in TBC is that it raises the level cap to 70 and provides a host of powerful benefits who players who reach that plateau – first among them the ability to fly, or at least to buy a flying mount like a gryphon.
Each of WOW's hundreds of servers, or copies of the game world, is home to thousands of players. (The game has more than 8 million subscribers total.) And so on each server – within each community - the big question on many players' lips as the expansion approached was "Who will be the first to level 70?", "Who will be the first player flying around?"
I am proud to report that on my server, it was me. After racking up about 76 hours of playtime in a little more than 4.5 days of real time, shortly after 4 pm Saturday my warlock became the first character to hit level 70 on my server. Unhealthy? Probably. Exhilarating? Definitely.
I'll report Tuesday about some of what I've seen in the game world and on Wednesday about the social dynamics of the race and about the hundreds of players I've heard from as a now-(in)famous citizen of my server. But today I'll share a bit about how I did it.
So the expansion opened for business at midnight last Tuesday (late Monday night). I was the first player on my server through the Dark Portal and into the new continent of Outland because I had received my game discs a couple of days early, but at that moment hundreds of stores opened their midnight madness events and thousands of gamers grabbed their copies and rushed home.From inside the game it was fascinating to watch. At 12:02 a.m. Tuesday, and for 20 minutes, I had all of Hellfire Peninsula (the first region in Outland) to myself. By 1:02 there were 24 people in the expansion. By 1:30 I had maxed out my Hellfire list at 49 people and by the morning there appeared to be hundreds of players on the peninsula alone.
I played for almost 24 hours and went to bed the first time late Tuesday night after hitting level 63. I didn't get back to the game for about 15 hours, my longest break of the week.
I picked up early Wednesday afternoon in corrupted Terokkar Forest and hit 64 around 9:30 that night, second to a mage in my guild we'll call Goldie. I went out for a brief cocktail (for the muscle relaxation), played straight through Wednesday night and hit 65 around 7:15 Thursday morning, a server first.
A sane person would have gone to sleep then, but I made some breakfast and pushed through all day Thursday, hitting 66 in the verdant plains of Nagrand around 5 p.m. Thursday and getting about two-thirds of the way through that level before going to sleep for the second and last time around midnight.
I logged on around 11am Friday and felt fear. When I had gone to bed the night before, the only other level 66 was my friend Goldie. But now there were two other 66's as well, competition in the form of a hunter and a druid from another guild.
It was disconcerting, but I knew they must have played all night to catch up with Goldie and me. Hopefully, they would have to sleep some time.
In the jagged Blade's Edge Mountains I recorded level 67 early Friday afternoon, about 10 minutes after Goldie, but the big shock came just a couple hours later when one of our competitors, the hunter, also hit 67. They were only a long lunch behind!
Even worse, my friend Goldie had to log off to go to work. I had mostly played solo as I leveled up, completing quests as I went, but Goldie had been a good source of friendly competition and we could chat we as we explored the new zones at the same time.
Still, I hit level 68 around 10:30 Friday night. And then, providence. First the hunter then the druid logged off. "Guess they're human after all," I cackled at my monitor as I crossed the bridge into the floating archipelago of Netherstorm.
The big moment of decision came around 7 a.m. Saturday, when I reached level 69. The competition was still offline. I had been awake almost 24 hours. There was only one level to go, the longest. Do I go to sleep or do I put the hammer down?
As a gamer might put it, sleep ftl (for the lose, as opposed to ftw, which means for the win). I stayed up and reached level 70 later Saturday afternoon, while the competition was still at level 68.
In World of Warcraft, players refer to a level-up as "ding" after the triumphant sound the game plays when you do it. When I dinged 70 outside the Wildhammer Stronghold in demon-infested Shadowmoon Valley, it was one of the best sounds I've heard in a while. When I bought my epic purple gryphon and took to the skies for the first time, after being landbound for thousands of hours of play-time, it felt like a real accomplishment.
Of course, there is a toll. Even a day later my neck is killing me. My back is sore. My hands are claws and my eyes look like something out of the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo.
The next World of Warcraft expansion probably won't be out for a couple of years. By then I may have recovered.
Check Out My Other Blogs (click on blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
posted by Joe Paris at Monday, January 22, 2007
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