The Video Game Revue

World of WarCraft

As I just mentioned in my previous post, I've finally discovered the joy that is World of WarCraft. Don't get me wrong; I've always known that it was a truly amazing game, and probably the best video game that's ever been made at this point in history. I've just never been as deeply hooked on it as I am right now, and I've learned a lot more about the true nature of its appeal in the past week.

What's really remarkable about WoW is that no game has managed to take the throne from it so far. The game is about three years old now, making it fairly ancient as far as popular video games go, and it has something like 6 million subscribers each paying subscriptions of $15 USD per month. It doesn't take much mental math to see that that means WoW is currenly en route to gross over $100 billion in one year. Given that WoW has already been running for three years and could even continue to be profitable for another three years (Blizzard may be able to keep it going with new expansion packs, like the one coming out this November), it's not hard to see the immense scope of market penetration and profit that we're talking about here. No single video game has ever come anywhere near that kind of prevalence. There's even that well known article where Brian Sullivan (the creator of Age of Empires) suggests that WoW's popularity is responsible for an overall decline in the PC gaming industry--presumably because gamers are so busy playing WoW that they can't be bothered to play anything else these days.

I've also played some Guild Wars, and damn that was a good game. It's very similar to World of WarCraft, and if you didn't know better you could say that it's just as good. A really important bit is that Guild Wars costs only $60 as a one time fee to play; it's a MMORPG without the subscription fees! Of course, it's also not exactly like other MMOs in that you only see other players in cities and the whole rest of the game world is instanced, but it does have PvP and other such WoW-like features. So given that Guild Wars is so much cheaper than WoW and seemingly almost as good, why haven't WoW subscriptions dropped off? Why hasn't another game like Guild Wars come forth to claim the top spot? Why haven't PC gamers gotten sick of WoW and retreated into something like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?

I've been pretty sure all along that the real reason is just that WoW is so fucking good. What I hadn't really thought through before is just why that is. Partly, it is a cultural phenominon--this much I've known for a long while now. World of WarCraft isn't just a game: it's like the current youth generation's woodstock. It's also a game mature enough to appeal to 30-something year old gamers while still being fast and furious enough for those hyperactive 10-14 year olds. There's such a large place carved out for it in our society and such a large community behind the rolling ball already that in that respect it's not surprising for it to have maintained itself for this long.

But there is also a blatantly obvious truth staring me in the face that I've ignored for years and years: Blizzard is one amazing video game company. Part of me has always felt that they were over-rated. I remember loving WarCraft II immensely for about three weeks, at which point I'd finished it and seen every new unit type and promptly got sick of it. After that I only played scarce multiplayer matches over modem (you know--dial-up, from back in the day.) When StarCraft came out my attitude was along the lines of "yes, this is awesome, but it's just WarCraft II in space with some extra features." When Diablo came out, again my attitude was that it was over-rated. Neither Diablo II nor WarCraft III excited me either, although in hindsight I see now that I was far too dismissive of them. The simple fact here is that Blizzard has basically made nothing but awesome games up through WarCraft III, and some of their work has revolutionized the gaming industry. That's not counting World of WarCraft at all.

And today it dawned on me: the real reason that Guild Wars didn't upset WoW, none of SOE's MMORPGs have upset it, and Oblivion or other single-player RPGs haven't upset it, is simply because World of WarCraft has the strength of Blizzard behind its design. All of the greatness that went into designing games like Diablo II and WarCraft III to be so amazingly addictive and balanced to the point where they appeal to total noob players and elite LAN party masters alike was put into World of WarCraft. What great stratetgy games or RPGs has SOE made? None at all. Aside from SOE games and WoW, most other MMORPGs are a lot like "get rich quick" schemes launched by companies that want to cash in on the phenominon. And while Guild Wars is a great game in its own right, the one thing that it doesn't have is a full fucking decade of legend-making quality game design behind it.

Simply put, World of WarCraft was assembled by some kind of amazing RPG design dream team that rivals what you'd get if you crossed the design team from Final Fantasy X with the game design ingenuity of Id Software circa 1995-1996 when they made Quake. What the core creators of World of WarCraft represent is a gathering of creative force and experience besting anything that the video game industry has ever seen before, and it is the sort of local maximum that may not be topped for years to come.

I've heard a lot of gamers gripe in the last several years that the gaming industry has lost a lot of its magic--that things have become too commercial and that the influx of the mainstream has washed away a lot of the flavour that made gaming so great back in the day. I've dealt with this topic before in saying that there are still great games out there--like Disgaea and Shadow of the Colossus--and you simply have to sift through more cruft to get to them these days. I now have a new answer: look at World of WarCraft. This is undeniably the single greatest video game experience ever made, and it was made in this decade, at the height of "the sucking."

And my attitude towards Blizzard has been entirely transformed. I used to think of Blizzard with the same part of my brain that dealt with monstrosities like Eidos and Rockstar Games--popular game companies that have done next to nothing to deserve their fame, and who ultimately squander their day in the sun by demonstrating their incapacity to repeat their success. I now think of Blizzard more along the same lines as Squaresoft (the mid-90s Squaresoft, even, well before the Enix merger) or the developers of Konami games. The employees of Blizzard are fucking heroes, and I've just been too snotty and elitist before to see that. And I don't just love World of WarCraft--I now love WarCraft III, Diablo (which I've barely even played before), StarCraft, and even WarCraft II. Hell, I love WarCraft II now more than on the day that I bought it, and in terms of loving Blizzard, that was certainly the old "high score."

So having had years to reflect on the matter, and having recently gone through a phase of rediscovering old joys like RPGs and anime, I now realise something that was simmering beneath the surface of my being all along: World of WarCraft is my all-time favourite video game, and the first video game that I can proclaim as being superior to Final Fantasy VI without hesitation since FF VI first came out over 10 years ago. It touches on a level of perfection in game design that moves me very deeply.

posted by Parappa @ 6:08 PM