Insanity Edition
Dragon Age was brought to a state of completion last week, although that statement infers a sense of finality that is not strictly accurate. I brought the game to bore on an ending, one of several I’m told, and then I set about with another one of my six characters to try again. I won’t lie and say that there isn’t a strong element of achievement hunting that motivates me and I won’t further the charade by suggesting that I won’t rest until all achievements have been acquired. Suffice to say that having watched the epic 25-minute credits roll at the end of the first playthrough, I wasn’t prepared to say that the game held no further appeal to me.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend after I had wrapped it up discussing the things that BioWare does right and it occurs to me that Knights of the Old Republic really nailed the formula from a combat mechanic perspective with the whole pause/queue process and since then the tweaks they’ve implemented haven’t been what I’d call improvements. Dragon Age is probably the best, but the Combat Tactics are poor substitutes for strategic turn-based control (especially of NPCs) and the single-slot action queue is ridiculously restrictive. I suppose they’re trying to speed up the combat and make it feel more fluid and dynamic but honestly I spent more time in Dragon Age fussing in the menu screens than I did with KotOR simply because I had to do it incessantly to babysit characters whose Combat Tactics weren’t working as intended and because some functions needed repetitive interaction to make them useful (even basic actions like “drink a health potion when you’re dying” which is ridiculous).
Maybe I’m on a Fantasy kick, maybe it’s because of last week’s Game of the Decade discussion, maybe it’s just my inner bargain-hunter, but for some reason I decided to take advantage of some free trial period offers and reinstall World of Warcraft this past week. At first, once the tortuous three-day re-installation procedure was at last complete and I had showered until the water ran cold in an attempt to cleanse my body of that wicked ordeal, I logged in with my main character and awoke, as it were, right where I had left off back in March. The problem was quickly apparent: When you drift away from a game over the course of several weeks and then abruptly drop it off your radar for nine months, during which you go so far as to have a child, you forget what the heck was going on. I wandered around aimlessly, shocked that after dumping hours and hours into the game earlier this very year I couldn’t remember basic commands much less what all this stuff was in my inventory or which quest I was working on.
After about a half hour of this I logged off that character and returned later thinking about how I had installed the game again to try out the free Burning Crusade sample so instead of getting back onto my main I created a new character, a Draenei priest. I wandered around that starting zone for a little while but starting zones aren’t terribly interesting to me and typify my definition of the phrase “grind.” But I gave it about an hour and then logged out. The next day I came back and hit my main again, determined to at least sort out what I would do next if I decided to start playing again in earnest. So after a bit of wandering I ended up back in Orgrimmar and happened to upgrade my mount to a Swift version at the urging of an in-game letter from an NPC and finally decided to head up to Azshara as it had my nearest incomplete quest. Of course when I got there I realized I didn’t know where the quest was exactly and all my carefully assembled Add-Ons were lost in the uninstall. So instead of getting involved in a frustrating hunt I decided to just wander around a kill mobs for a little while (mostly Scalebanes), taking advantage of my XP bonus from being in a protracted resting state.
Curiously, I found myself actually having a really good time.
It shouldn’t be surprising because at its core WoW is really an enjoyable game, but I think what happens is that through its incredible density it becomes sort of overwhelming and it becomes very easy to lose your perspective in the swirl of professions and quests and guilds and grinding and instancing and auctioning. A friend of mine said when I first started playing almost a year ago “It’s a really good game if you can play it casually.” He said this with a marked note of sadness in his voice. The implication was that he wasn’t capable of having a casual approach and later he clarified that he had remorse for the amount of his life he had sunken into the game. More so than any other game I’ve played WoW encourages players to dissect the systems within it so that they cease to become enjoyable aspects of a rich game but they become routes to conquest in a struggle against a sinister foe. I’m not sure whether it’s the punishing in-game economy or just the endless gameplay fueled by regular infusions of new content but somehow I’ve never seen a game broken down so thoroughly into formulas and shortest paths.
I’m not even saying this from some lofty position as if I were somehow immune to it: I fell full on into the trap and I believe it is only my carefully nurtured cheapskate tendencies that allowed me to not tumble all the way through. Well that and the fact that I can’t stand being “stuck” in any game for very long without needing a lengthy reprieve. But that’s why the game is both so overwhelmingly compelling to a lot of people and why I gave it up after such a relatively short period of time. I’m pretty sure it isn’t in Blizzard’s best interest to encourage a more casual style of play; the more people who have an obsessive approach to the game the fewer people who are willing to give up their $15/month subscriptions. As for me, I’m happy to oblige Blizzard with the occasional toe dip into the game but my thin wallet will continue to prevent me from being a regular subscriber. Simply put I don’t play any single game enough to justify an annual expense of $180, not counting the price for expansion content.