Related Articles

15 users responded in this post

Subscribe to this post comment rss or trackback url
mygif

I can get you a free 10 day pass….

(Come on, kid, the first one’s free…..)

ReplyReply
mygif

Really? You’ll let me play ten days of a game with no actual way to win for FREE?

Gosh, how do I pass that up…

ReplyReply
mygif

Do you have the same disdain for D&D and that genre? There’s no real win condition there, either. Why do games have to be discrete? Most sandbox style games have no “you won” scenario, save for arbitrary point values or elimination.

“You mean to tell me you’ve been pretending to be a dwarf for the sake of being a dwarf for years now?”

There are lots of good reasons not to play WoW, lack of free time being chief, but don’t hate on it for its premise.

Beyond that, T was sweet and the idea of Shatner as a big cow is somehow valid.

ReplyReply
mygif

What Exar said, plus you do win even if it isn’t in the way you’re thinking. The game’s divided up into many, many, many, many quests that you do for people. So if somebody tells you “go and kill this guy because he is a dick”, and you kill the dick in question, and return to the person who told you to kill him, you “win”, and you get a reward.

Also, you’re only a year older than me so you might remember back when adventure games (such as Space Quest) were big. Those games were all about guiding your character through a story and solving puzzles to figure out how to move on to the next chapter. With WoW it’s pretty much the same thing, as there are a lot of stories in-game

Give you an example. When you arrive in one place, somebody tells you that the son of his chieftain has gone missing and asks you to investigate. He tells you where to start and what to look for. After you look there, there’s another step, and eventually you wind up killing a couple of bad guys and bringing them to a witch doctor so he can bring their heads back to life for you to interrogate. 🙂 Once you find out where the guy is, you have to go and save him, and once he’s back with his family and his tribe safe and sound and everything is back to normal, you can consider that a “win”. Then you can go on and look for other things to do. There are more interesting and difficult quest chains than that one, but even summarizing them would make this comment much too long(er).

There’s also PVP combat, where you win or lose battles or gladiatorial bouts against other players. In the case of the gladiator stuff, people actually form teams with other players to participate in a “season” of arena combat where teams advance or are eliminated over time in a tournament, with the last ones left standing getting an awesome prize.

At the very least, try it before you form an opinion one way or the other. Hell, it wasn’t all that long ago that you were talking about how much you hated people who said that certain comics sucked even though they were not reading said comics and therefore wouldn’t know.

Not that I’m gonna say WoW is all perfect or anything.

For one thing, the reason that so many people spend too much time playing is in part because much of that time is spent either traveling from point A to point B, which is boring and wastes time.

Also, before WoW there was the Warcraft series of RTS games, and in Warcraft III there was a good story in between–and during–missions with some great characters. Now for WoW, Blizzard has decided that it would be awesome for players if they got to fight and kill those same characters, so Blizzard has turned many of them into bosses and made them turn evil so that they need to be taken down. Once they’re dead, that’s the end of their story, meaning that they’re never gonna turn up in a Warcraft IV.

For one guy it goes like this: “…after narrowly escaping death he went back home. Then he went crazy and started doing terrible things that were totally out of character for him, tormenting his people, until finally some nameless nobodies who happened to be real tough came along and killed him. The end.”

You might not be able to fully appreciate how much this sucks for people who like a particular character unless you know the whole story about that character, so I’ll make up an analogy using a character that you do know and like. Let’s say they made a Legion of Super Heroes game that was considered canon by DC. In the game, Brainiac 5 goes crazy and turns into a villain (which has happened before in the comic, so it’s not too far-fetched). So your character, whom you have custom-designed and who doesn’t really have a back-story or anything beyond the fact that it’s you, is supposed to defeat him and kill him. DC just assumes that Brainy has died at the hands of players, makes it canon, and in the next issue of LoSH Brainy isn’t there. He’s dead. He died off-panel, at the hands of…somebody or other.

That would suck hard, wouldn’t it? If you have a good character who is liked or loved by lots of fans, then the character deserves to go down in a blaze of glory against a worthy foe, as opposed to some interchangeable anonymous player character.

ReplyReply
mygif

I think what MGK was trying to get across is that spending ten days killing rats or whatever isn’t really such a great time. (And I don’t know about you, but any good D&D game is marked by having an ending.)

I dig MMOs, provided they have fairly specific types of content, but I can’t do WoW because I can’t get past the elf/dwarf thing. It goes something like this:

If the answer to the question ARE THERE ELVES AND DWARVES IN YOUR MMO? is “yes” or “sometimes” or “possibly” or basically anything but “absolutely not in a million fucking years,” I’m out.

ReplyReply
mygif
mightybaldking said on November 22nd, 2007 at 1:54 pm

“f the answer to the question ARE THERE ELVES AND DWARVES IN YOUR MMO? is “yes” or “sometimes” or “possibly” or basically anything but “absolutely not in a million fucking years,” I’m out.”

That’s racist.

ReplyReply
mygif

You can choose Horde and have fun killing the elves and dwarves, Ken. 🙂 Of course with the last expansion the Horde got its own elves, but you can just try to ignore them.

(Actually this is another beef I have with WoW; you cannot actually kill anybody on your own “side”, nor can you choose what side you’re on. If you pick a troll, then you’re with the Horde; if you pick a human, you’re with the Alliance. No exceptions, sadly. Plus these two sides shouldn’t even be fighting; they united against a common enemy in Warcraft III after fighting one another for decades, and their two leaders wanted to maintain that peace and cooperation. AFAIK they never had a falling out.)

ReplyReply
mygif

I just saw the William Shatner commercial for WOW. The Mr. T. commercial above? 1000 times better, especially with the bitch-slap to the director. -grin-

ReplyReply
mygif

Don’t play WoW because, despite the game being perfectly fun, it will also destroy your life and make you hate other people even more than you do now.

Also, have you seen The Mr. T puts the “T” in “I.T.” vid?

ReplyReply
mygif

MBK: I am perfectly fine with being that kind of racist.

I probably shouldn’t have put that statement on the internet.

Rob: But, the possibility of elves and dwarves is still there. I’ll take my CoX any day of the week; I get jazzed leaping around cityscapes way more than I ever could running across endless fantasy-scapes. Different strokes.

ReplyReply
mygif

Guys — I think sometimes when someone says “I don’t care about X” it doesn’t actually translate to “this is a challenge to you to make me care about X”. Sometimes it really does mean “I don’t care about X”.

I understand the urge to get someone into something you really enjoy, but…if they’re not going to enjoy it, they’re not. No amount of evangelism will change their minds.

ReplyReply
mygif
mightybaldking said on November 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am

“MBK: I am perfectly fine with being that kind of racist.”
I shall file that away and quote it out of context sometime when I need to torpedo your political career.

ReplyReply
mygif

Point taken, Leah, and I’ll stop. In my defense, though, I didn’t take it to mean “I don’t care about X” as much as “I’m not interested in X because X is stupid.” Which made me want to defend X…er, WoW, because I don’t think it’s so stupid.

Don’t play WoW because, despite the game being perfectly fun, it will also destroy your life and make you hate other people even more than you do now.

I don’t know about the game destroying your life, but Charlotte has a point about hating people. There really is an amazing amount of genuine hatred for other players. If somebody harasses you in PVP, in any game, I can understand disliking that individual player. In WoW, it’s almost like prejudice with players often saying that everybody on the other side is an asshole, or that only 12-year-olds pick that side, etc. That is something that I have trouble understanding.

ReplyReply
mygif

I shall file that away and quote it out of context sometime when I need to torpedo your political career.

SNRK! 😀

ReplyReply
mygif

I enjoy the game, but it’s definitely not for all tastes. The 10-day trial is a good way to see whether you’ll enjoy this sort of thing or not, if you haven’t played any other MMOs at least.

ReplyReply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please Note: Comment moderation may be active so there is no need to resubmit your comments