Ok guys next item on the shopping list...The eyebrow of a goat.
I’m an avid gamer, I have been for as long as I can remember, but I will admit that there have been some areas of the pixel planets that I have always avoided because…well because of the stigma.I’m talking about the RPG world; you know the online realms of dragons, warriors and warlocks.
Now, don’t shoot me! Ok? Don’t shoot me with your dark magic, because I never actually called anyone a geek, and I didn’t say that the only kinds of people who play those games are the kind who sit in their bedrooms at 2 o’clock in the morning, their acne speckled faces glowing from the light of a computer screen, reflected in their tape wrapped, bottle glasses.
I didn’t say that but if we’re honest here (and let’s be honest here) I didn’t have to did I? If someone was to mention the likes of World of Warcraft, probably the leading game of its kind, then we tend to think of that kid in his room don’t we? We shouldn’t but we do. So that’s the reason why these online RPG games had never grabbed me before, and maybe there was some active avoidance on my part because I was afraid of the implications.
Having said that, I had been a fan of Warcraft as a bog standard strategy game, along with the likes of Red Alert and other battle games based on different time periods (I’m still waiting for one based in biblical times). I always liked the idea of slowly building an army, the biggest army, an immovable offensive force of power and then knocking on the enemy door and smiling when they open it to find my horde waiting to engulf them, and engulf they would.
What I’m trying to say is, there’s a bit of geek in all of us, it’s just that some of us are a tad less brave about who knows it, and it’s only until recently that I realised what I was missing.
It was about a month ago that my brother announced to me his intention to teleport into the World of Warcraft, and I must say I remained sceptical, but I thought, ‘Well, here is a chance for me to see if the hype is true. I’ll let him do the work of the downloading, installing and figuring everything out, and then I’ll kick him off and have a go myself.’
So he did his part and had a bit of a tinker on it and sure enough he was soon converted to one of the masses of gamers in awe of the magic of the vast landscapes and communities housed within this online dimension. Within an hour or so I was there myself.
There’s something about games like this, when executed as well as World of Warcraft, that you can’t help but get excited about. I suppose it all comes back to that escapism that we all as humans crave once or twice a week. When the television gives you nothing but bad news, when the clouds keep following you around, when you have to walk past the pick-and-mix section once again longing to plunge an open hand into the chocolate mice box, grab, and run (but you know you won’t because…well because the chocolate mice would melt in your hand and you’ve nothing to wipe them on except your jeans, but also because you know that this grim society that we live in just wouldn’t accept it).
When all that starts to drag us down, where do we go? We go to our cinemas, our theatres, our DVDs or, for the not so fortunate, our grandparents for those tales of courage and adventure, where we can leave our world and, just for a little while, move to a place where we can steal those mice and yes, we can get away with it! My point is that whilst films may give us windows into other worlds and games may allow us to have very limited interaction with a section of those worlds, the online RPGs allow us to recreate ourselves in a perfect image and live and explore in a new world which is just as vast as ours and where anything can be made possible.
‘But surely Tom’ I hear you cry, ‘Surely this raises all sort of ethical and philosophical questions as to social degradation, the limits of reality and the very essence of life itself?’ and I would say yes, yes it does…But this is neither the time nor the place, so keep reading and stop being a kill joy!
The World of Warcraft brings its signature artwork and rendering that is now synonymous with the strategy series, but rather than command ranks from the skies like some divine…commander (poor I know), you control a single representative of yourself.
Whether you wish to be a warrior Orc or a Human mage, they’re all there with many more combinations. You are then dropped into the online world, part of your chosen ranks, working from the bottom up, slowly but surely seeking and taking on quests in order to boost those ever so precious experience points that we have grown to love.
Obviously it’s all very fun roaming round, chatting to other onliners, and taking on bandits or wolves in little Lord of the Rings style teams but it wasn’t this that got me hooked, it wasn’t this that made me sit for hours on end, missing meals and forgetting to drink to the point where I contracted a water infection and had to be admitted to hospital.
The most astounding thing about WoW is the world itself. It won’t hit you until you use the map feature and with continuous clicks of the mouse zoom further and further out until you realise that, in fact, you aren’t in some playing field or typical sandbox game level, you’re roaming around a planet, not only with towns and villages miles apart, not only with its own roads and subway systems, but with counties, rivers, seas and countries.
The scale of the World of Warcraft propels it beyond the typical considerations of graphics and game play as they are for once rendered secondary simply to the achievement of this world, which lives and breathes twenty four hours a day without a single loading screen.
Despite how it may seem, however, this doesn’t have a ‘happily ever after’ ending, because after a day or two of play I realised something. Each day I would find a computer controlled character that could set me up with a quest; they would say they needed some wolf meat or a bear tongue or something weird like that (I didn’t like to ask, and besides they couldn’t answer even if I did). So sure enough I would go, searching for wolves, find some, click on one and let my character go to work.
Upon completing one quest, I’d come away with a bit more experience (that sweet sweet experience) and go looking for another quest. I’d find someone who needed to get rid of some trouble making bandits and so I would go off, find the bandits, click on them and…Wait a second, I’m sure I was doing this with wolves five minutes ago, and bandits again before that, and penguins before that (only joking, no penguins). Someone’s playing me for a fool here!
You see, that’s the fundamental problem with WoW and in fact, as I was to learn, a problem with many of the RPGs it’s actually a very repetitive formula of ‘find quest, find enemy, click enemy, fight enemy’. I mean sure there are different enemies but it’s essentially the same quest and it’s the same combat engine of click a button and leave it up to the characters to take turns swinging at each other.
Upon further research, further day long downloads and further log in frustrations I found that Star Wars Galaxies shared the same patterns, the only bonus being that you could control each shot or each swing. Still, if it wasn’t for the interaction with other human players and the remarkable online realms, the actual game play of these games wouldn’t even be worth reviewing.
Whilst you can never complete Wow in order to give it a replay-ability rating, to be honest, replay-ability technically runs out once you have completed your first quest. True, it can get quite exciting when there are rumblings that an Orc has made it onto the human island and everyone legs it to the keep to defend queen and country but this rarely happens. In fact, upon hearing that there was an Orc island, I was actually quite determined to go over there, kick some arse and come home a hero. So after, miles of walking (having to take the long way around in order to avoid level 20 creatures that I clearly wasn’t ready for at level 5) I reached the sea and started to swim.
After about half an hour of pressing forward, my finger began to lose its feeling and so I set up a complex weighted system that would keep the button suppressed and went to get a sandwich and some water (the doctor said I had to drink more water). I came back to find that once you are far out enough at sea tiredness becomes a factor and my warrior guy had drowned. I wasn’t going to walk all that way to try again.
So I find these RPG games somewhat lacklustre in some pretty vital areas, but that’s not to say there isn’t potential. There is an absolutely huge amount of potential, especially with the evolution of online gaming on our next gen consoles.
I firmly believe that we will soon be playing in online worlds as vast as the World of Warcraft with characters that have as much dynamic ability as Sam Fisher or Solid Snake. And that may not be all: Of course to have a truly interactive online world we need a wide range of people logging in to do a wide range of things rather than each playing as essentially the same protagonist in the same game.
What if we didn’t have a separate online world for each game, but rather one world for all games? Picture it; a multitude of gaming engines all in one online sphere, where people take a bus to the football stadium to play FIFA or walk to the gym to play Fight Night. ‘Who’s that shifty looking guy down in the subway?’ they might think whilst eyeing up a guy in a trench coat nursing a gun, “Perhaps he’s playing the latest ‘stealth-em up’’, better make sure I don’t get in his line of fire if something goes off.
It’s a crazy thought I know, but what an experience, and the way things are looking at the moment, we may well be on the right path.
By Tom Pakinkis
