Here are some more of my WoW experiences. Why am I subjecting you all to this? Because I can! That’s why. But no worries – this will end one way or another. I suspect that I will run out of things to write about this game in a day or two. :P
I just figured out the daylight cycle in WoW is roughly equivalent to the daylight cycle in the real world. This sucks balls, because I tend to play in the evenings around the same time every day. Once I get out of work, drive home and grab something to eat is usually 7pm and it’s already fucking dark outside. This means that the only time I can see how WoW looks in daytime is on weekends and holidays. That’s depressing – if I wanted play a game that takes place only at night, I would dust off and finish Vampire the Masquerade. In fact this perpetual night is kinda depressing and gloomy after a while. I guess if you are playing undead the night setting is fine, but for the rest of us.. I bet the Thunderbluff area is beautiful in daylight. I mean look at the colors on my character choice screen:
They are pretty – the yellows and browns are much more cheerful and soothing than the hazy blues I’ve been seeing for the past two days. Maybe if I stay up long enough on the weekend I can see the the sunrise. :P
Does WoW have time zones btw? Where do I go to catch a glimpse of sunlight after 8pm EST?
This time around I had plenty opportunities to explore being a ghost. It turns out you can’t pass through solid objects. :( I kinda hoped for this feature – it would make getting around much faster if you could pass through houses as a ghost. But no dice. There is one thing you can do though. Walk on water! How awesome is that?
It does help to get back to your body faster. I used this ability extensively this time around. I’m getting better at managing aggro but sometimes the enemies still gang up on me. Bad part about being Tauren sized character is that almost every enemy can outrun you. Escaping from combat is very hard and usually ends in death if I wasn’t chugging health potions. I was watching a Blood Elf player grinding around in the nearby area and I was envious – he would essentially running circles around the enemies never getting hit.
Here is a curious statistic – while the player population Bloodhoof and Thunderbloof is predominantly Tauren, I saw disproportionate amount of Blood Elves wandering around. I also saw some orcs (which seems about right, since their lands are over in the Barrens a short walk away from Bloodhoof) , few undead but no trolls. I wonder why is that. Perhaps their area is far away or something. :P
What I like about WoW as opposed to GW is the fact that most of the mission areas are not instanced. This means you can actually meet people “on the road” and form ad-hock teams on the fly. In GW I would have to stand in the middle of the common area and yell LFG for like 20 minutes. Of course you usually ended up with to many people, but no healer and had to make sure everyone choose the right 8 skills for the mission and remind everyone to equip the resurrection sigil. In WoW you see bunch of people killing stuff in your mission area, you run up and help them – in worst case scenario, you will at least benefit from friendly buffs, and you can use other players as shields if you are low on HP. In best case you can invite/get invited to the group and get a chunk of the gold and experience gained by the other group members.
It makes meeting people and helping each other more natural, and less forced. For example, if join a group for a 4 man instance mission in GW you are expected to pull your weight. If you don’t then you are hindering the team. The problem is that every mission is an instance. In WoW you can sometimes luck out and find a group of people who just happen to be doing the same quest, or don’t mind grinding in your quest area – the relationship you develop is much more casual.
To bad the quests are so repetitive. Most of them pretty much revolve around killing a certain number of critters of some kind. I’m not sure if there is such a thing as main storyline of interlinked quests that leads you somewhere. It does seem like some of the missions are designed to lead you from one location to another discovering new terrain and meeting new people. But the world seems to be pretty sable, and there seems to be no life changing scripted events like Searing of Ascalon in Guild Wars.
Some of this stuff is kinda interesting – for example one of the quests revolves around beating up some Dwarfs who decided to mine in the nearby area. Another pits you against the workers of Venture Company which seems to be some sort of mining/trading operation run by members of different races including goblins, ogres, dwarfs an humans. So the “good” alliance races are portrayed in less than favorable light. They are invaders encroaching on
Tauren territory, polluting and stealing natural resources. Just like Eldarion said in the comments to my previous post – no race is truly good or evil in this game. Everyone seems to have their own motivations, goals and etc.
It is a really rich universe, and so far I’ve been enjoying exploring it. Tomorrow, if I don’t end up doing something else I will write about my crazy sight seeing and exploration trip.
[tags]wow, world of warcraft, warcraft, mmo[/tags]
[quote post=”2202″]Bad part about being Tauren sized character is that almost every enemy can outrun you.[/quote]
Actually, Tauren run as fast or slow as any other race. The shorter races (look at that gnome fly!) appear to run faster simply because their legs are shorter and their strides are quicker. Travel speed is exactly the same. Most mobs move faster than players, some more than others. Blizzard has made it clear that they want players to always think twice before aggroing mobs, so they made it slightly difficult to retreat, amongst other things that you’ll discover.
[quote post=”2202″]It makes meeting people and helping each other more natural, and less forced.[/quote]
Hope you are meeting nice people on your quests. I started on an RP realm and people were generally extremely friendly and polite. Contrary to popular belief, people don’t talk in RP speak 24/7. In fact, RP realms are not very different from PvE realms, just with vastly more appropriate character names (I *HATE* stupid names like Burnyoass in fantasy games), less immature and rude teenagers, less hardcore raiders, more grown-ups who appreciate more in the game than just IMA PWN U. The real role-player is not at all in-your-face and many people, like myself, don’t participate much. I eventually transferred to a PvE realm to experience hardcore end-game raiding, and definitely noticed the slightly less mature and friendly atmosphere. I hear PvP realms are the worst in terms of maturity. Hope your PvE realm is treating you well.
[quote post=”2202″]But the world seems to be pretty sable, and there seems to be no life changing scripted events like Searing of Ascalon in Guild Wars.[/quote]
Haven’t played any MMO other than WoW so I don’t have anything to compare with. There aren’t any life-changing events for every character like irreversibly specializing into a certain sub-class, but there are plenty of epic quests and scripted events that enable you to take part in historic events, or help move the Warcraft story forward, or gain access to a dungeon, or the friendship of a faction, etc. However, the common complaint is that these scripted events apply to you personally, but don’t really change anything in the world. Ex. if you slay Big Bad Dragon and save a village, the Big Bag Dragon respawns so that other players can kill it again.
There are true world-changing events that apply to the world and all the characters in WoW, but these only happen every few months with content patches. (The Burning Crusade is obviously the most obvious and grand example of a world-changing event.) Blizzard is promising speedier development of new content with content patches and hopefully annual expansion packs though.
Re: life changing events – in Guild Wars the starting area is called pre-searing Ascalon. It’s actually pretty big and I haven’t personally reached every available corner but it’s only a fraction of the full map. Once you reach a certain event, you can speak with an appropriate NPC to take part in a multi part instanced quest that takes you away from this area. In the meantime it gets raided and literally scorched with powerful destrictive magic.
When you come back from the quest you find a desolated wasteland full of dangerous monsters. The beautiful city where you started is just a pile of rocks, the quaint farms are smoking ruins. So you get to re-discover the places you knew before anew.
Of course the downside is that once you transition to the post-searing Ascalon you can’t go back – if your friend joins a game, you have to wait for them to get to the searing event before you can meet up. But it does make for hell of a story.
GW does have a very strong narrative going on, and there is a thread of main story quests that quickly moves you towards the end of the game in somewhat linear manner. If you team up with a group bent on knocking out the story missions (they give you the most XP) as fast as possible, you may end up missing out on parts of the story. On the other hand, it’s hard to deviate from the linear path – and it’s the same for every character.
Nice thing in WoW is that every race starts in their own unique area so you get a slightly different starting experience with every character.
But yeah, like you said – the missions in WoW sometimes seem futile – for example I kill all the Venture Co. dudes polluting the wells, sanctify the wells with the magical totems, only to see the polluters respawn automatically 10 minutes later. :(
[quote post=”2202″]When you come back from the quest you find a desolated wasteland full of dangerous monsters. The beautiful city where you started is just a pile of rocks, the quaint farms are smoking ruins. So you get to re-discover the places you knew before anew.[/quote]
Ooo that’s neat! That actually sounds like something Blizzard should learn from. Not only is it a good narrative technique and hook, it also allows for a safe “newbie” area that is insulated from the rest of the world.
It sounds like GW does things a bit differently from WoW though (and more similar to Diablo). In WoW, one can level up and beat the game in whatever manner one chooses. Some people follow the quest stories and complete every quest under the sun. Some people wander around casually and complete quests when possible. Some people grind from zone to zone without questing. Some people painstakingly plan out optimal questing circuits to complete the most number of quests in the least amount of time. Some people level up by running instances constantly. Some people level up solely through turning in PvP tokens. I even read about some guy who leveled up to level 70 without stepping foot in Outlands (60-70 is supposed to be done in the expansion world Outlands).
But do try to follow the suggestion of the friendly NPCs. They will give you hints of when you should move on (you have outgrown the current zone), and where you should go (zones that are appropriate for your level). There are also many quest chains that lead you all over the map.
hehe, I kinda wonder if it’s possible to do what they did in the Warcraft-based South Park episode when they needed to get to a high level without going out into the main part of the world (there was a super-high level jerk running around killing everyone, even the admin/NPC characters)
They just killed boars in the forests of the newbie area for weeks on end :lol:
@Matt` – I don’t think it is. I read somewhere that after you reach a certain level you really don’t get any experience for killing the low level foes.
That’s correct. When a mob’s name appears grey to you, it yields no experience. I believe the person I mentioned was able to level to 70 without stepping foot in Outlands because he grinded on level 61 or 62 Elite mobs in Azeroth that remained green till 70. Still, that must have been incredibly tedious.
Luke, what server are you playing on?
@Matt McCullough – Undermine, I think. :)
Ah damn, I play on Blackdragon Flight. I’m not sure what the restrictions on trial accounts are these days, but I could definitely help you out if you had a char on my server.
By the way, as far as I remember, yes, you can change time zone. You just need to go to a server in Europe, for instance.
As far as i know you cannot play on the european realms from America – the same that we in Europe cannot play on american servers. For whatever reason Blizzard separated the continents.
@Matt McCullough – I think I can create a new character on a different server no problem. Not sure about transferring the character from one server to another. I’ll check it out next time I log in. :)
@Kavalor and @Alphast – well, one reason not to play on an european server would be the lag. The eu realms are probably physically located in europe which means they would obviously seem slower to US users than local ones.
That’s of course a practical reason. Not sure why Blizzard would want to enforce this. Perhaps it has something to do with the migrations of professional gold miners?