A Return To Azeroth

 

 

A return to Azeroth

It had been many long years since I had visited the grandeur that is Stormwind City in the lands of Azeroth. Now, when I say many long years I mean it. I stopped playing World of Warcraft before the Burning Crusade was even talked about.

Did I quite because I was one of the WOW haters; No, not at all. I enjoyed my time in the game and had a couple of character close to the original level cap. There were just other things to do like Playtest tons of other MMOs and games that were coming out.  

Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron’s Call, City of Heroes and many others over the years called to me and I wanted to give them a try.

Now, with Cataclysm immanent and posing some very interesting new twists to the game I decided to boot up my old account, create a couple new characters, and see how things were going.

Being completely honest my expectations were low. I was totally expecting my “raised bar” of graphics and game play to kick in. I was ready to say “UCK” look at the old and clunky engine, ACK, at all the old style kill and fed ex quest runs.

I downloaded the client and leapt in to the old yet still familiar world.

My new little Priest

I am going to think back a little bit and reminisce so bare with me.  WOW, when it launched still held that allure of wonder and exploration. I recall fondly that it was a worthy successor to my old Everquest and even though WOW had stolen many things from the other games I played, including much of the setting (I am a Games Workshop fan from way back) it was great fun.

I remember my first trip into the starter zone, loaded with new players finding their way around and questing, looking for help and guidance from MMO vets that ventured from games such as EQ. I remember being impressed with my first glimpse of Stormwind and Ironforge. I was awestruck by the coolness.

I might be exaggerating a little but needless to say my memories are fond ones. I wanted to see now what kept the appeal going. I had to assume it was the loyalists that have played for years that have kept the game alive and strong.

Now, Fast forward to Sept 26^th 2009 and a desire to revisit the old girl that is WOW. My expectations low and thinking the newbie zone would be completely empty I logged in and created a Priest.

When I entered near the Abbey I fully expected to hear crickets and run around the lonely land doing newbie quests. This was when I first realized how vital and alive WOW still is. The starter zone was FULL of new characters running around. Now, some things from my old experience had changed. Mostly it was the extremely high level characters running around on wondrous mounts. The other thing, and I will say now it will be my only major negative experience, the community was well, Immature at best.

Shouts of noob, loser and many other things were being spewed forth like bad sewage. I also have no idea what being gay has to do with whether or not you are good in a duel or PVP type action. It must have some impact and it must be inherent that being gay impacts your ability to fight other characters or why would you see people shouting that you are a loser gay noob if you lose the duel.

I digress but that is a MAJOR turn off to me and something I usually encounter in FTP games and PVP centric FFA servers with other games like Age of Conan, Battlefield Heroes, etc. Which means, as much as I like PVP I tend to wander away from FFA servers, etc because I really don’t like the level of immaturity that goes along it, as well as the ignorant and potentially hurtful name calling.  As I said, I digress and this could be a whole topic of its own.

Back in Azeroth I found  that, while the graphics were simple and light in processing requirements, textures, etc. they were still pleasing to the eye.  After all those years the game did not visually offend me in anyway.

Blizzard did a great job at creating a style that shines through and makes the game world enjoyable even though the graphics capability is subpar compared to MMOs of today. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are outdated and don’t compare with games like Age of Conan, Champions, or Aion but they don’t have to either.

Finding that I still found the world visually stimulating and that the newbie zones were full of people I was thrilled. I could tell by some of the banter that many of these players were fairly new to Azeroth. How cool is that? I wish every newbie zone in a major MMO was that  full so many years after launch.

At any rate I ventured out from the abbey, whistling and smiling as I ran to kill off some kobolds. I came upon a glade near and old mine with a camp site in it. Much to my horror it was littered with corpses. That of the kobolds I was sent to kill. Oh well, a product of the amount of players in the area. I await the respawn, as did the 15 to 20 other people.

Aha, the battle was on. I will get to them before you many, many others. I thought to myself as I prepped up my Smite spell.  

Still looking pretty darn good

OK…Yawn…15 kobolds later I did find something that good old WOW was lagging in. I had become a bit spoiled by some of the new combat action in recent releases. At the lowest end was Aion with new combos and more active looking combat. It gives you “some” extra choices at least. At the higher end is AOC, and Champions which have active combat that you have to pay attention too, especially AOC. I thought next of Fallen Earth which left me wishing it was a better game than I experienced in beta, but actually had FPS style combat. Harkening back to Star Wars Galaxies, even its combat felt a little more active.

Even with this glaring backwards glance to combat of old with cool down timers and all I still found that an hour passed and I was on my way to town. Yippie, I was not as bored from combat as I thought I would be.  The race for new powers to buy and better gear was still within me and WOW fulfills that need to achieve even today.

While I know it would be earth shattering to change this if WOW could fast forward their combat system to something more like today it would continue to be a real gem, even if it did nothing else to change.

It has apparently undergone some graphics updates as it did look better to me when I cranked up the settings to max. . That might just be my PC though. Hard to say and I have honestly not followed WOW enough to know if there were any official graphical updates to the existing zones so far.

I found myself playing for a couple of hours straight without noticing. WOW has still got the goods as far as gaming enjoyment goes and to boot, it is about to undergo one of the coolest changes in an MMO. It is about to get blasted up. If you don’t mind the simple graphical style (or even enjoy it) and you are OK with the quest standard set by this very game then you should still be able to thoroughly enjoy World of Warcraft. You will even be able to find groups in the low level areas of the game to adventure with.

Hats off to you Blizzard, while WOW may not be as ageless and timeless as Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones, or the grand tale of Lord of the Rings, it still has what it takes to dominate the market share in MMO gaming.

The only thing that will unseat this giant is time. I sincerely believe that no matter how good a game is no single MMO will dethrone the giant. With Cataclysm on the horizon I think it will remain King of the Mountain for a while.

I am off now to play some more Champions but I find my mouse cursor floating over the artistic W of the WOW launcher on my desktop. We shall see.