Digitally Disillusioned

While I did find a few moments to dabble in World of Warcraft after the monstrously long two hour install process, day two of this endeavor was scheduled to be the first real test of what World of Warcraft had to offer. I’d arranged to meet my friend who donated his 10 day guest pass for a few hours of play - the wife, you see, is out of town on business.

We met online at the appointed time, and set about trying to establish a voice connection over AIM, which of course sent me straight into my router configuration settings. Having just installed open source firmware on my Linksys WRT54G, I was dismayed to find out that port forwarding did many things, all completely unrelated to the forwarding of ports. This may have been a product of this software having two tabs that advertise the exact same features - perhaps I was using the wrong one. So I set up both. This made the router crash, and for 15 minutes it refused to recognize the internet existed.

So 30 minutes behind schedule and still devoid of the ability to communicate by voice, my adventure into Azeroth continued.

Forced to communicate by text, I immediately noticed how unfriendly the default text chat window is. While I quickly intuited the shortcut keys to initiate chat, all messages - be they global, idle NPC chatter, or party missives - were crammed into one little box where I consistently missed my friend yelling at me. While not devoid of realism - I’ve been known to be oblivious to communication in the real world - I really wished that there were better defaults for chatting. I hear the UI in this game is very customizable. I should look into that if I stick with it for the long haul.

We began prowling the steppes of Coldridge Valley, filled with all manner of pseudo-kobolds and the junior troll-kin varsity squad. Aside from the starting town, there were a few shacks scattered in the wilderness, and between fits of killing things we collected and completed a number of elementary quests. He had picked up a dwarven paladin, and his brawn and healing ability made a fine match with my ability to shoot little black balls of demonic energy from afar. Indeed, this whole evening was almost entirely devoid of challenge, but perhaps this introductory area is simply intended to teach one the controls.

And boy-oh-boy are the controls elegant. Wander around using WASD and right click an enemy to indicate it as a target. If in proximity you’ll immediately begin a melee attack, otherwise you can use the number keys to select a spell to execute. If you begin the combat ranged, once the enemey gets close enough your character will automatically start stabbing. With the mouse wheel and the right mouse button held you have a full degree of camera control as well. While I’m sure juggling all the various abilities that will eventually be available will become a bit of a task, at the start World of Warcraft is a painfully simple game to play. Think Diablo II but you don’t have to keep clicking.

The other thing this game has in spades is pleasant visuals. Sure, its two years old, but the over-chunky and cartoonish aesthetic used in the art creates a practically timeless image. Oh, sure, it could be done fancier, but Blizzard has really put the effort where the effort needed to be to construct the sort of visual landscape that doesn’t make one think twice about the graphics.

I mentioned last time how you can walk through players. Indeed, you can also walk through enemies. Again I can see why they did it, but it was damn annoying the first time a wolf walked through me enough for the game to consider him behind me and I had to spin before my spell - which required my target to be in the front - could fire.

So, a few hours passed, and I’d killed a lot of stuff, and collected a lot of totally useless garbage. I mean, this is the kind of stuff you wouldn’t even throw a garage sale to get rid of. You’d just throw it in the garbage to spare some poor pathetic sot the indignity of paying a quarter for your filthy leavings. A few of the quests had semi-useful rewards, which was good as for a warlock there was absolutely nothing useful available in the shops. Never did I anticipate getting so excited about a pair of linen pants.

As a warlock, Sven Bjornik is entitled to a “pet”, which seems to me to be an awfully strange shorthand for a demonic summon from the nether realms. But I guess if your job involved the invocation of unholy powers to drag unnatural aberrations into servitude you might come up with a nicer sounding nickname too, so “pet” it is. Tonight I received every warlock’s first pet, the Imp. My friend couldn’t stop chuckling about how it pranced daintily after me through the forest, and for something so little he certainly offered substantial wallop. The ability to have two sources of magical fireballs dramatically offset the fact that I was doing embarrassing little damage with my lousy dagger.

We eventually made our way through a tunnel which every NPC within proximity warned us was extremely perilous - it wasn’t - and made it to the first waypoint on the road to what I presume is fame and glory - Kharanos. This is where we decided to call it a night, but not before witnessing a motley collection of low level characters acting like fools in the local bar. I proceeded to jump on the nearest table and /dance my little gnomish heart out. When in Rome, as they say.

So, day two is done. A series of reflections percolate to the surface. First, I had fun. It was fun to play with my friend, and fun to explore the world Blizzard created. Second, I did the same god damned thing over and over and over for three hours. It wasn’t a very interesting thing, and I wasn’t very well rewarded for it. It certainly beat watching paint dry, and while I appreciate that I am experiencing nothing of the community and collaborative possibilities people swear games like this offer, taken for what I experienced this was really nothing to write home about.

But I’m pretty damn curious what the next corner in the road is going to bring before my little gnomish feet. And maybe thats all I really needed to be at this point.