Blizzard sent me their occasional “come back and play pleeeeeeease, so you’ll get hooked and buy more subscription time” email recently, and I decided to take them up on it. Of course, they pitched it as “come take part in the Siege of Orgrimmar“, but since that’s a raider thing, I chose to interpret their email a little bit.
…and really, I know that this sort of “play for a few days for freeee” email is meant to lure back in players who have been out of the game for a while, but it seems to me that isn’t limited to end-game raiders. Especially since it seems like you have to be out of the game for four or more months for them to even extend the offer, and by then… are you really on the cutting edge of raid content any more?
Anyway, I did break down a while back and buy a Collector’s Edition of Mists of Pandaria. (It was something like $35 or so, which netted me the art book, soundtrack and DVD that I really wanted. The other extras were icing on the cake. Oh, and the game expansion was nice. I’ll make a Dwarf Monk at some point.) You see, WoW and I, we have a tenuous relationship. It’s a game I could easily spend a lot of time in, mostly just looking around at the nicely realized world and art.
And yet… what time I do spend in it is torn between “ooh, that is a good screenshot opportunity” and “man, this game design needs work”, with a fair bit of mindless questing and dungeoneering in the murky middle. The combat isn’t terribly engaging most of the time, but sometimes, that’s exactly what I want. Sometimes I want involved, tactically awesome combat, sometimes I just want to zone out for a bit before I go to sleep. It’s a bit like watching a Stargate SG-1 episode I’ve seen before; I can just sort of turn off my brain and enjoy the ride as I coast to a stop at the end of the day. WoW is a game that I just “graze” in, really, and that’s OK. I’m happy to just putter around here and there during those times when I’m in the mood, and I love that my Druid has flight form and the cat form’s stealth so I can poke around in places where I’m not generally supposed to go.
This is also why the subscription model is such an awful fit for me. I don’t binge on the game, or commit to it. I just play it a little bit, and the value calculations of a subscription make that an expensive bit of gaming. For the $15/month I might pay to play, I’d get in maybe 15-20 hours, tops, and even getting that much in would mean not playing any other games or working on Kickstarter (Go, Go, Tinker Deck!) or other art projects. I just don’t do that sort of single-game thing any more. For that same $15, I can buy three Humble Bundles or the like and get hundreds of hours of gaming over the next year or so.
What stood out to me last night, though, wasn’t the value proposition. No, it was the design. My Tauren Druid was tasked with fetching rattan switches for this quest:
And as it happens, there’s a bunch of these switches by a neighboring merchant. That Wowpedia link describes it a bit if you want detail, but I, quite mindlessly, as is my wont when I’m doing these bog-standard fetch quests, just grabbed one of those switches.
And then the merchant started yelling at me.
Immediately, my response was to right click on the guy and see if I could give him back the switch. There were plenty in the neighborhood, and I was sorry I took his.
This quick incident was at once intriguing and disappointing. For once, a character in the game exhibited small signs of an AI that was more than just “be present in the world”. That was awesome. It was a glimmer of what the AI in Everquest Next might get up to (and I hope that they make it interesting; there’s a TON of potential). I thought it delightful that a NPC would chew me out for an admittedly stupid minor theft.
And yet, and yet… I couldn’t react to it. I couldn’t give him back the switch. I couldn’t attack him and kill him for his insolence. (I didn’t think of that option until later, as it’s not a reflexive response for me, but I still couldn’t do it, even if I had wanted to.) I could /bow to him or /laugh, but there wasn’t really interaction there. It was little more than a scripted event that’s just barely beyond what most NPCs do.
Still, it was an NPC reacting to something I did nearby, not something I did directly to them. That was a nice touch, and I’m looking forward to seeing games take that further. There’s a long way to go, and it’s sad to see only the very rudimentary efforts when there’s so much potential, but I choose to see that as a glimmer of hope for these MMO things.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
” I thought it delightful that a NPC would chew me out for an admittedly stupid minor theft.”
Mkay, what was than again with you hating Mr. Resetti? 😉
I’d love to see more such NPCs in the future. maybe you remember my olde post about Sheddle Glossgleam in Dalaran – that kind of stuff is such a highlight in MMOs. which also shows us that it’s way too rare.
and funny how I haven’t ever gotten such comeback mails from Blizz since leaving early Cata…they must know how futile that would be!
On Resetti, yeah, I still don’t like him. It’s less about the character and more about what he does, though. He steals control from you and won’t let you progress without jumping through his hoops. It’s not optional; you have to play his sick little game or you don’t get access to the rest of the Animal Crossing world. I consider that sort of heavy handed design to be a cardinal sin in game design.
If Resetti just popped up and yelled at me as I went about my business, maybe even following me for a while, I would probably get a laugh out of him and think it to be clever design. I’m all for reasonable consequences, and I don’t mind the in-universe reminder that resetting is cheesy, but the “Resetti mechanic” is far too annoying to be a good idea.
Similarly, if that Pandarian vendor rooted/stunned me and I had no control while he ranted, I’d hate it for the same reasons. If he attacked me like any other hostile mob, that would be OK, since I could fight back or run. There’s no such middle ground with Resetti. I can’t even whack him in the head with a butterfly net since I literally can’t control my character while he’s yapping away.
Odd that Blizz didn’t bother to email you. Maybe the spam catcher is running interference. Maybe you should give it a pat on the head. 😉
I’m not quite like many blogging folk, since I’m not burned out on the game. I haven’t spent enough time with it to be. I just call out bad design when I see it. WoW has good and bad parts. *shrug* Like most games.