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Hairy Pogonophobia (noun): a fear of beards.I'm not normally one to dabble in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing experience. Even the acronym itself is something of a bastard to express. It’s the biggest, hairiest beard of the hairy beard gaming genres - a rather hirsute achievement indeed. As such, it’s a genre that I’ve largely tried to avoid over the years for several reasons. They're too geeky, too prone to gobbling up what little spare time I have and then there's the whole monthly subscription thing. And as for the subscribers?
So then, after all of these preconceptions, why did I decide to give World of Warcraft a go? Well, it’s the most popular MMORPG out there, with an estimated six million players. I also rather enjoy playing traditional RPG’s, so it really came down to a mixture of curiosity and looking to try out a different genre of gaming. After all, they say that you should try everything once. I downloaded the demo, complete with ten day trial, set up my character, a Paladin, and took my first tentative steps into the world of the MMORPG. I could feel the bum fluff on my chin bristle in expectation.
When you first start out, everything is shiny, new, and exciting. You run around fighting creatures, testing out the abilities and limits of your character, all the time constantly finding new objectives, items, spells, weapons and armour. You see players running around showing off their skills, and the air would constantly be fizzing as spells whistled past your head. I would watch other new players venture into places where I had quickly learned that I was too weak to venture into, and laugh as they ran from danger, leaving a fresh trail of virtual brownness as they fled from impending doom. I quickly grew stronger, ventured out to fresher pastures, and became acquainted with a small corner of what is essentially a vast virtual land. I soon found myself settling into the ways of the game, and learned the structure and mechanics of the game play. After a few days, I reached the level limit allowed by the trial version. I had gone from level one to almost level twenty in the space of a few short days. Fair enough, I had spent rather a lot of time in doing so, having been privy to the amounts of spare time that those who don’t have it crave for, and those who do have it would happily trade in for more exciting things to do. However, I was enjoying the game play (and feeling rather addicted), and moseyed on down the shops to purchase the full version. I could feel my face grow ever fuzzier on the way back home. The demo had previously restricted some of the games features, and I could now take advantage of the auction house and inter-character trading. I went on a buying spree, loading my character with great items, and becoming even more powerful than before. The auction house should really be called the crack house, as it can be such an addictive feature of the game. It could also possibly be the whore house, as it seems to be the location of choice for those with female characters to strip off and dance on the stage (remember what I said before about blokes controlling female characters?). I also joined a guild, and worked through some dungeons and quests with my guild-mates, doing all those things that a herd of beards does when they get together. I brushed the digestive crumbs out of my chin fuzz.
After a while though, I found myself being niggled at and disappointed by the flaws and limitations in the game. You don’t really notice them at first, but I could definitely feel the "Honeymoon Period" coming to an end. I began to find myself frustrated at the lack of speed at which my character was progressing as it took longer and longer to level up. It soon gets to the stage where the whole shebang felt like work rather than play. I tired of the combat, an integral part of any RPG, as there is little skill involved and the enemies become incredibly dull to fight. You just do the same thing again and again. Most enemies from area to area are exactly the same types of creature that you had fought before, but with different names and different colours. It’s like watching a play where there aren’t enough actors, and you can tell it’s just the same person as before, only wearing a different hat. The bosses don’t really help the situation either.. Bosses in games, as a rule, should be spectacular and memorable. They are ideally a testament to the skill and patience of the player, and a substantially varied challenge to the average opponent that you encounter. Even more so, the boss itself should be quite clearly the most imposing figure in any given area. This is not so in WoW. None of the bosses really do anything that could be considered exciting. They’re simply a bit bigger than whatever it was that you were fighting before, and are a couple of levels higher in strength. And that’s your lot. There’s not even any exciting new music to give any atmosphere and excitement to the pinnacle of an arduous quest. You simply sit there and thwack away until the jobs done, like a teenager watching Eurotrash, only with less tissues involved.
The questing element of the game also started to lose its impact as well - it all began to feel somewhat samey. There’s also only so many times that you can do "Kill so many of this type of beastie for me, will ya mate?" or "Go to the shops and bring me 20 B&H, ta luv". It gets even worse when you complete a quest, then head all the way back to the quest-giver for your reward, only to be told the next quest is back where you were before! It feels like going all the way to the supermarket to get bread, taking it home, then being told to go back and buy milk! Let me do it all at the same time you twunts!
However, the final straw for me is that in terms of the world that you occupy, you cannot do anything to change anything about it permanently, ever. You know that evil monster, the scourge of the land that you killed to save all humanity from doom? He’s back again ten minutes later, swaggering along like he’s got an eleven inch cock. Nothing that you achieve in the game world has any real consequence to your surroundings, because if anything like that happened, it would prevent other players from being able to do it as well. The game world has to look exactly the same for everyone, otherwise it would be, well, rather odd really. Imagine what it would be like if in your world, for example, there had a wall demolished by a rampaging enemy, and the person standing next to you had yet to encounter this. You would be able to walk through the vacated space, no problem, but to the other person, you would be walking through solid matter. It’d be like being at Kings Cross station between platforms 9 and 10 at the start of term time at Hogwarts. It all adds up to a tremendous lack of sense of achievement. At first I thought I was just being fussy. I also thought that maybe I’d played it a bit too much all at once, and gave it a break for a few days. Maybe it was just that I was getting itchy from all the beardiness. When I returned to the game, I found that I still felt the same about it. I’d pretty much got everything out of it that I could, and I couldn’t recapture the feeling of fun that I’d first had. I’d also realised that most of my preconceptions about the genre were, in my opinion, true. If I could just dip in and out of the game every once in a while, perhaps it would be a better experience overall, but the monthly cost structure pretty much puts paid to that. Maybe I’ve been trying to blur the line between RPG’s and MMOPRG’s in my mind, and hoping that all of the good aspects of a decent RPG could be transferred online, with the added benefits of the multiplayer functionality. That’s the type of online RPG that I’d really like to play. In reality, despite appearances, they’re very different styles of game. It’s like trying to compare Mario Kart directly to Gran Turismo - you can't really do it. What I do think is possible though, is that the distance between the two can gradually grow smaller over time, although it will require a great deal of ingenuity and a lot of lessons to be learned. I don’t think that World of Warcraft is a bad game, far from it, but I do think that it has too little of what I was really hoping for in it in order to overlook the aspects which I would rather try and brush aside. The game is itself a remarkable achievement, make no mistake, but it’s far from perfect, and has great scope for improvement. My beardiness is now gone (I still can’t grow those bits that link a ‘tache to the rest of my facial hair), and I’m putting my account to rest. Problem is, I was a day too late, and the buggers have only gone and charged me for a whole new month which I do not want. Maybe I’ll start another character, as it’d be pointless just wasting the time I have, and I’ll see if it’s possible to recapture the fun I had when I first started out. I’m not convinced it will be. The Gillette remains on standby, just in case. October 2006
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