Warcraft’s constant cycle of rewards helps explain the game’s extreme addictiveness. The color-coding also illustrates the game’s defining ethos: the lowest common denominator.
To reach everyone from casual players to obsessives, Warcraft strips its controls down to a handful of choices and tactics. Winning a fight turns into a basic numbers game. If you’re bigger, you’ll win.
If you’re smaller—well, you should start running. As a consequence of Warcraft’s simplemindedness, you end up doing the same thing the same way hundreds of times. Somebody asks you to go to some field, find some monsters, and kill them. After you’re done, you walk back and pick up your reward—only to hear that even bigger monsters wait around the corner. You’re a rat, and the game keeps sending you to look for bigger pellets.
You could argue that the gameplay is supposed to be repetitive and simple. The real point of Warcraft is to interact with the other players—to socialize in the chat channels, team up for quests, and run each other down on the battlefields.
Teamwork and competition do make the game much more fun, but everybody’s stuck in the same grind. With little at stake, your quests feel less like Frodo and Sam’s trip to Mordor than a night shift at Hardee’s.
Every new level brings more of the same, and fatigue sets in the 10th time you’ve run through the same high-level dungeon, or when you’re trying to crack level 38 but can’t bring yourself to kill another goddamn swamp jaguar. In other words, you start to feel what designer and critic Mike Sellers dubbed “WoW-nnui.”
Warcraft also limits your choices when it comes to gameplay. The citizens of Warcraft are like migrant workers—they get their marching orders, and they follow them to the letter.
Players never face moral quandaries and never get to choose between an upstanding act and an evil one. Instead of just barging through every problem with a sword and a club, Warcraft should let players negotiate their way through conflicts.
If someone pays you to run an errand, do you follow through honestly or steal their money? Should you betray one faction to win favor with another—and what happens if you pick the wrong side? Other commercial role-playing games, like the best-selling Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, are full of these types of decisions. It’s time Warcraft gets with the program.
Read more at Slate
To reach everyone from casual players to obsessives, Warcraft strips its controls down to a handful of choices and tactics. Winning a fight turns into a basic numbers game. If you’re bigger, you’ll win.
If you’re smaller—well, you should start running. As a consequence of Warcraft’s simplemindedness, you end up doing the same thing the same way hundreds of times. Somebody asks you to go to some field, find some monsters, and kill them. After you’re done, you walk back and pick up your reward—only to hear that even bigger monsters wait around the corner. You’re a rat, and the game keeps sending you to look for bigger pellets.
You could argue that the gameplay is supposed to be repetitive and simple. The real point of Warcraft is to interact with the other players—to socialize in the chat channels, team up for quests, and run each other down on the battlefields.
Teamwork and competition do make the game much more fun, but everybody’s stuck in the same grind. With little at stake, your quests feel less like Frodo and Sam’s trip to Mordor than a night shift at Hardee’s.
Every new level brings more of the same, and fatigue sets in the 10th time you’ve run through the same high-level dungeon, or when you’re trying to crack level 38 but can’t bring yourself to kill another goddamn swamp jaguar. In other words, you start to feel what designer and critic Mike Sellers dubbed “WoW-nnui.”
Warcraft also limits your choices when it comes to gameplay. The citizens of Warcraft are like migrant workers—they get their marching orders, and they follow them to the letter.
Players never face moral quandaries and never get to choose between an upstanding act and an evil one. Instead of just barging through every problem with a sword and a club, Warcraft should let players negotiate their way through conflicts.
If someone pays you to run an errand, do you follow through honestly or steal their money? Should you betray one faction to win favor with another—and what happens if you pick the wrong side? Other commercial role-playing games, like the best-selling Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, are full of these types of decisions. It’s time Warcraft gets with the program.
Read more at Slate
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