• 
• 

Thanks to an almost decade-long drought between Diablo games, I play World of Warcraft. Warcraft comes as close as possible to what makes Diablo great for me, and saves me the trouble of wasting money on cheap imitators. I've quit and come back for months at a time over the past few years, but thanks to the one-two punch of the expansions, it looks like I might be here to stay. ...at least until Diablo III is finally released.

 

I'm best described a "casual addict." I live in the space between the truly absorbed and the rest of the world. What I know about the game amazes some, what I don't know disappoints others. Everyone is embarrassed for me. I have friends whose eyes pop out when I say that I have a character at level 71 in the same way mine do when they casually mention cycling 200 miles in a single weekend . I have other friends who scoff at how little I've accomplished in the game. A third group is scandalized that I could give a flying fig about the specific lore behind why the "noble Taurens" have allied themselves with the Horde.

 

I play differently than the other people who play 5 or more hours a week. I have one simple rule: avoid everyone else as much as possible. It may sound unfriendly, but from my perspective, everyone else is just trespassing on what could have been a very lovely single-player game. Before some of you start, I've tried it your way. I've hung out with a decent-sized guild on a PvP server, eyes twitching and constantly spinning around because I just heard a rogue go stealth near me. I don't like it. I want to take my gorilla and my bow and arrow and run around killing things that don't have a sophisticated enough AI to fight back properly, collect my loot, and go home.

 

(At this point you've either rolled your eyes because of course I'm a hunter on a PvE server or you've clicked over to something else because your eyes are bleeding. See? Everyone's embarrassed.)

 

A few months back, my first character was finally powerful enough to reach the new zones in the Burning Crusade expansion and I had an epiphany: It was just code.

 

Maybe epiphany is a bit severe. This wasn't exactly a new revelation. I was never so absorbed in the game that I lost touch with reality and I frequently applied programming logic to complete quests when needed. I've spent enough time chatting with friends and developing game logic to know what makes them work. But there's a difference between telling Neo he's a battery in the Matrix, zapping him in and out of the world through phone booths and spikes in his skull, and that moment at the end of the movie where Agent Smith and the walls turn into the greatest screen-saver ever.

 

This is what happened to me. I was suddenly playing NetHack.

 

Different as the expansion was, it was exactly the same and I could barely see the differences behind the ribbons of code on my screen. The quests were almost entirely the same formula I'd been playing for 60 levels. A deranged helboar is different than a young thistle boar in many ways, but when you get right down to it, a pig is a pig whether you skin him for ruined leather scraps or fel hides. I turned the game off in dismay and although I tried repeatedly to see if the sensation had passed, it was a week or so before I could play for more than a few minutes.

 

Once I got past my "code-blindness", how I interacted with the game was fundamentally different. I had lost all personal investment in it and the freedom was exhilarating. The voice inside my head that worried about what would happen if I looked up to see who had won the Diet Dr. Pepper® Quickfire Challenge in Top Chef had been replaced with a sarcastic "oh no, if you get up to grab a drink, some of the ones and zeros might be in a slightly different pattern when you get back!" Warcraft continued to serve its purpose, but did so with greater efficiency and I found myself with extra hours in my day. I started reading more. I plotted and planned for the near and distant future. I even wrote a novel.

 

When the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was released in November, I was days away from needing it to keep my character advancing, but I couldn't be bothered. What was the point of accessing yet another set of boars? Even if they spewed clouds of poison frostbite, were the undead frozen boars going to be that different? Instead, my level 70 hunter picked up her flying mount and together we toured the worlds I had access to. We saw all sorts of things we hadn't been able to see before and everything was going great... Until that itch came back. I knew I needed Lich King despite the flaws I assumed it would contain.

 

I could not have been more wrong about the expansion.

 

Clearly, Blizzard saved the good stuff for Lich King. The original quest types are still around but they've been ripped apart and rebuilt so that I have to pay attention to the plot behind the quests--in a good way. They've introduced mini-games where you lay waste to a village from atop a fire-breathing dragon or annihilate an entire army waiting on the beach because you've snuck past them and have started blasting the cannons from their empty boats behind them. The new playing areas are arranged differently, too. Instead of one or two main cities in the zone, they're full of little pockets of folks looking for your help. Instead of being something you could largely ignore, faction takes a seat up front. You can't gain access to certain areas until you've proven your worth to the folks that live there, and you certainly can't gain access to their precious supplies and fancy gear until you've helped them out a few more times. Even the things that are essentially the same are different. The oceans are full of sharks and killer whales instead of nagas and crabs. And the new Death Knight class? After playing a tutorial that's more like a 45 minute Square Enix game than anything tutorial-esque, your character hits the ground running near or past level 58, better geared than my lvl 71 hunter (sad but true), and with a full set of flight paths and weapon skills tucked under his plague-spreading belt. It's still Warcraft, but it's refreshing in a way I had not expected at all.

 

I play almost every day, and that's not likely to change any time soon. My cyclist friends still give me funny looks and worry about all the time I spend indoors, and the looks from the truly engrossed friends are even more concerned. They "get "why I play the game, but they just don't get it. That's okay. Blizzard gets it, and that's enough for me.

 

Article Tags

Write a Response