#17. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
So, what next?
It’s not a question of whether there will be a third expansion to WOW – the rumors, in fact, say there will be five in total. It’s more a question of what’s coming next. Wrath is the second go-round, and there are two major additions: the continent of Northrend, which lets you get to 80 (and fight Arthas once you’ve gotten there, in theory) and the hero class Death Knight, which is a title only Blizzard could sell unironically.
It’s a lot of fun, this expansion. The Death Knights start off ridiculously overpowered and gradually settle in to a balance with the other classes. The new profession, Inscription, isn’t so different from the others but has certainly made the trade-skill driven economy more interesting. The new continent is snowy and beautiful and exquisitely rendered. But I’m beginning to feel the repetition: that constant, combat-centric cycle of do-quests-to-get-loot-to-do-harder-quests-to-get-better-loot….When you run out of quests, there are dungeons, and when you run out of those there are the same dungeons, but harder, and some raids, and the same raids but harder….And then what? Am I really going to have to fight to 90 next time around? Or as a non-PVPer, is this about to become a merely social exercise?
So let me know, Blizzard: how much more god-like am I going to get? Because there are only so many special abilities you can hand me, and the hard-core players are already complaining that Wrath has been too easy (hell, someone hit 80 within the first 27 hours after release.) I’m a more casual player: I enjoy making new armor sets and potions, exploring new landscapes, seeing new creatures. But it still all comes down to that cycle of achievement, and I’m getting bored with it.
It’s the defining problem for a persistent world, I think. It’s awful if your MMO fails, of course (and so many of them do) – but when you succeed, how do you keep succeeding? How do you give your players more of the same without boring them? How do you create content that’s different, exciting, innovative, but still fits with the tried and true mechanics that your players are already paying for? Because of their reputation, we expect Blizzard to have clean, perfect solutions locked in a vault somewhere, ready for the next ten years of development, but I wonder how they can top themselves the next time, and the next, and the next. I’m certainly not going to level to 145 or play 37 alts. Sooner or later, I fear that WOW will have to change or disappoint, and it’s easy to do both.
Until then, however, it’s still one of my favorite casual games when I have fifteen minutes to spare, and one of my favorite multiplayer games when I have a free afternoon. I look forward to how WOW will evolve over the next five or ten years, whether I choose to keep playing it or not.
That said, my money’s still on a complete reinvention of the mainstream MMO, plans for which are locked up in that vault at Blizzard, waiting for the day that WOW starts to die. Let’s call it World of Starcraft, shall we?
