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?

Between today’s migraine and the impending Wrath of the Lich King release, let’s take an easy one today.

What can you say about World of Warcraft that hasn’t already been said? It’s the 800-pound gorilla. It’s EverQuest taken mainstream and to the non-gaming public. It’s nearly a billion dollars of good design that changes continuously as the players and playstyles change. It’s at once the last gasp of opera and the harbinger of things to come: I can’t imagine a bigger MMO in the same vein, and I don’t think there is such as thing as a “WOW-killer” in development anywhere. The next one will be radically different, because it will have to be; Stravinsky and Schoenberg after the excesses of Wagner and Verdi.

As a self-professed altoholic, I usually sign off of a given character by saying “Im’a go be someone else for a while.” I’ve been a shaman, a warlock, a hunter, a blacksmith, an alchemist, a master fisherman, a full-on raider, a good Samaritan, and once an accidental ninja-looter (bane of the serious player). Hell, even the ads say you can be anyone you want, and then ask “What’s your game?” In terms of digital identity, WOW is fascinating for its first fundamental assumption – that rather than lengthening the game to keep players playing, it encourages players to try out all the classes, all the professions, to explore the entire world, and to enjoy the game however they want. Casual players are rewarded with rest XP. New players are quickly brought up to speed. I’ve seen more Everquest players bash the game for being “too easy” – and yet this is a design that works. There’s no assumption that everyone’s ultimate goal is a complete set of epically-difficult-to-attain raid gear, and Blizzard is just fine with that.

In my book, WOW gets to be the big dog in MMOs for that and for its second fundamental assumption: that nearly the entire game can be played solo. Historically, it seems that once we had the ability to make these huge, graphical online worlds, there was this idealistic sense that players would rush together to play in online worlds all the time in some fantastic explosion of social gamey togetherness. In the wise words of the Blizzard dev team, sometimes none of your friends are online and everybody else is a dick. My mother could play this game, and yet there’s still enough to keep the hardest of the hard core interested – and both of these kinds of people can find each other. More than that, I have useful, goal-oriented, and above all fun things to do in Azeroth that I can do all by myself, whether my mother or my raid guild feel like signing on excatly when I do.

I’m constantly surprised that I’m still playing the game. For me, WOW is truly casual – I tend to play in 15 to 30 minute spurts, apart from the few times that I choose to run an instance with friends. It’s a game I understand, it’s easy to sign in and sign out, and it’s something to do with my morning coffee and crossword puzzle. And I’m the target demographic.

But that’s not a surprise. You’re the target demographic too. Only Nintendo swings their net wider these days, and WOW is much easier to find than a Wii.