auto assault: traversing irradiated highways

In the future, there are cars with guns. Lots of guns. There are vast, unending reaches of post-apocolyptic wasteland to explore, in varying shades of brown and grey. And sometimes it rains, making the polluted atmosphere almost tangible as your headlights attempt to penetrate the gloom. Then the mutants come, the pallor of their tainted skins reflected in your high-beams. You mow them down with machine gun fire, one by one, running over a few for good measure. But they don't die. The machine gun only does 1-2 damage. The mutants rise again after your 2 tonne vehicle just ran headlong into a crowd of them. Something isn't right here.

Welcome to Auto Assault.

World of Warcraft prepares for launch

Blizzard officially closed the World of Warcraft Open Beta test on Thursday, announcing that they would be wiping clean the servers in preparation for the game's launch this Tuesday. According to the official site, over 500,000 people signed up for the World of Warcraft open beta, before they had to turn away account requests. The game was absolutely packed during the first few days of the open beta: wandering around my test server I couldn't stretch my arms without hitting another player. Adding to this percieved chaos were the truckloads of monster swarms surrounding each population centre. Low level character quests thrive on these "Kill X number of [Monster]" quests, but at peak hours it was like walking through the killing fields. The server lag was equally troubling - but what a perfect way for Blizzard to test their architecture.

The amount of traffic settled down after a while, and I was able to continue my adventures in earnest. I created another Human Warlock, an Undead Warrior, and a Night Elf priest. Once again I was amazed at how well designed each race's homeland was. This was my first time playing a Night Elf, and though some of the quests were a little uninteresting, the virtual realm that was sprawled before me kept me thinking about other things. And when you die as a Night Elf, you are converted to Wisp form instead of the standard ghost form every other race must endure, allowing a few extra degrees of freedom when trying to find your corpse. Blizzard has to be commended for really dipping into every piece of Warcraft lore and making it so believable. Originally I thought the low-poly graphics were a little too cartoony compared directly with my experiences in Star Wars Galaxies, but looking deeper at the World of Warcraft reveals a cohesive whole.

There are many areas to explore: the dwarven mountains of Khaz Modan to the undead stronghold of the Undercity are all reachable by foot. And you can hop on a Zeppelin to travel between the islands of Kalimdor and Azeroth if you wish to explore the homeland of the Orcs. I have to admit it was pretty amusing to see my Undead warrior hanging out with some Tauren Shamans and an Orc warrior in the barren lands outside the orcish city of Ogrimmar. Mounts are also available to travel great distances, and though I talked to players who had ridden on the back of a mighty griffin, my own efforts to obtain a mount were fruitless. I wanted to get a skeletal horse for my undead warrior, but a level requirement (and significant amount of money) was needed. This wasn't a huge deal, though, because the game's quests mostly depend on the surrounding area they are assigned in.

This time around I paid particular attention to the initial character building stages. I found that beginning characters don't feel as useless as in Star Wars Galaxies, and can fend for themselves on all of the beginner and intermediate missions. Any mission you pick up that would be a challenge for your character will be marked in red in your quest journal. You can either team up to complete this mission, or level up a few more times until the quest is marked in green. And because each quest will more than likely take place in one region, this makes it easier to prioritize and plan your trips. It also makes your game sessions much more manageable, instead of spending your time marathon running to your next objective. I found I was able to have satisfying gaming sessions that were sometimes less than an hour with a feeling that I've actually accomplished something: whether it was levelling up or completing a few quests.

But this gives rise to a serious flaw surrounding quests, weapons, and monsters: once you get out of a town or region you have no real direction except to go forward. Going back to previous towns and locations will always contain lower level monsters that don't give out as much experience or better loot, which is understandable to some degree. But I also remember clearing an older quest after levelling up a few times in a later area, and my reward was a weapon that was a lot weaker than what I was currently using. As a result, you will rarely see higher level characters going back to the starting areas, unless they are grouped up and helping out some newer characters with the more difficult quests. In that sense, the game world seems like a bunch of "zones" of increasing difficulty tacked together - something I've heard a number of times used to describe Everquest.

I made a conscious decision to put myself onto a roleplaying server, to see if this would affect the way the game is played. I know that during the first stress test roleplaying was the farthest thing from people's minds as all of the servers were made up of first-time players. During the first two days of the open beta, players on my test server did their best to keep conversation in character. But as new players joined, some not even knowing what "roleplaying" was, this diluted the effect and all but eliminated any hopes of getting a believable game world up and running. With newbies asking questions on one side of me, I had powergamers challenging me to duels on the other. The Blizzard-sanctioned game masters tried to keep out-of-character (OOC) conversation in check, but when you have hundreds of players in one zone, it becomes a large and unmanageable task. I doubt this will change for the full release. But as I have said in the past, I can't imagine this action and levelling-focused game will be attracting the serious roleplayer. To give some perspective about the game's intentions, out of the 12 or so Eastern test servers only one of them was for roleplayers.

On the Player versus Player (PvP) servers, Alliance and Horde characters are automatically at war. Anytime you encounter a player of the opposing side, you can fight them - or be promptly killed - without any warning or authorization. On the Player versus Everyone (PvE) or "Normal" servers, if you wander into an Alliance or Horde area and are of the opposing side you will not be touched. If, however, you decide to attack a town NPC or character while in this area, you will be identified as hostile and will become a potential target. This allows potential for massive, player-driven faction wars befitting of its source material - something that Star Wars Galaxies still hasn't been able to nail down a year after its launch.

This final leg of the Beta testing phase was a good indicator of what things will be like at launch, and allowed Blizzard to prepare for the new user onslaught unlike certain other developers. I said in my first experiences with World of Warcraft that the traditional level grind didn't feel like a grind, and was more like part of being a resident of this virtual world. I would often wander the wilderness while completing my quests, slaying a few beasts on the way just to pick up a little extra experience. Certainly this side effect of all MMORPGs will get tiresome, but during the Open Beta I put any negative thoughts about the grind aside and actually enjoyed absorbing everything this unique game world had to offer. As stylized as the environments are, Blizzard has done an excellent job in converting their legendary universe to a MMORPG. They just have to stay ahead of the curve, and make sure players stay interested once they discover the grind has just been dressed up in some new clothes.

why can't we just look the other way?

Jump to Lightspeed impressions

Soon after I joined Star Wars Galaxies, I enlisted myself in the Beta program for Jump to Lightspeed. Being a fresh recruit into the Galaxies fold, I envisioned this expansion as being the game's saving grace. How could SOE/Lucasarts make a better Star Wars MMORPG experience? Easy. Add in the spacecraft and dogfighting that made the movies so fun to watch and you've got yourself an instant hit. And for a good portion of the beta, I almost believed it. But after signing off the day before the expansion's official release last week, it hit me: Jump to Lightspeed is just a clever distraction.

the brief life of a World of Warcraft stress tester

Next to the mass hysteria surrounding the release of Star Wars Galaxies, the MMORPG scene could never have anticipated the reaction to Blizzard's first foray into this growing marketplace. The difference being that most of the people waiting to play a space faring smuggler or bounty hunter were Star Wars fans that just happened to be gamers; this time around, existing MMORPG gamers and neophytes alike are eagerly awaiting the chance to try out what could potentially become the Everquest slayer.

Standard game commentary hyperbole aside, after spending five days and just shy of 20 hours with World of Warcraft I can say that this description is more than adequate. The easiest comparison I can make is to Blizzard's own Diablo II, which transplanted the simple "kill-reward" system into a decent looking game where the goal is not just to complete quests, but to get better equipment and level up as many times as possible. Along with a free online component, all of these things created a theoretically endless game. And deftly executing this simple design concept is where World of Warcraft succeeds. The level grind in MMORPGs is a design contrivance that will never go away, unfortunately. But in World of Warcraft, it doesn't have to feel that way.