I remember the first time I picked up
World of Warcraft. I rolled my first character, stepped into the
world and was blown away. It was HUGE. There were so many places to
see and explore. I wandered aimlessly for hours just taking it all
in.
I knew nothing at the time about
mmorpgs. I understood Diablo or Oblivion, but this was a step above.
I was fascinated by the idea that actions took /time/, not just the
few second to swing a sword or fire a gun, but these strange things
known as cooldowns that could take minutes to hours before I could
use them again. I slowly learned about gathering nodes and the
concept of loot drops, happily slaughtering random creatures just to
collect a useless gray drop because it looked interesting. I was
bombarded by new jargon and concepts, like a whole new world of
gaming unfolding before my eyes.
Slowly, bit by bit, I learned about the
world around me, adapting to the concepts and community that make up
the base of mmorpgs. I learned what instances meant, the concept of
group dungeons, captial cities, questing hubs and so many other basic
concepts I now take for granted. Then I evolved further. I learned
about raiding, theorycrafting, group synergy, powerleveling and
min-maxing.
It was here that the wonderment died.
Now don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed
the game, in fact I felt quite proud and clever for learning how to
be not only competent, but talented at tanking and melee dps classes.
I raid led a huge raiding syndicate for roughly a year and led many
other teams for the years following, using my extensive knowledge of
the environment and concepts to even increase the enjoyment and
rewards for others.
However, when you are a level capped
character with excellent gear where your only source of improvement
is to repeatedly raid with large groups with tough challenges or wait
for the next expansion, you lose the ability to enjoy the small
things. Leveling is no longer a wondrous adventure, exploring new and
exciting places. You are familiar with all the zones and you've seen
them all before. You no longer take the time to visit every
mountaintop or see what might be just around that riverbend. In fact
you try to find the absolute shortest and most efficient route to
rush through the quests you've memorized to get your character to
level cap as fast as possible. You never bother to search for
anything interesting or rare in the zones around you, you've instead
learned how to find the websites where other people have already
documented this better then you could do anyway.
I've talked to quite a few people who
have seen this similar development in their online gaming routines.
When you are introduced to concepts such as “dailies” or other
rewards that take a lot of time to reach, your time in-game suddenly
becomes a valuable commodity with limited supply. When you only have
a few hours you choose the actions that would most benefit you. You
could perhaps raid and get a chance at some gear to make your
character more powerful. You could “farm” or spend time actively
collecting in-game materials that can be sold, combined or used in
some fashion that could perhaps make you more gear or new tools for
you to use. These things take time. So when rewards from many of
these may take hours, days or even weeks to obtain, why would you
waste such valuable time just wandering?
One of my favorite examples is when my
friend and I were playing World of Warcraft during the Burning
Crusade expansion. We took our characters to a swampy zone known as
Dustwallow marsh and bravely attempted to fight our way through
monsters bigger then our character level. It was during this that we
accidentally stumbled across a cave that housed creatures known as
Dragonkin. These enemies were tightly packed and hard to kill,
leaving us proud as we slowly left a pile of scaly corpses in our
wake. It was during this that my friend used their skinning ability
to harvest materials from the corpses used in a crafting profession
within the game and we discovered something that excited us. They
dropped dragon scales! Up to this point, all “skinned” monsters
were dropping leathers or leather scraps with to occasional turtle
scale. But now this? Dragons were cool and powerful, obviously dragon
scales must be really important crafting materials for cool and
powerful armor right? And so we spent the majority of our evening
simply racing around the dragonkin caves, felling them one at a time
as we eagerly harvested their gleaming scales.
In the end we sold piles of the scales
on the in-game auction house, netting a tidy profit as the remainder
went to make some cool armor, just like we had thought. We felt so
very accomplished and had a complete blast in the process.
Yet for some reason our other online
friends could not understand why we had done this. There were no
quests to lead us there, so we had no reason to blunder along the
caves. In addition, with no quest, we also were not netting any
additional experience or loot incentives to continue our slaughter.
The dragon scales, once sold gave us a decent profit, but no where
near the kind of gold we could have made had we raced to level cap
and worked on end-game materials which were in much higher demand on
the auction house. In the eyes of our friends there was absolutely no
reason why we should have /wasted/ our time doing such random
actions.
And one day we got to the point where
we could no longer bring ourselves to do such acts of exploration.
When we had reached these “higher” concepts we had essentially
lost our innocence with the game. Playing was only about challenges
and obstacles. This idea followed us into many other games as well.
In Star Wars: The Old Republic we almost regained the wonder of
exploring new zones alongside the phenomenal storylines, but it only
lasted so long. As soon as we had learned the ins and outs of the new
system we once again adopted the mindset of racing to the top so we
could spend endless hours doing the same things over and over. It
didn't matter where we turned into from there, we always carried with
us this broken innocence.
Wildstar has become an opportunity for
myself to regain this innocence, this sense of wonderment.
Here we have a new rich world to
explore and no reason to rush. I want to learn all about the races
and factions, all about the Nexus and what happened to the Elden. And
the best part? Carbine studios has created ways to /reward/ us for
this! For example, with the path system, Explorers are perfect for
people who want to see every inch of the map. In fact, you might
uncover secret tunnels or exciting new places you would not have seen
before, encouraging you to search every nook and cranny. You can
share these experiences with your allies as well! This encourages
people to join together and explore, sharing their benefits as they
go rather then race to find some sort of common ground at the end.
And they took this a step further even! In WildStar we are expected
to hit our level cap and open up raiding and other opportunities
/before we have finished the content./ This is an amazing idea! When
I get done with the game...I'm not done with the game? It seems so
odd. Rather then bringing the world and the immersion storyline to a
grinding halt, we are given even more opportunities and adventure
once we hit the level cap. No longer do I have to sigh as I table my
favorite character who can do no more then senselessly repeat the
same monotonous tasks day after day or raid maybe once or twice a
week. No longer do I feel like I need to rush another character
though the content, just to open more variety for myself. Now I get
to keep going, keep exploring and learning.
I will never quite regain the sense of
pure wonderment when I first entered the world of mmorpgs and in some
ways I don't wish to. I'm rather proud of how far I've come. However
WildStar may be a breath of fresh air in this stale loop I've been
locked within, putting excitement and reward back into the epic
adventures that draw me in again and again.
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