Trials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry Two

“Questing.”

While Frodo Baggins had one major quest, destroy The Ring, I’ve found myself in a cesspool of incomplete quests, filling my quest book to the brim with worldwide travels. From coast to coast, island to island and across the open seas I’ve got missions to complete with no end in sight.

It’s an addiction, a fascination, an uncontrollable urge to click any creature with an exclamation upon his head. I cannot stop taking on the responsibilities of the world all upon my lonely shoulders. Unfortunately, travel time is not free and I find myself traveling the world in search for quest “turn-ins” and random item drops from creatures small and tall.

When does it end? I turn in a quest to get another! A few quests have me traveling to far off lands where more villages scream for my help with yellow “!” above their heads. I must help a wandering soldier, a fisherman, a poor villager and the beggar; I do it all “for the horde.”

You can have something like 20 quests in your log at a time, I’ve got it full with quests from each land. Perhaps someday I’ll complete them all or throw them away to pickup others, realizing the value of each quest will decline as my character levels.

The lesson here, stay where you are until the quests in that land have all been exhausted. Ah, the trials of a wondering adventurer striving to conquer the land.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Beta: Wrath of the Lich King – Initial ReactionBeta: Wrath of the Lich King – Initial Reaction

The long awaited Wrath of the Lich King is here! By long awaited, really, I mean, I waited a long time to get patch after patch of the next expansion to Blizzards best of MMORPG. Although I don’t know the architecture to creating the patches, it seems so dated in methodology. Why must I download 5GB of patches when one can just supply me with an option to pull everything.

The initial download was roughly 1.8GB for what I assume would be “the DVD” you’d be buying in the store. Once I install that baseline it requires another roughly 1.2GB “update” before you can launch the application. Once you launch the WoW executable it must download another 500MB or so of patch data followed by another 100MB of patch data followed by another 500MB of patch data. Then, and only then, can you login and start playing!

My first option was to use the character I transferred over from Scarlet Crusade and jump into the world. Wishfully thinking, I also migrated over my addons to see what would work. After receiving more errors than I can explain I logged out and disabled all the addons. We’ll wait on those.

Within seconds I noticed the date in the top corner, it seems WoW has evolved over the years from a black vortex of time suckage to something a bit more user friendly. An older patch included a clock on the map so you know how many hours you’ve got before the sunrises, allowing you to sneak in a few hours of sleep before work. Now, they’ve included a calendar so you will know just how many days you’ve been up without food or drink. I kid.

(more…)

Episode 360: City of WarcraftEpisode 360: City of Warcraft

This week’s Gaming Flashback is a major one, in particle for Gaming Podcast: World of Warcraft, as the WoW guild established by Derrick and Jennifer is well-remembered. For Paul, however, World of Warcraft was and is the source of some deep pain.

Along with the Gaming Flashback, this week’s news includes:

  • NCsoft might allow players to resurrect the City of Heroes IP
  • Sega accuses Gearbox founder of “doing whatever the f— he likes”
  • Free full-version Xbox One game trials coming for Gold members
  • Thousands of developers sign plea for tolerance in gaming community
  • Dev on PS4?s 8GB RAM: “It didn’t really change that much for us”

All this plus Listener Feedback and the Question of the Week: “What are the strongest memories of World of Warcraft that you have?”

Video Games Are Entertaining, E3, Not So MuchVideo Games Are Entertaining, E3, Not So Much

Most folks in the game industry are already writing off E3 as an actual event to be attending. Even Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is calling it “virtually useless” for both retail and investors. The writing is on the wall and the reasons are obvious.

Publishers and developers didn’t want to invest the millions of dollars to make E3 a glamour show of epic proportions anymore. The lights, camera and action are all what the industry is about; the hype wagon in full steam. Gamers eat up the hype, bloggers and journalist rely on the hype and action to build readership and keep them coming back for more and retail uses it to gauge new releases and get a grip of the future.

Without the entertainment value of E3 nobody seems to care anymore. Large scale gaming entertainment is reflected in the large scale events and, at the end of the day, we want our conferences and shows to reflect the emotion and exciting of the industry.

“E3 had much more of an impact when it was a show,” comments IGN.com vice president of games content Tal Blevins. “The video game industry is about fun and entertainment, and we should have a show that reflects it.” (gamasutra)

Everyone is sad to see the state of E3, it’s like a cancer patient waiting for their final diagnosis. It’s unfortunate, it’s going to get worse and life will go on without it. In its wake, new shows will crop up while old shows increase in audience, excitement, intensity and cost.

As one show begins to fade others will grow to replace it and developers will yet again find themselves spending millions of dollars to be the best of show.