This is part one of a series called “The MMO Hunter.”  My goal is to find the best (or least worst) MMORPG by playing as many as I can and giving each a two to four week trial. This is not intended to be a review, but rather a glimpse at my experiences with the game during that time.

There’s no better way to start off this series than with the reigning “king” of the MMO, World of Warcraft.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to start with this since it seemed like the obvious choice, but since WoW is the reference point of MMOs for most players, I decided it deserved to be first in line.

Warcraft is one of the MMOs I’ve already made an attempt at.  If you’re not one of the 11 million subscribers, here is my attempt at covering the basics:  You choose a race that also determines where you start your journey, and it also determines your allegiance in an overall battle between two groups called the Alliance and the Horde.  Your allegiance determines who you’ll fight in PvP, short for player versus player combat, which I’ll get to in a bit.  After that you choose a class for your character.  Not every race has every class available and vice versa.  After a little intro movie, you begin the game.  Your main task is to make your character as powerful as can be.  To do this you need to, of course, level up.  This is done by gaining XP, earned through defeating creatures and by completing quests, which are given to you by talking to NPCs that have floating punctuation marks above their heads.  Quests can be anything from delivering items, retrieving items, killing certain creatures, and so on.  A lot of these quests types repeat, so get used to defeating a lot of enemies.

Leveling up makes you more powerful by increasing all your stats, such as your health and magic, and also allows you to earn skill points.  Skill points, which you start earning at level 10, go towards your “skill tree.”  This is how you add spells or special moves to your repertoire.  Each class has a different set of skill trees that you choose from.  In earlier versions of WoW you could select points on each tree, but now you must choose one tree and you can’t move on to another one until you’ve spent 31 points.  At any time you can pay to redo everything, but that can end up being a waste of virtual coinage.  Also when you reach certain levels you unlock more abilities that you can learn from a class trainer, who are located in each city.

You can also take on two professions.  There are many to choose from, but it’s good to get one that compliments your class.  For example, if you use a lot of mail weapons and armor, blacksmithing would be good, and that pairs up with mining.  Herbalism pairs up with alchemy and so forth.  

Another stat you can upgrade through your journey is “honor,” which you earn points towards by killing members of the opposing factions in what is called PvP combat.  When you start the game you decide what style of PvP you’d like to play.  You can’t totally avoid PvP but you can join servers where you only fight in contested areas.  On the other hand, you can also select one where PvP is available anywhere.  Once you start getting to know people, you can form groups and guilds and do everything from taking down individual “elite” enemies or raiding dungeons.  While it is possible to play the game by yourself, in ways it can be quicker to play with friends in a party, although when doing so you share XP and have to fight over any loot drops.  

I made my first attempt way back when as a human Paladin.  My reasoning was I’m a human and my favorite type of combat in action games is melee.  Of course this isn’t an action game, but I didn’t really think of that at the time.  I’m also the kind of guy who hated using magic in RPGs and was more about racking up gold or gil or G and buying as much high level equipment that I could, so someone that relied on weapons and armor seemed like a good idea at the time.  I’ve since realized the flaw of my ways when playing RPGs offline and online.  Either way I did not enjoy the starting area at all.  It was pretty bland, and the other areas seemed quite far away.  Quests were spread out pretty far and I didn’t seem to be leveling enough by the time I made it to the next area.  In fact all the adjacent areas seemed really difficult.  Maybe it was just my inexperience, but my first attempt didn’t work out and only lasted about a month.

Skip ahead a year later and a few friends and myself were jumping aboard the hype train for the upcoming Burning Crusade expansion.  We decided we’d all give the game another shot.  This time I lasted two months, and that was because of a few factors.  First of all I chose one of the new races, the Draenai, and their starting area was not only much more attractive visually, it was also loaded with things to do, and much easier to figure out what areas to go to next so I could level appropriately.  

Most importantly though was deciding to be a mage.  I guess I never thought that a mage would be the way to go if I wanted to focus on offense, but it was.  Your spells are pretty powerful, and since they’re ranged, you can easily take down enemies before they can get many hits on you, sometimes none at all.  I really enjoy that.

This brings us to my third and current attempt.  Since I had more fun being a mage so much I decided to try that again, but with a blood elf this time.  Like it’s counterpart from the Burning Crusade expansion, the starting area was great, and slowly opens out to the world in a much more progressive way than when I started in the human area where everything was very far apart and you weren’t exactly sure which area wouldn’t be dangerous to go to next for leveling.

Since playing last time a lot of updates have occurred as well, ones for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and one that just happened recently for the upcoming Cataclysm.  I’ll get to the 4.0 patch in a bit, but first I have to say of all the updates from 3.0 to 4.0, I really enjoy the map they have for quests.  Instead of just vague dots on your mini map, you can now look at a map which has all your quests numbered.  This is a great way for you to figure out what quests are close to you.  Then you can check the name and requirements on the right hand side and by highlighting the quest, it’ll put a big yellow arrow on your mini-map pointing your way to that quest.  Also on the larger map, when a quest is selected, if it involves something like killing a certain number of enemies, it will highlight on the map all the areas where the enemy can be found.  This is very similar to the map that was in Warhammer Online, and was probably one of the best parts of that game.  Warcraft has adapted it well.  If they could do anything to make this feature better it’s taking the way that your quest log organizes quests for difficulty and putting it on the map.  That and the choice to abandon a quest are the only two items from the quest log not on the map now.  Just move those two things over and you’ve made things more efficient.

A fun addition in the Lich King period was achievements.  This is actually something they implemented that made me consider going back before.  I know that they’re silly and don’t add to the gameplay directly, but what they do is make me want to play the game in ways I may not have before.  That’s been the case with the Xbox 360’s achievement system, and the trophies on PS3.  Lord of the Rings Online had a feature similar to this, where doing certain tasks that weren’t necessarily quests would give you something like a title you could use.  So say you kill 50 wolves.  That might get you a title of “Wolf Slayer.”  The more little things to do, the more appealing a perpetual title like this will be.  I kind of expected the WoW achievement system to be little victories like this, but honestly they’ve been a bit heftier than expected, like exploring entire continents and doing certain numbers of quests.  I really thought there would be smaller tasks that were almost quests just for achievements, like “kill 50 flying enemies” and so forth.  That’s a bit disappointing.

The skill trees have also changed a few times, but none as much as the 4.0 patch that was sent out this week.  Once you hit level 10 you choose a tree to focus on.  For example, as a mage I chose fire, so instead of ice or arcane magic, I am now exclusively tied to the fire magic skill tree.  I cannot move onto another skill tree until I’ve completed 31 slots in that particular tree.  Of course I can pay my fake money and clear off my trees and reassign whenever I want.  Also when your class trainer has something new for you to learn, it will tell you once you level up, along with everything else leveling up has given you, and inside the skills and profession menu you can see what you’re missing without having to go all the way to your trainer.  Another addition I’m enjoying with the update is when you die; at any point you can hit a button that will take you back to the guardian.  So if you go back to your corpse, realize that you’ll just die if you resurrect, you can hit a button, go back to the guardian and choose to come back to life there.  Of course there is still resurrection sickness.

Another aspect I got to experience that I didn’t before were mounts, now that they’re available at level 20.  This too has made the game way more comfortable to play, especially after winding up in The Barrens trying to look for some new quests.

Overall since the last time I played Warcraft there have been a lot of positive changes that I’m enjoying.  At this point I’ve only played for two weeks, which, according to the game clock, has been about 24 hours of gameplay.  I seem to be leveling up extremely quickly and also feel very powerful, much more than I did before, even before the 4.0 patch.  I welcome this because nothing in the game is more satisfying than leveling up, and I seem to be doing so at a real steady pace.  I went from level 10 to 11 in about an hour.  After the 4.0 patch I went from 11 to 14 in about 90 minutes.  It could have been a coincidence, but I’m not sure.  I’m up to 24 already, and I just finally found a new area that matched my level.  A friend of mine who had a level 70 back in the day got back into the game with a level 35 character of his and jumped four levels in a few hours, saying that certain quests he remembered doing before had become significantly easier.  That makes me feel way more positive about continuing on, especially if I can keep averaging a level an hour.

The sad part is that finding a new area to go to wasn’t as easy as walking to the next area on the map.  Now with such an open world environment as an MMO I wouldn’t expect this to be the case, but hunting down a place to match my level was difficult and took a couple hours.  Everywhere I went I was either way over level or way under level.  Eventually I did find a place that was a fit for me, but it was a sad reminder of how content lacked in the original areas, and was all very spread out, unlike the massive chunks of content that the two new starting areas have.  This is why it took so long.  I only checked out three areas til I found one that matched my level, but each one was incredibly large to traverse.  I’m hoping Cataclysm will take care of that problem.

The question is will I keep playing this, and more importantly, keep paying $15 a month for this?  I don’t know.  I think when I get to a point that I can’t level up as quickly as I am now then I’ll stop.  Honestly I’m enjoying it enough that I want to give Cataclysm a try, and will probably add my thoughts about that later.  Right now I feel progression, and that’s something that I was missing from MMOs before, including Warcraft.

The MMO Hunter will return in… Final Fantasy XIV.