While making my way through Elwynn Forest towards Goldshire, it occurred to me that I needed to do something that I hadn’t done since I last rolled an Alliance character. I took a slight detour from the path, strolled the lands north of Westbook Garrison, and there he was. One quickly loosed arrow later, he was on the ground and I was doing a little dance. But I guess the question you might be asking is what I was doing in Elwynn in the first place.

We’re in the midst of the Midsummer Festival, one of the yearly events that occurs in World of Warcraft. If you participate in the events in various ways, you earn achievements, and while the points associated with them don’t count as anything other than a general benchmark of how much stuff you’ve done in the game, you can earn other prizes such as titles and rare mounts. There’s a bit more incentive, then, to do things like toss torches, hug enemy players and fill out the unexplored portions of your map, rather than just secure bragging rights.

The fact is, however, that most gamers would do these things even if rewards weren’t offered. X-Box Live participants build their Gamerscore by racking up achievements from all sorts of games. The score doesn’t allow for free content downloads or anything else, it’s simply to show how dedicated a gamer is to this or that game. While one player might spend a weekend trying to get the perfect headshot in a shooter, another might try to find all the obscure hidden items in an open-world game.

When you’re creating any form of entertainment, it’s always good to have repeat business in mind. The beauty of achievements is in their ability to deliver exactly that without having to develop new content. I’m playing BioShock again on the hardest difficulty with the reanimation tubes switched off to earn a couple of achievements I missed the first time around, and I’ll continue working on the seasonal achievements in World of Warcraft because I want the special flying draconic mount you can earn by dedicating yourself to all the holidays for an entire year. I could simply worry about raiding to earn the best loot and then roll another character to chow down on grind sandwiches for another 80 levels, or I could pick up a new game for my X-Box instead of playing an old one, but with all of this achievement challenge, why bother?

Achievements really are advantageous for both players and developers. Developers can relax a bit and work on other projects, even if they’re upcoming patches/sequels for the current game, and players save money by not investing in new games until they’ve wrung absolutely every ounce of enjoyment they can from their favorites. It’s like buying a bag of miniature cupcakes but instead of emptying, every time you reach in for what you believe is the last cupcake your fingers tell you there are at least five more in there just begging to be popped into your waiting mouth so you can enjoy their succulent soft sweetness.

I’m not entirely sure where that analogy came from.

I’ve flounced around on a few different MMOGs in my past. I cut my teeth and damaged my first marriage with EverQuest. I started playing World of Warcraft after that, and have dabbled in varying degrees with EverQuest 2, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Eve Online and City of Heroes/Villains. I beta’d Planetside and Tabula Rasa & Lord of the Rings Online have taken it in turns to tempt me – though with Tabula Rasa breathing it’s last, I have less to worry about from Lord British.

I find myself coming back to World of Warcraft time and time again. Considering most of the people who got me started with MMOGs moved from EverQuest to it’s sequel, I feel some loyalty to them and yet I can’t seem to hold onto that game long enough to make the kind of commitment I feel they deserve. So what makes me such a WoW junkie?

Original & Coherent Fluff
Despite the occasional retcon and shoehorning of new content (where exactly did the naaru come from?), Blizzard has proven, at least to me, that their story-telling is original and inspired. Yes, some of their influences are clearly from the likes of Games Workshop and Tolkien, but Warcraft has established its own storylines and cultural identity back around the time RTS geeks like myself were plowing battleships through the Dark Portal. Just as they did with the dark world of Diablo and the science fiction universe of StarCraft, Blizzard carved out their own identity for the “high” fantasy world of Azeroth. The history of that world, while sometimes a bit of a work in progress as more material is written and developed, is still some of the easiest to follow in the genre. It’s not fluff that’s been established in another medium, like Warhammer’s tabletop worlds or Tolkien’s reams of literature, nor is it difficult to research and understand, like the disparate racial identities of EQ’s Norrath.

Balanced Gameplay
When I say “balanced,” I’m not referring to class balance. That’s an issue that will be endlessly debated on the WoW forums and over various alcoholic beverages and Ventrilo during raids when the healers should be healing instead of complaining that other classes’ heals are better than theirs. What I’m referring to is the balance between solo content, raid content and PvP (player versus player for the uninitiated). Age of Conan relied very heavily on solo content during its opening levels, so much so that I wondered why I wasn’t playing a single-player RPG like Mass Effect or Oblivion or Bloodlines to get a similar experience without the annoying monthly fee. EverQuest 2 has a veritable lack of PvP which borders on this sort of isolation, but has group content that sort of balances that loss, or would if the group dungeons were instanced instead of open. Warhammer Online is very PvP (or Realm versus Realm) centered, and while the Public Quests are an interesting idea, most of the solo content seems to be a mere vehicle to get a player more viable in a PvP situation. WoW demonstrates how to cater to a variety of audiences by balancing the player versus environment (PvE) and PvP aspects in a way that allows players to pursue either or both as they see fit.

Straightfoward Design
You don’t need a water-cooled quad-core supercomputer to run World of Warcraft. Yes, you might lag in some of the larger population hubs but that is more due to the sheer number of simultaneous players than the graphical or programmatic content. This is, I feel, another deliberate attempt on the behalf of Blizzard to appeal to the lowest common denominator and thus increase their player base, but the side effect is a solid, relatively bug-free game engine that runs smoothly between patches. When wasting hours of otherwise productive time on a MMOG, avoiding things like crashes, bugs and incomplete content helps immerse the user in the experience.

The Significant Other Factor
My fiancée plays.

Now, I’m interested to see how the upcoming Star Trek Online and Star Wars: the Old Republic turn out, but if experience has taught me anything, it’s that the newest and shiniest thing to come along isn’t necessarily the best. So depending on how those sci-fi MMOGs turn out, my return to WoW might not be as short-lived as was my attempt to rekindle my interest in EverQuest 2.

More geeky gaming posts to come, from console gaming to live-action role play.