If Warcraft Sues is any indication, a lot of people running around on role-playing servers like mine are there for shameless attention gathering and “mature” role-playing. Prime examples are this, this and dear God, this monstrosity. This could just be me, but I think that the role-playing bit of a role-playing game should be more than that; one’s role-play should inform their decisions in game and vice versa. Case in point: the Argent Tournament dailies and my hunter, Gilrandur.
Since this is going to be a post about World of Warcraft, I’ll spare those of you uninterested in such overt geekery the rambling thoughts that follow. Just pretend I’m reviewing The Hurt Locker or something.
Art by Kennon James
They slay dragons, liberate the oppressed and defy the nefarious plans of unspeakably evil villains. Some of them wear suits of armor and ride into battle on noble steeds while others stay far from the melee and rely on intellect and study for their combative prowess. However, what fantasy heroes have in common is that they are mortal beings who need rest & relaxation just as much as you or I do, especially when you and I are playing them. If the Dungeon Master needs a break from the action or if your party is low on hit points, the answers is almost always the closest inn.
It’s more than just a place to recover one’s lost health, though. Considering that most fantasy settings are full of more threats than one party of adventurers to address, it’s highly likely that a given innkeeper will have his common room filled with more than one expedition on a given night. And provided that the various travelers aren’t from opposite sides of the alignment tracks, a good meal and some ale is a sure-fire way to get them talking to one another. There are likely to be some very interesting stories told of past exploits, and rumors of even more daunting challenges are bound to arise sooner or later.
When it comes to tabletop games, the inn is a classic place to introduce new characters, side quests, or major plot points. Tolkien gave future fantasy authors & game audiences a fine example of the “average” inn with the Prancing Pony in Bree, and the tavern your party stops in can range anywhere from a bright and colorful place that feels miles away from any sort of peril to a mix of a Viking mead hall and the mosh pit at a Slipknot concert. Regardless of the state of affairs within, inns are rarely boring places, and even if the person behind the screen at the head of the table is finding themselves burnt out or starved for ideas, a few moments of in-character interaction around the table can lead to a new adventure. Or at least some interesting or amusing moments when the fighter catches the thief with an extra card up their sleeve.
MMOGs with fantasy settings tend to have their inns run by non-player characters, and you’ll have people with no interest or ability in role-playing darting in and out to complete quests, buy supplies or beg for loose change, but you can still find a good story and perhaps some people to hang with on a regular basis if you can tolerate the bad apples. In fact, I’m helping some of the friends I’ve made on our server in World of Warcraft put together a new guild, with the premise being the members are people who simply meet in an inn or tavern somewhere in the game world and swap stories, often volunteering to travel with one another into dangerous places. It’s a flexible and classic idea, and I hope we can take it in exciting and fun directions.
Just be careful if the innkeeper’s willing to let you stay free of charge. Final Fantasy teaches that such things lead inevitably to a cutscene, drama, or even loss of a character, so you’d better save your game first.
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.
BlizzCon is the annual convention of all things Blizzard, held in Anaheim, California. Panels will be held for all of Blizzard’s upcoming products, from class balance in World of Warcraft to the latest buzz about Diablo 3. Given it’s location and the rarity of tickets, I always figured it’d be highly unlikely that I’d ever be able to attend the event.
I was apparently mistaken.
I entered a contest at WarCry, sister site to The Escapist, on a whim yesterday. One-day contest, answer a few Blizzard questions and cross your fingers. I thought that the site would be bombarded with nerds like myself trying to win a ticket as coveted as the golden pass to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and my chances of getting any sort of response whatsoever after hitting the ‘submit’ button would be between astronomically low and something on the subatomic level. So I all but forgot about it after I sent in my entry.
Apparently, I won.
I got an email from Jeff, brand manager at the Escapist, congratulating me. After restarting my shocked heart, I did a fanboy flounce worthy of a teenager getting tickets to see a favorite band or a meet and greet with Robert Pattinson. But I’m not a teenager. I’m a thirty year old geek with an apartment, a somewhat estranged son, a new fiancée and a very needy cat. So after my excitement cooled down I began to wonder if this would be a practical journey or just a flight of fancy.
It turns out the flight is the problem. I have a friend who’s been bugging me to come visit her in California anyway, and she’s got a spare room. She also assures me that transporation to and from the convention center in Anaheim is something we can suss out later. So how do I get to California? Well, if I don’t fancy taking the time off from work to live out of my car for a few days and smelling up the place when I walk in, I’ll be flying.
That’s where I need help.
A ticket, with discounts from websites, is likely to run around $300. There’s no way I can put that amount of money together on my own – unless I turn to a life of crime or something. So what I’m going to do, dear readers, is turn to you for help.
Below is an image from Blizzard’s site for the convention which cleverly disguises a PayPal donation link.
If you want to help me get to BlizzCon, donate as much or as little as you choose.
What do you get for your money, you ask? Other than my undying gratitude, I will be putting together packages of photos taken from inside BlizzCon which I will happily share with you. This space will contain the best shots combined with notes taken from the panels and observations of the goings-on, but if I shoot any videos or anything, they’ll come to you personally. In other words, I’ll snap a plethora of photos, put them in an attractive and easy to use Flash photo book, and send you the end result as a thanks for helping me fly the friendly skies to California.
(Image copyright Blizzard)
And if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to rethink how I’m spending that weekend.
EDIT: This entire thing is going to take a lot of thought and I’ll revisit it at a later date.
EDIT 2: I think it’s more a flight of fancy than anything else.
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