Exploring the World of Warcraft

GameSpot has dished up a new feature entitled “Exploring the World of Warcraft“, in which they take an in-depth look at many aspects of the MMORPG. It’s a pretty good read, especially if you didn’t get a chance to try out the beta. A snippet:

While the game’s been great at giving players enough to do to stay motivated without ever really feeling like a simple treadmill designed to suck monthly monies out of your wallet, it still does come along with some of the conventions of the genre. If the rest of the game were more standard, these things wouldn’t stick out as much, but they’re there, and I still find them a little troublesome. For example, quest-specific non-player characters appear on a timer. In Elwynn Forest, there’s a pig named Princess that you must whack for one of your quests. But run to the area where Princess supposedly lives and you’ll usually find a handful of players, camping out, waiting for the next incarnation of Princess to spawn. Head over to Westfall and you’ll find players camping out in search of a messenger or camping out while waiting for a Defias traitor to appear and guide them to the thieves’ headquarters. While longtime fans of the genre aren’t strangers to this practice, it feels as out of place here as it does in other, similar games. In fact, given the rest of the game’s fast-moving pace, having to wait around for some dumb gnoll boss to reappear feels really out of character. It’s my hope that the developers can find a way to get around this waiting game, as camping out at various respawn points is really the only waiting game that World of Warcraft has.