Only as good as the last patch

I cannot remember a time when I have been as glutted on awesome computer games as I am right now at this moment. My gaming hours are still very occupied with Dragon Age, which is offering some of the most compelling, immersive gaming I’ve ever had on PC right now.  It is not only a great game, but it also plays right into my storytelling/ RP AND gameplay preferences so it’s absolutely the whole package.

If I want a break from that and some mindless hack/ slay action, Torchlight is still brilliantly entertaining. I find I enjoy it more when I don’t sit down for long sessions — that can get repetitive. But in short bursts it’s very fun and refreshing, and I still have more character classes, more builds, more endless dungeon to try. As if that wasn’t enough, we finally decided to pick up a PS3 so have a couple more great games there (Little Big Planet and Uncharted 2) when we want to sit down on the sofa together and play. I will have more to say about both of those games sometime but they’re both fantastic.

The nice thing about the single player games is that even if I build up a backlog now, it just means I won’t buy any more for awhile until I’m done with them. There’s no special hurry.

But where is WoW in all this? It’s on the back burner for me. I’m keeping up my relaxed raid schedule of one 25 man raid a week, and that’s about it. But why is that? This current patch is simply not compelling and I’ve run out of goals. Until the next patch drops, I’m finding other things to do with my spare time.

Larisa comments that she worries that people think she’s burning out because she’s been critical of WoW recently. I don’t think that. I think they put out an unexciting patch, and I remember noting that it sounded like filler when I first read about the Coliseum. I also don’t see any reason why even a fan has to ooze positivity over a lacklustre patch. By all means find something positive to talk about, but what if the positive thing is, ‘Well, at least we’ll all be geared for the next patch which should be better’?

Compared to the single player games, patch 3.2 offers very very little gameplay. There was one new raid instance that didn’t put up much of a challenge – I enjoyed the new mechanics but they didn’t keep us occupied for very long. Being offered the chance to keep rerunning old instances to be rewarded by a slightly different set of badges which could be turned in for better loot got old before the patch even went live.

One thing this has crystallised in my mind is that WoW at the moment is only as good as its last patch. Oh, there’s plenty of other content in there but I’m done with the rest of the expansion myself, as are a lot of other endgame players. We’ve run the instances, gotten the rep, experienced the quests/ storyline, and capped the tradeskills, so we are very focussed on the new patch content to keep us engaged. Or in other words, many people who played since the beginning of Wrath are now out of in-game goals and bored of the year old gameplay. As soon as a new patch hits, everyone who is endgame-ready will be motivated to switch to the new content — partly because it is new and partly because they will be enticed there with ever increasing rewards. But what happens when they’re done?

Any subscription game needs to keep offering players a mixture of short, medium, and longterm goals to keep their interest in maintaining a relationship with that game. Those are the things which make it worthwhile to pick up a longterm sub, knowing that there are things you want to accomplish that will take months. Goals aren’t enough on their own, but if they’re not there, then you’d better hope that your community is very sticky indeed.

The reason this has become more of an issue now in Warcraft  is that Wrath heralded a new era of accessibility for the game. And that meant fewer long term goals, and a shift in perspective for raid goals. For example, if your goal is to kill the last boss of a raid instance, you can now decide whether killing it on normal mode (possibly in a PUG) will satisfy the sightseeing instinct. Is it worth the extra hassle of finding a raid group just to get the boss on hard mode? A lot of people don’t find that as compelling a prospect as when it was the only way to see that boss die at all. Not only that, but because of the way players are now corralled through the game, many more of them will run out of patch content before the next patch hits.

So these things are in many ways a result of deliberate design decisions. I don’t think the decisions were bad, and I rather enjoy that I’m able to see all the bosses and finish a patch and move on without having to dedicate vast amounts of time and effort. But it does mean that if one patch is less exciting, it’s far easier to either skip it or take a break and do something else until Blizzard provide something more interesting for players to do.

I’ve seen a lot more raid groups recruiting at the moment, so I’m guessing a lot of people are bored with the Coliseum. Will they come back to see Arthas fall in patch 3.3, or will other games — maybe even single player games — have stolen their gaming souls?

Preparing for a patch

I wrote earlier this week about one of the Icecrown quests in WoW. I decided to complete more of those quests on an alt to remind myself of the storylines that had gripped me when I first ran them on my main, many months ago.

After all, patch 3.3 may well pick up those loose ends; loose ends that haven’t really been touched since Wrath went live, which is not one of Blizzard’s best storytelling decisions. As Rohan noted, usual screenwriting rules would require that the bad guy be in the ascendent when the last act of a three-act play begins. Instead we’ve beaten the Lich King on every encounter and taken time out to destroy an Old God and do some jousting en route.

Despite that, I’m excited to see what lies in store in patch 3.3. I’m looking forwards to venturing into the new 5 man instances with my friends and fighting a variety of scourge baddies alongside my NPC faction leader. I’m looking forwards to the new raid and to finding out how the Lich King storylines draw to a close, or at least to a new start.

So my current goal is to redo all of the Icecrown quests on an alt before the patch hits so as to refresh my memory.

Is there anything you particularly like to do to prepare for a patch, either in WoW or in another MMO? (It is after all that that patching time of year.)

Best patch change ever

Why did none of the americans tell me about this? They had the patch yesterday!

Convention at the Legerdemain now only needs 4 chilled meat.

This bears a bit of explanation. There’s a daily cooking quest that you can pick up in WoW if your cooking skill is high enough. It is randomly chosen from four different cooking quests and for each one you have to make or collect some stuff and deliver it to someone in Dalaran.

But not all cooking quests are equal. One of them required vast amounts more raw material than the others, for the same reward. And guess which one our server/faction seemed to get at least three times as often as any others? Yup, it was the convention.

People used to log on, whisper nervously, “Is it convention today?” and then log off weeping when the guild channel erupted in crazed giggles.

But now we can move on with our in game lives secure in the knowledge that the convention may go on, but it’s had to face up to the credit crunch.

(And just for the record, the best place we found to farm chilled meat was by killing seals off the south coast of Howling Fjord.)