I say part 1 because I don't know how often or how much I'm going to ramble on this. The gist of it, though, is that I find explaining World of Warcraft to people who are not gamers to be... difficult. The social side of the game is fascinating, but explaining why when people don't have a concept of what the game doesn't really get anywhere.
So what is WoW? The organizational breakdown of a game with 6 or 8 million players may make things easier to understand. Yes, there are millions of people, but there are also over 200 servers. You can make characters on more than one server, but most people I know mostly focus on the characters they have on one server at a time. (That gives you 30-40,000 people on each server, on average, but they're generally not all playing at the same time.)
The game population itself is broken into two factions, the Alliance (blue) and the Horde (red). You get to choose which faction you play. Each faction has varoius fantasy races (human, elf, orc, troll, among others) for you to choose from; each race can play certain classes (there are 9). The factions are in conflict with each other. The Alliance is said to have "prettier" races than the Horde, though with the expansion, the Horde picked up an Elf option. This has led, to some extent, some servers having a larger Alliance population. I've played both factions; currently I play mostly Horde.
Solo play in the game is similar to some other fantasy games; to some extent it's an improvement or evolution of the Diablo game play. (I can make a pretty good argument for WoW being Diablo III.) Since WoW is inherently multi-player, though (you can't play offline), group play is integral to the experience. For the most part, you spend your time running around the virtual world (another concept which is sometimes difficult to explain), doing quests for the computer-controlled population (NPCs) of the world. Some of them want you to kill certain mobs, to bring them certain items, or to take something to another NPC. For quests, and for killing challenging mobs, players get experience points (XP). This lets them gain power, represented by levels (1-70).
Although you can group for almost any quest in the game, most of the quests can be done solo. Some require you to kill harder than average (elite) mobs; these are group quests. Other quests will send you into dungeons where all the mobs are harder than average; these also require groups. Anything that can be completed with 2-5 people falls into the "group" concept. Anything more than 5 people is a "raid." Raids are generally for quests or encounters involving bosses or mini-bosses, which are especially tough mobs.
The dungeon structure of WoW helps regulate how many people you can take to complete quests in certain areas. A dungeon is like a mini-map within the game, entered through an "instance" portal - each group that goes in gets their own copy of the dungeon to play in, allowing multiple groups to run through them in parallel. Some instances only allow 5 people in at a time; some 10, 20, 25, or 40.
Group play highlights each class's abilities; you want someone with heavy armor and a lot of hit points to hold a monster's attention while the other characters hit it; this is called "tanking." (This is also what a hunter's pet is useful for in solo play.) The classic tank is a warrior, though the hybrid classes (druids, paladins, shaman) can also pull it off depending how they've trained. You also want someone who can cast healing magics along to keep everyone alive so that the run through the dungeon goes faster (priests, druids, paladins, and shamans are all healers). And then you want some players along who can dish out damage to help kill the mobs faster; these are called "DPS" classes (hunters, rogues, mages, and warlocks are all classic DPS, but any of the other classes can do respectable damage, depending on their training).
Besides these roles, there are utility roles; crowd-control refers to abilities that can somehow remove a monster from combat temporarily; the particular dungeon may require different types of crowd-control (for example, mages can turn some types of monsters into sheep temporarily, and priests can immobilize undead). It never hurts to have someone along who can open locked treasure chests (or sometimes doors) - that would be a rogue, for the most part. Another useful ability is "wipe recovery" - some classes have abilities to allow themselves or others resurrect on the spot after dying; normally one has to run back from a graveyard to the instance portal. This type of ability (shamans, paladins, and warlocks all have some form) lets a healing class raise the other party members from the dead; it's a big time saver.
Okay, that's enough for now... I think I'll go into guilds next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment