World of Warcraft news here:
Slashdot: New World of Warcraft Raid Dungeon
In short, a new really HUGE, really HARD 40-man mega-raid zone with AT LEAST 18 bosses, and MORE phat lootz. And my server hasn’t even finished scouring for Peaceblooms to get the previous one open yet!
The accompanying quotes do seem to suggest that Blizzard’s position on future content is clear; 40-up and Raid, or start a new character, which seems like a bit of a middle-finger to the great many players clamouring for something to do post-60 that doesn’t involve 39 other half-way competent idiots, and I do begin to wonder if levels 1-60 are in fact little more than the tutorial for the ‘real’ game now being further implemented.
Not in a huge guild? Then f*** off, n00b! lolerskatez! (And your little ‘just me and my friends’ guild isn’t going shopping in Da Core either, kid…you need to be in one of the four or five Certified Uber Guilds per server to get a sniff of the purple stuff. Soowee!) Enforced co-operation FTL, as the kids say - and there was me last year, giving WoW brownie points for not getting all Everquest about the whole group thing. Wrong again, it seems...
It does make me question the generally accepted mega-success (5.5 million players) a bit. If Warcraft Realms Census is to be believed, it looks like over half of ALL WoW characters are Lv60. This means that most players are already on at least their second go up the escalator. Assuming a Horde/Alliance swap to keep things interesting, this means that most folks are going to run out of ‘new’ (to them) sub-60 content pretty soon, if they haven’t already. I'm not sure I could jusyt start on a third ascent, no matter how many quests I may have missed, so when you’ve a 60 Alliance, and a 60 Horde, and have seen both sides quests and zones, what remains? The 40-man raid or PvP, and if, as many commentators suggest, that isn’t enough…is it time to leave? And how many people are at that point by now? WoW has 5.5 Million players, technically, but how many only ever log when the guild raid calendar tells them to? How many don’t actually log in that much at all anymore? All very confusing, but I suspect is more like '5.5 million people have ever played World of Warcraft'...
The ensueing Slashdot comment thread seems to cover the usual range of responses, but one view in particular made me stop and pause from the above self-righteous indignation you’d expect from an interested nearly-60 soloer. In a nutshell; if you’ve reached 60, you’ve won!. Well done! Thanks for playing! See you for World of Warcraft II! (Only as regular readers know by now, We Never Call Them Sequels Anymore, so it’ll actually be an ‘Expansion’ – Burning Crusade or some such.)
The point, and perhaps one that our genre of mindless and seemingly infinite staircases disguises well, is that all games end. This is as true for World of Warcraft, or Everquest 2 as it is for Half Life, Deus Ex, or even Chess. Nothing last for ever, and in any ‘normal’ pastime or pursuit for fun, you wouldn’t hear anything like this much fuss.
Arx Fatalis was one of the best games I’d played in a long time, but suffered from being very short. You don’t hear me storming message boards about it, or anyone else for that matter. I played, I saw, I conquered, and then I came away with a complete, and finished, set of experiences that I will cherish. I’ll play it again, of course, but for me, Arx Fatalis is a closed book now, and strangely better for it.
Perhaps the fact that WoW is so fast has surprised so many of it’s players, traditionally used to massive long crawls over broken glass to reach the top, and ordinarily, most of them would never make it, giving up long before reaching the top of the tree. I know I usually don’t make it, but for the first time, at level 52 and still going, I’m looking at a finishing post I can actually reach, and already all I can hear is the thronging mass of people who already got there before me, bitching about there being nothing to do except raid as part of a ruthlessly efficient 40 man death squad and upgrade equipment, and also I hear a whole bunch of unpleasantness about ‘DKP’, ‘ninjas’, ‘guild drama’, and all sorts of similar loveliness, and do find myself asking ‘what did you expect to be there?’
Let it go…you won! You don’t need to do any of this anymore…enjoy the rest of your life…
I have eight levels to go, to the point where many players say the game really starts. I think for me, that will be the point at which the game actually ends. For the first time in my life, a life spent mostly trying to fill stupid petty experience bars, I’ll be able to walk away from one that is absolutely, totally and finally, full.
I can only imagine what that feels like…