So how is my is few days back in world of warcraft going? I’m fed up with it and have remembered why exactly dislike it so much at the moment.
Dungeons were once group activities, you worked as part of a team to solve the problems layed before you. It was more than just a case of people using crowd control, it was about teamwork and respect. Somewhere along the road this has changed, i suspect party in 3.0 when the dungeon mechanics were laid out and again in 3.3 with the introduction of the dungeon finder tool.
Now we have tasks that require no co-ordination, with people that have anonymity and get rewarded you for finishing as quickly as possible:
- Team tactics are never needed, there is no reason to act as a team. You are playing a single player game that happens to have other people in it
- As people are randomly thrown together from several servers they act exactly like their actions have no consequences.
- Why would you want to keep in a group that isn’t rushing at full speed when it could mean you are missing out on emblems?
I think World of Warcraft suffers from the same problem as many other games at the moment. They have been over analysed and had too many enhancements that looks and sound good on paper but have knock on consequences elsewhere. Yes you can find groups easily, perhaps too easily. People are effectively spoilt by the ease and throw away nature of it.
One of the best games of the last yew years has been Portal, which is probably also extremely short only being a few hours long. It trained you up, gave you final change and that was it. Coupled with that was also the great story, characters and humour which were a surprise all the way through. It didn’t have any padding and it didn’t need it, you could complete it in one sitting and come away knowing it was great.
Given the original Doom games were very basic on the story front the third instalment does very well at fleshing out what is going on, this is mainly done by data packs which you pick up as you go along. These contain audio memos and emails of the unfortunate people who have left them behind. The characters are rather two dimensional however its to be expected given the subject matter. The voice acting throughout is very good and also provides a way of playing a meta game of unlocking storage lockers which contain goodies. You will often be told a code for a locker which isn’t directly around you so may end up going round chanting numbers to yourself until you find the right one. Ammo is well balanced, you are never so dry of it you struggle due to a lack of it but at the same time it is limited enough that you feel every round counts and that you shouldn’t waste plasma on zombies when you can take them out with a handgun.
Along with the lighting comes your trusty friend the flashlight. You can only ever use your flashlight or your weapon which leads to great feeling of surrounding darkness and fear whenever you are fighting anything. Enemies often light themselves up when attacking with projectiles or sit in the dark with their piercing eyes glowing at you so there is a nice balance with the lighting, it is never needed however its very comforting when you have it on. Compare this to the new Aliens vs Predator where there are several sections where you are in constant darkness areas being attacked by black enemies.
Ludological 