MMOs can really spoil you for single-player games

It's been quiet on here because I haven't been playing much, and as a consequence I haven't had a lot to say about my limited play time. On the plus side for me, this means that I've had time to do other things that I hadn't done in a while, such as play a single-player game, in this case Dragon Age II.

Without going into too much detail about it, I can say that I really enjoyed it. I was a bit wary of it at first because it had received some very mixed user reviews, but my worries were completely unfounded. I had a blast. I stayed up late several nights in a row just to play that little bit further. And when I finally completed it, I was happy to simply watch the credits roll by for a good ten minutes or so, just to allow the whole experience to sink in.

Even after I had finished my first playthrough, I still wasn't done. There were alternate progression paths to be explored! But more than anything, I felt an urge to connect with other people who had also enjoyed the game. I talked to friends who had played it, read reviews and sought out a bunch of forum threads that were discussing various aspects of the game. This was enjoyable for a while, but oddly enough it also diminished my desire to actually play again somewhat. I wanted to share my enthusiasm, but playing the game again effectively meant isolating myself.

At the end of the day, I can talk to other players about how they played the game all day long, but I can never actually meet their characters. We all play in our own little bubble worlds, and we can talk about how much fun it is but we can never actually interact while playing. And it's kind of scary just how much I miss the ability to share space.

Back before I got into WoW, The Sims 2 was my game of choice. I spent hours upon hours breeding funny-looking Sims, taking screenshots and making up stories. I was also a member of various communities and took part in a vivid exchange of ideas and information there. It was all I could have wanted from a game.

But then I started to play WoW and... in principle playing with my Sims was still as good as before, but I just could not stand playing completely on my own anymore, having to wait for the interaction to happen afterwards and on forums. In Dragon Age II I could briefly overcome this problem because I managed to really immerse myself in the story and wanted to see where it was going, no matter what. However, now that I know the ending I'm really longing for company again.

It's a bit of a shame because intellectually, I'm aware that single-player games can still offer great entertainment. And I would kind of like to play around with different settings and options. After having spent so much time playing an MMO however, the experience of just doing my own thing in my own lonely little world just feels a bit hollow these days.

Why we should have more class quests

On Saturday night I finally got lucky with the dungeon finder and managed to get into heroic Sethekk Halls on my Alliance druid. The run was a lot more fun than I've had in a five-man for some time, and I was pleased as punch to finally complete Vanquish the Raven God and acquire swift flight form. Despite of the difficulties I had with getting that last step of the quest done now that the level cap is at eighty, it was still very much worth doing and I can heartily recommend putting the effort in yourself if you've got a druid of the right level. It's definitely one of the best pieces of class-related content currently in the game.


The main thing that makes this quest line stand out to me over many others is the fact that it doesn't just take you to places you might not have seen before and present you with class-related lore, but that several of the individual quests are specifically tailored towards using druid class-abilities. To Catch A Sparrowhawk for example requires you to trap, not harm, a shy bird that will fly away from you if you get within its normal aggro range. For several classes that would be pretty much impossible, but a druid can use soothe animal to get close, switch to cat form and prowl, or simply make the bird hibernate.

The three "essence" quests are even better, with each one being designed to be completed in a different form. The first boss has low health but summons a lot of adds quickly, so the sturdy bear form has the best tools to deal with him. The second boss is a squishy caster with a decent amount of health, so trying to claw him to death quickly while in cat form works great. And finally, the third boss is extremely hard to fight in melee but very vulnerable to spells, so even if you're a feral druid your best bet is to stay in caster form, root and moonfire him. Oh, and did I mention that you have to dispel poisons and curses from yourself too? It's not nearly as hard as it used to be, but provided you do those quests at roughly at the right level you'll still have to engage your brain and learn how to play your class. And that's a good thing!

If anything it's a shame that druid players aren't presented with a quest like this much earlier. If people were already confronted with challenges like this at level twenty or thirty, it would really help those that are new to the class to get a better understanding of what the different specialisations are about and which style of play they enjoy the most. Nothing like valuable guidance for those truly new to the game, who might not even know that they are supposed to do research on different talent specs online. Not to mention that it's just plain fun!

Blizzard has said in the past that they don't want to make any more class quests because they don't like spending too much time on content that only a small portion of the player base will ever see. I understand that reasoning but at the same time I think that it's faulty. People used to complain about raiding not being accessible enough, which led Blizzard to change their raiding philosphy in this expansion and make sure that everyone could see everything, which I assume is what is influencing their stance on class quests as well. But nothing is stopping anyone from rolling an alt of another class! Providing some content that is unique to one class doesn't mean locking players out of that content, it means giving them an incentive to roll an alt of that class and see for themselves!

For comparison purposes, I mentioned playing Dragon Age: Origins recently. One of the things that I found most fascinating about the game the longer I played it were the many different choices you get to make on the way. The very basic core of the story about you becoming a hero and fighting the big bad remains the same, but a lot of other things are entirely up to you and how you decide to advance the story, who lives or dies, who becomes friend or foe, who gets to rule the kingdom in the end. However, this also means that you only see a limited portion of the game in a single playthrough - if you choose to kill an important character, you obviously can't see the ending that involves him being alive. Bioware didn't say, "oh well, we need to make a game where everyone can see everything in a single playthrough or else people won't like it" and were still successful. In fact, as soon as I completed the game I started up a new session with the intent of seeing how I could make events play out differently. Variety is the spice of (virtual) life!

I think Blizzard is really missing out on some great opportunities by neglecting class quests these days, both to teach players a little about how to play their class in-game and to give everyone more of an incentive to reroll and try out different classes.

Going from WoW to Dragon Age

I have a confession to make: I haven't been playing a lot of WoW in the past couple of days; instead I've been playing Dragon Age. This is unusal for me in so far as I never played a single-player roleplaying game before. Yep, you read that right. Before I got into WoW I used to play old school adventure games, real-time strategy games and The Sims, but never any RPGs. They looked very similar to action adventures to me, and I didn't like action adventures because they took the old school adventure games that I loved and slowly shifted their focus towards jumping, running and fighting, which was simply not something I wanted from the genre. The only reason I ended up getting Dragon Age was because Spinks raved about it when it first came out and I was intrigued by the things she posted.

After I finished playing with the extremely detailed character creator, I found that the game itself looked pleasantly familiar to a WoW player: I need to upgrade my gear, clicking on things that sparkle is useful, there's my health and my mana bar, warriors are the tough guys in plate, mages cast cone of cold and heal... wait, what? Healing mages? Well, since there are no priests or anything of the like, someone had to do it I guess.

The main difference between Dragon Age, or any single-player RPG I suppose, and a game like WoW is the shift of focus. A single-player game is all about the story: You need to go out and save the world, and everything you do is focused on making the next step necessary to achieve that goal. You gain levels on the way, upgrade your gear, learn some professions... but it all feels damn trivial in comparison. I mean, my main character is a herbalist and can make healing potions out of flowers she finds by the road, but considering the same potions drop off dead monsters like candy it feels pretty superfluous. Not to mention that there are no skill-ups for using your profession or anything like that.

Upgrading your gear is nice, but there don't seem to be all that many different options and it all kind of looks the same (boo realism). In WoW I get excited about gear upgrades; in Dragon Age the constant need to check whether what just dropped is better than what I already have before selling it all simply feels like a nuisance that stalls my story progression - though I guess the fact that I'm having to manage the outfits of a whole party at once isn't helping. (Are these boots an upgrade for my warrior? No? What about the other warrior?)

In contrast to that, a game like WoW has an overarching story too (like in the case of the current expansion the expedition to Northrend and battling the Lich King), but it's comparatively low-key. Most quests are only very tangentially related to the plot (at best), and a lot of things that are basically just "fluff" in single-player games are inflated to be full-blown, very time-consuming features that become a goal onto themselves, like gaining levels to be able to advance, skilling up professions or collecting all the best gear available.

Looking at it from that angle, I think I can understand why many people complain about a lot of aspects of WoW being too "grindy", if these people are used to the way these things work in single-player RPGs. Why do I have to waste so much time collecting all that gear if all I want to do is kill the Lich King?

Coming at it from the other end of the spectrum however, as someone who started with MMOs without ever having tried anything similar, it feels like the MMO way of requiring everything to take a lot of time is the normal way to go and anything else is lacking. After all, things like skilling up professions can be a mini-game of their own! It's all about perspective I guess.