Wolfbytes

When the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm announcement landed, I quit WoW. Not for that reason alone, but the final straw was Blizzard confirming class restrictions would be relaxed. Most dedicated RP’ers right now are praying there’s some in-world story explanation to this that hasn’t been revealed yet. Because for us, changing who can be a druid or a paladin, let alone having Night Elves abandon the bane on using Arcane magic, is sort of a a big deal.

The pure gamer in me says it shouldn’t be. Players have been clamouring for certain gameplay/class restrictions to be changed for ages, and accommodating them is just good customer service. I’m only shocked here because after years of on/off roleplay in WoW, I finally realised an old friend was right. For all it’s genius in gameplay and design, in storytelling WoW delivers the exact same bullshit quality as any lesser franchise. It tells the same half-arsed stories using the same two-dimensional characters as every other Generic Fantasy Game (TM) out there – and it’s doing it’s damnest to achieve more, not less, genericness.

This also isn’t a big deal. In the world of gaming, only BioWare and Peter Molyneux routinely make story their primary selling point. To the rest “compelling story” is the same sort of non-information press release spin as “action-packed adventure”, “thrilling gaming experience” and “exclusive title”. WoW has never claimed it’s story is all that special, and it’s never claimed to be a RPG, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge it on those grounds (though it does have dedicated RP servers, so they do try to snag that audience too). It was just a shock to realise that though Blizzard does allow for roleplay in WoW, on closer reflection their approach to story seems handcrafted to drive all but the most casual roleplayers clinically insane.

Much fluff, less meat

The root of the problem roleplayers face in WoW is that there is story, but it establishes almost nothing useful about the setting. The games and novels and comics only tell their own isolated bit of epic history, generally involving dashing teenagers (or adults, ancients and demigods who act remarkably like teenagers), who basically go about solving dramatic situations with ill-advised but dramatic action, and then evade all responsibility by doing something even more dramatic. There’s very little about normal culture or less epic times – and even the epic bits read like the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which shares WoW’s remarkable ability to drown all its cool ideas in metric fucktons of embarrassing posturing by uninspired protagonists. Which is a shame, because under the goop the Warcraft setting does get around to some pretty neat fantasy themes – noble and intelligent orcs and trolls, savage and magic-hating elves, a religion that’s evolved past the need for God and a matriarchal society that isn’t all about peace and hugs, to mention a few. In spite of Blizzard’s best efforts to produce a homogenized fantasy MMO, some of that variation still survives in WoW.

For those bits or originality, I made a lot of excuses for Blizzard’s storytelling over my WoW roleplaying career.  “Play along with the setting, not against it” is a direct quote from the roleplay section of the official World of Warcraft player’s guide, and I used it a lot. The thing is, to do that there has to be a setting. The game itself isn’t enough – roleplay in any narrative way requires an underlying, predictable idea of how things work in the world, and that idea should not retroactively change with the latest bugfixes, class revamps, raid content and expansions to the mechanical game. I’m not even thinking about the genuinely heavy-handed game mechanical stuff, like phased areas — speed questers like me will usually have finished anything that could put us out of phase soon after it came out, nailing story-related quests to “some point in the recentish past” (or if it’s a secret revelation, to “we suspect, but can’t prove it until Blizzard advances the story to make this common knowledge and fact”). I’m talking about the basic world information that give the story its context.

Where Blizzard deserts roleplayers

Sitting and talking about stuff - the backbone of roleplay. Easy, as long as you have a setting that actually knows how it works day to day.

To have sensible roleplay, I need to know if my 500-year old elf is an ancient or a teen among her people. I need to know if my character’s culture considers torture ok or a crappy thing to do. I need to know if my character’s religion thinks God is a code of conduct, an actual creature or that big blobby sun-thing up there. And if this can change on the fly – by switching elven age maximums from 700 to “several thousand” years, or by turning Blood Knights from evil leaches into redeemed servants of the Naaru, or by having Night Elves pick up Arcane Magic again, or by declaring that Tauren can be paladins because they worship the Sun, which is now exactly the same thing as serving Vorlon-wannabe aliens or studying a warrior monk philosophy that has long since done away with the concept of ‘God’ in favour for something semi-Zen…

…this is where roleplay starts coming apart. Changes like that aren’t “just” furthering the plot, or adding to the setting in the same way as opening up previously inaccessible places like Quel’thalas or Dalaran does. They’re not a pure gameplay change, like rebuilding the paladin class from skills to talent trees. They’re rewriting the underlying logic that governs what is normal and possible in the setting – it’s like saying, ‘in this expansion, gravity will work sideways, and it possibly always has’. At the very least roleplayers need some way to rationalise the change. What bugs me is, I’m pretty sure Blizzard knows this, and doesn’t care. Why should they? Roleplayers are a minority of paying customers, 5% or less by common estimates. There are probably more Italian-speaking WoW-players than there are RP’ers across all the language areas. Italian localisation would be a better investment for Blizzard’s money than catering to us whiny roleplaying geeks.

I can respect the logic. As a gamer, I can admit Cataclysm implements stuff I’ve wanted (flying mounts in old Azeroth and an update of the badly dated classic zones), and I have to admit that Blizzard does, rarely, make an effort to cater to us with a more storied experience. The irony is that when they do this – by dungeon encounters, or phased quests, or by having Silvermoon NPC’s blithely praise Kael’thas while Outland NPC’s revile him as a Legion lackey – they just succeed in exposing how generic their idea of story is, and how primitive and ham-handed MMO tools for handling narratives actually are. How many times a day did the Alliance see Onyxia exposed before Blizzard finally freed us from that terrible /yell-spam?

But mostly they don’t seem to bother. The message seems to be that story is fine when you’re levelling and bored, but the purpose of WoW is to reach the endgame. If the Argent Tournament is anything to go by, after that we’re only expected to want a graphical button mashing exercise whose sole point is to reach the next loot lotteries and/or PvP leaderboard update. Success will be rewarded only with gear that lets you do the same exact thing a tiny bit more efficiently. This is what WoW is about now – the story is padding at best.

It’s built for raiding

Even the tram in Ulduar looks cool. Raiders are used to scale - take it away and the whole thing collapses.

I don’t mind flimsy or even no story if it’s logical. An underground gladiator ring, Arena-style and run by greedy and immoral goblins, works fine. But the Argent Tournament? We’ve fought an epic campaign to Arthas’s doorstep, we’re ready to smite the greatest traitor of the generation in his undead unmentionables, and we … set up a tourney on his porch so he can laugh himself silly while Tirion Fordring’s valiant knights beat up on each other? Or worse, watch while Tirion obligingly decimates his own army by feeding them to random raid-bosses?

Ulduar was the allout showcase of Blizzard’s current raid-building prowess. The scenery was beautiful, the story stuck together, progression was nicely modularised to let raids vary their routines, and even the trash fights were challenging enough to wipe overly cocky raids. The Tournament instances, Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader, are the plain lazy antithesis of that design. One ugly arena, and nothing else except a lone NPC to click. When you do, you get a boss to fight, without even the thinnest clue why Tirion is playing last days of Rome on the Lich King’s front lawn. Couldn’t they at least have added some nominal mechanic where a failed raid is rescued from the beasts and patched back up – so it would seem like Tirion is training his army and not just butchering chunks of it for giggles?

I’m hoping the hyperefficient boss-o-matic is a design they’ll back away from. In other raids, gameplaywise, WoW is still unbeaten, and I’d like to return to nostalgise, once the sting of disappointment has worn off. But if I ever roleplay in the game again, I’ll be doing it with a big “whatever” to the setting – because anything else simply isn’t worth the effort.

Newbies get sabotaged by the epic

Blizzard has never honoured the terms it offered to RP’ers. “Play with the world, not against it” simply doesn’t work when they retcon established facts about the game world regularly. It’s the roleplay equivalent of a spouse who demands you do EXACTLY as they want, and then without warning decides they want something else instead. No-one wants to be the poor sucker being jerked around like that. Especially when each change of heart breaks suspension of disbelief and reminds you that even the bits that aren’t annoying you right now are still very tired and very teenage. And Blizzard’s own lore characters are only the start of it.

When these guys are given buddy-dialog, can you blame roleplay newbies for getting swelled heads?

Take Tyrande who somehow gets called a wise and loving leader even after murdering her own people to free a known menace. Or Sylvanas, who apparently is queen of the Forsaken largely by virtue of being powerful enough to stay pretty and stand straight while dead. Or Rhonin, who might seem a match for demigods if his best mate Krasus wasn’t married to one – which should be cringe-worthy in and of itself. When the official gold standard for viable characters is like that (and a very sincere “like that”, not an ironic Quentin Tarantino “like that”), it’s no wonder so very many WoW-taught roleplayers create Mary Sue after Mary-fucking-Sue and proceed to enact their own personal soap operas as if the world revolved around their dramatic and luridly described navels. Sometimes as players as well as characters.

The one thing about Cataclysm that makes me happy is that Blizzard finally broke my back. Since I’m not taking intravenous bullshit-for-story from the source anymore, I can finally take a breath and quit taking it from players as well. No more drama that would make daytime TV writers cringe with the frequency of life-altering disasters. No more roleplay where ‘mature’ consists of playing a female character (though really you’re male) and only having cybersex some of the time. Yes that second one is a cliche, dammit – because in seven years online I’ve met a total of four men who don’t publicly admit to doing both, “but it doesn’t count because…”.

Yes it bloody does count. Could you punks at least exploit your own gender and sexual orientation for a change? You’re embarrassing the actual women and lesbians/bis – I’ve lost count of how many people have told me I play “a really convincing woman” because of you.

Bad Blizzard. Bad WoW roleplayers. No cookie for either of you.