Investigative Gaming

Issue 5: World of Warcraft, Part 5 - The Wrapup

In this wrapup edition of Investigative Gaming's coverage of World of Warcraft's staying power, I'm going to try and keep this concise. I've spent a over a month on this project and I'm just as anxious as any of you to see it come to a conclusion. I've spent time on multiple avatars, covering all races and classes, and I've learned one thing from all of this: I'm not this game's target audience.

The target audience for WoW is someone who has allot of freetime, is driven by social interaction, and doesn't mind grinding through mindless tasks to reach what amounts to little more then bragging rights. I'm not saying there's something wrong with aspiring to reach level 70  to keep up with the masses, just that it's not for me. The game does have it's draws, such as the social networks that can form. If you get in a good one, you can really enjoy your time in WoW. If you don't, you'll spend allot of time doing nothing but simple quests, reaching a quest roadblock, which forces you to kill random beasts for hours, hoping to be able to survive the next quest. For someone like me, this is enough to drive you mad.

The end result is that the MMO gamer is significantly a different breed from the conventional gamer. There are points where they cross over, but by and large, someone who's used to a standard game is going to be lost in this digital chatroom of a game. If you like that kind of thing, it's going to swallow you whole. The gameworld is huge, the options vast, and the userbase is staggering. For people like me, we'll stick to GTA4 and Oblivion for our freeroaming kicks. Alphasim out.

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