W.O.W. #3 – Yes, I Do Start Playing (but do I like it?)

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering over character customization in World of Warcraft, but now I’ll get into my actual experience playing the game. In my first play-through, I stayed in the Goldshire area and completed many of the small initial quests that I’m sure all new players go through. Even when given the opportunity to leave on the gryphon, I stayed to complete the oddly comical quests associated with the families on the nearby farms.

At first, I found the world interesting. It was bright, full of color, and I felt at liberty to go pretty much anywhere. Here is where the explorer/spade side of me and the achiever/diamond side came into conflict. I wanted to explore the map and see how much variety there was to the world, but I also had a drive to complete any quest assigned to me. That’s why I spent so much time in the area around Goldshire, trying to complete all the tasks in that area before moving on to the next one (an impossible goal, I later found out).

This led to a whole lot of grinding; I haven’t made it very far into the game, but from what I can see most of the early quests are kill this many things, fetch this many objects, deliver this thing to this person, and repeat. To be frank, I found it all rather tedious and boring. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t care to be social with other players, but I completed these quests, got my rewards, obtained a new repetitive goal, and consistently wondered why exactly I was doing all of this. What’s the point? Where is my larger objective?

To be fair, the quest descriptions are interesting. They give you the why, how, where, etc. of your quest, and plenty of excess information concerning the world should the player choose to look. So far, reading these snippets of information has been the driving force in completing each successive quest, especially those that are sequential and relate to one another. But will it be enough to keep me interested?

I feel like I’m a picky player sometimes, but perhaps that’s normal. I know I tend to need either a compelling narrative to drive my gameplay, or interesting puzzles that capture my attention to keep me invested in a game. Perhaps the style of W.O.W. just won’t appeal to me, or (hopefully) it will get better as I play.

(Game session was 1 hour, completed at home on my laptop)