I appear to have jumped off at the deep end with these blogs. I mean, yeah, I initially said I was going to do this crap like 5 months ago, but you know me. Bloody Useless. With capital letters. If you don’t know me and you’re here new, I’m not useless and you can rely on me updating this blog 3 times a week, regular as clockwork!
Cough.
So, the point of my Games of Forever™ blogs is to wax lyrical about games that have stuck with me for a long time and belong in the coveted ‘Top xx’ that people seem to hang so much value on. I don’t do ‘Top xx’ because I’m a nebulous, fickle beast that changes his mind about what he likes with the phases of the moon (except 2 specific games, but we’ll get to those eventually). There are also 2 I couldn’t put numbers on even if I had some kind of device capable of expelling lead at high velocity pointed at my head. I can’t really explain it but it seems a disservice somehow to put numbers on them. World of Warcraft is one of those games.
WARNING: this is going to be a long one. Get a cup of tea and settle in because there’s a lot to tell. If you have no interest in someone who is steaming towards 40 years old prattling on about the heyday of a game you don’t care about come back when I’m not misty eyed and wading through melancholy.
Still here? Good.
There are quite a few reasons this is a difficult one to talk about, not least of which is the game that WoW is now is not the game it was. It’s over 10 years old and any MMO worth its salt would not be the same game it was when it started after a decade. It’s not like I could go back and play the original game to familiarise myself with it again like I will with other games in this blog without some serious messing around with private servers and game clients and what not so I fear most of this post will be anecdotal and rely on my horrific memory.
Probably the biggest reason it’s difficult to talk about with any cohesiveness is there’s just so much to tell. I could tell you how the world became like a second home; how easy it was to lose yourself in. How real it felt despite being outlandishly cartoon-like. I could tell you a million stories about gooning around for no reason, grinding ore or herbs or other materials for professions to get up to the required level to train the next load of items I’d probably never use, or for a rare mount. Or the time, before any Player Vs Player mode was implemented, myself and a load of other forum members tried to get to a high level area so we could meet the opposing faction (the Alliance to our Horde. FOR THE HORDE! Ahem, excuse me) from the same forum only to have to call it off because too many people died trying to scramble through ?? level (which denoted mobs x levels above you) crocolisks and tigers .
I could tell you about the late nights, the friends made, the relationships destroyed, the rage, the elation, the recrimination, and the indescribable rapture of getting those boss kills after literally weeks of trying. It’s one of the few games that spilled over into real life and had an effect on me and the people I played with and came to call friends, despite never meeting many of them in real life.
The experience of WoW for me is too vast to put into words. I’m trying, this is the third time I’ve tried writing this, but there’s just too much.
Like any good video game, World of Warcraft was pure escapism. You chose your race and your class (in my case I decided as a Tauren Shaman, which was fine until I got to level 21ish and realised I knew shit-all about how to play the bloody class) and it puts you in the world with a skill or two and some exclamation marked non-player characters. It was breathtaking. I can’t expect anyone who hasn’t had a similar experience in games to understand. That sounds condescending as shit, but it’s true. I’d never seen anything like it and I doubt I’ll ever experience anything like it again.
It was the first game I had to split my time across two servers and many characters to try and keep up with the social aspect of it.
It was a masterpiece in many ways and you took away from it what you wanted. You wanted lore? The game had it bleeding out of it’s nose. You want to explore? Go nuts, as long as you can get away from the higher level mobs. Pop culture references? Tonnes of them. Just want the grind? Sure, kill away to your heart’s content.
The first character I invested any massive amount of time into was my female Forsaken Warlock, Necrique. I’ve no idea where that name came from. I have no idea what it means. The Forsaken are awesome, so stereotypically metal, so wonderfully cliched. The male /dance emote is a one man mosh party, all flailing limbs, devil horns and head banging. They also have my favourite (if inaccurate, but they are undead) /silly emote (“Roses are grey, violets are grey, I’m dead and colourblind.”)
I stuck with Necrique for a long time, she was my ‘main’. One thing that makes me sad is how much I’ve forgotten. Warlocks get pets to help them out with the damage, each one has it’s own unique name and you start with an imp and I can’t for the life of me remember my imps name. Bearing in mind I used that little cunt for 5 fucking years, and yet I can’t remember his name. Balls. The Voidwalker was called Sardok, I remember that, I guess I used him more than the Imp.
We raided Kharazan (a wonderful ten man dungeon set in a typically Blizzard gothic-styled castle), we ran 5 man dungeons beyond count, we watched sunrises and sunsets, grinded (ground?) for epic, rare mounts and tabards, won the weekly fishing competition, flew over the continents of Azeroth, all the while with her spikey hair and half rotted face. She was an extension of me, which sounds like a very odd thing to say seeing as she’s female and dead and entirely a fictitious product of a load of ones and zeroes. I realise how oddly I’m writing about her, but when you spend the equivalent of something like 40 full days (960+ hours, fact fans) with a character you develop a very peculiar attachment to them. I’ve also put approximately 30-40 days each into my Blood Elf Paladin Explosion (named after the lead singer of fictitious cartoon metal band Dethklök) because Necrique was a pure damage dealer and our guild and friends sometimes needed a Tank or Healer, and Obullox (after learning how to play him, and also thanks to some excellent mods for the totems) but never attached to either like I did Necrique. Then there’s the multitude of ‘alt’ characters that never made it past level 20, or my Forsaken Mage ‘Rotte’ (which is Norwegian for rat, so that led to some interesting private conversations where I had to admit I had no idea it meant that and I wasn’t Scandinavian) who got to 60 ish, each of which have thousands of memories and stories attached to them.
Then there’s Tinks.
Tinks isn’t my character, but my partners, Paula. A troll mage, all tusks and floppy feet, who a guild mate and I met in game as she joined through a forum we both used. We spent a while trying to figure out whether she was a gay male or female. She (half-jokingly) maintains it’s because we’re sexist pigs and we didn’t think girls played video games, but that’s not even vaguely the truth. She had an effeminate way of typing but nothing she said obviously gave her away as female.
Look, we didn’t fucking know, alright?! Jesus, don’t judge me. Pricks.
Where was I? So, yeah, Tinks. The TL;DR version is we spent lots of time together in game, things progressed eventually outside of the game and we’ve been together ten years. Turns out neither one of us was as psychotic or broken as the media would have you believe about people on the internet. Who’d have thought it, eh?
But my better half is just one part of the massive WoW tapestry that hangs in the gallery of my life. Or something less wanky and nauseating. Eventually we both stopped playing it. We both gradually found other things to do with our spare time, neither of us really wanting to be dictated to by a game, which is what happens when you raid. You have to be on by x time, and you spend y hours smashing your face into the bosses until you learn the patterns and beat them. I wouldn’t change all that for the world, but it became apparent it wasn’t how we wanted to spend evenings and weekends.
The game changed with each expansion and people drifted off and it became apparent we were both playing for the social aspect and as people left, there was less and less reason to play. It also became obvious that we didn’t have time to invest in the game like we did before, and I think this is a large part of the decline of WoW. I mean it still has a ridiculous number of subscribers that any game company would be envious of, but the MMORPG is a bit of an outdated concept these days. There are very few new games capable of continuing on and getting people to cough up a monthly sub. I definitely don’t have the time or inclination to go through it all again.
All of this is why World of Warcraft cannot be numbered in a Top 10, for me. The sheer amount of memories, experiences and enjoyment I got out of it makes it (and I hate to use such a fucking flowery word) transcends lists and numbers. I can’t assign it an arbitrary figure simply because there isn’t one that could do it justice.
Video Games Are Fucking Great 