Cataclysm? Werewolves and Goblins? Awesome!

.....Or why I may just be popping back into World of Warcraft. (The Joy of MMO's)

So awhile ago I wrote a blog entry about a new Star Wars MMO coming out that had me all excited. And while I'm still looking forward to it, Blizzard just released word about a new expansion to the World of Warcraft series. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Their last expansion gave gamers an incredibly powerful class in the Deathknight and a couple of new zones were added, but overall, I didn't see enough to bring me back to a game that is a huge time sink. I'll get more into the new expansion after a brief explanation followed by some nostalgia bragging.

Now for the unfamiliar, MMO's are a unique genre of game where instead of the goal being to complete the game, you instead have to set up goals within the game: to reach the next level, to kill a particular bad guy, to get a powerful weapon, etc. "So what is the fun in this?" you might ask. Well, for starters, there is a social aspect to the game that you just don't get when you play on a console (PS3, Xbox360, etc.). Sure there are a few co-op games where you can play side by side with a buddy and run through a game, but take that experience, multiply it by a hundred and then you have an idea of what the online community is like. It is a whole different feeling when you realize that the group of friends you have met all come from different parts of the world and that you are all uniting to take down some big bad monster.

Some of my favorite gaming memories involve my best friend and me running through Azeroth in World of Warcraft. We'd both been playing for a few months on a PvP server and so we were getting pretty good a defending ourselves against other players. We decided to set up a couple of Horde characters on a new server that we could just run without having to worry about other people joining us - and thus House Savanhi was born. We were a fearsome duo - Kaylos (me), a bloodelf paladin, and Bastille (Chip), a bloodelf hunter. We were fearless running through Alliance territory while hunting for new pets for Chip. But our true crowning moment didn't occur until we hit level 24. Up until this point, we had attacked and destroyed players who were up to 9 levels higher than us (read this as: significantly stronger). However when we hit level 24 and were hanging around an area called Southshore, we were attacked by a human warrior whose level appeared not as a number but as a skull. This meant that attacking him was instant death. House Savanhi bows to no man though, so we fought back and brought his health down considerably.

We lost.

Afterwards, Chip and I discussed the fight in the little chat box -
Chip: "Dude, we almost had him."
Me: "I know...we did get him down pretty low."
Chip: "I think we can take him!"
Me: "...."
Me: "Let's go for it."
We both realized that we had held back some of our more powerful abilities.Sure enough when we got back to Southshore, the warrior spotted us and charged in. This time though, we had a plan. We spread out and I alternated between attacking the warrior and healing Chip and myself while Chip blasted away. It was a fierce battle but we were victorious. After the fight I looked up the warrior on the Armory, and found out that he was a level 44 human warrior. He had 20 levels on us, and we - just the 2 of us - beat him! Within 10 minutes of this fight, we slaughtered a 36 dranei paladin, 31 night elf warrior and a 32 human warrior. We were actually being solicited for help by other players to protect them against Alliance players.

Moments like this just don't happen on console games. The sheer adrenalin of matching wits and skill against a human opponent (outside of a First-Person-Shooter game), knowing where and when to use skills and abilities, working in tandem with your best friend to take down a stronger human player. Exhilarating!

And it is moments like that might just cause me to head back when the new expansion comes out. As I mentioned in the title, thar be Werewolves! Granted, they're called Worgen, but the principle is the same. And I do love me werewolves (see my first Twitter tweet if you doubt it). The sheer novelty of playing that race might be enough to draw me back where deathknights and flying mounts failed.

Now before this blog entry gets too much longer, I'm just going to stop here. I'll get more into some of the cooler details of the expansion in the future and I'll also point out the debate between monthly fees and paying for new console games.

Next time: A retro-game review: Secret of Mana followed by Dragon Quest VIII.