I promise I’ll get back to talking about mages soon. I’ve been doing some research on the latest PTR patch which I think will make interesting reading, but that can wait a few more days. Today I’d like to ask you a question.
Do you play World of Warcraft because it’s an MMO, or because it’s Warcraft?
The reason I ask is because your expectations of the game were probably different depending on what angle you were coming from. If you’re a veteran MMO player you’d probably expected many of the genre conventions to be applied to this game. The game world would then have been moulded and shaped around those genre conventions, effectively making a Warcraft MMO. It would still be fun to play but it would probably have had a much more traditional feel to it.
If on the other hand you’re a veteran of the Warcraft games then you’d probably expected the game world, environment and storyline to come first. You wouldn’t have felt too worried about genre conventions being cast out and disregarded as long as the game had that Warcraft look and feel. It would still have been fun to play with that unmistakable Blizzard polish, but it probably wouldn’t have felt like a traditional MMO.
Why do I make this point? Because sometimes we need reminding that games aren’t designed with our individual tastes in mind.