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World of Warcraft: Beta 4 Patch |
Written by:
HitNRun
Monday, August 30, 2004 11:02 PM
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World of Warcraft Patch (World of Warcraft):
When The World! first got into the World of Warcraft beta in June, we were astonished at how complete the game seemed. Sure, there were some unfinished areas, Talents were removed for class-by-class reworking, and there was some lag from the un-optimized state of the code. But considering
what passes for "ready" in the world of Massively Multiplayer, WoW was pretty close to done. We were thinking "end of August" and open beta would be winding down. We thought this, again, in June.
Two and a half months (and one patch) later, WoW is actually farther from being finished. Some background info- There are nine classes in WoW, and all of them will have three separate lines of Talents. Talents are WoW's token Customization function, similar to
Spec Lines in Camelot, Skill trees in Diablo/Ragnarok, skills in Anarchy and Ultima Online and, well, nothing in Everquest. Blizzard's approach to Talents seems to be thusly:
1) Design and release Talent lines for two classes
2) Take angry notes from all the players without Talents over the course of two months
3) Make the offending Talents worthless to balance the game- they'll have to be fixed later, once everyone has Talents
4) Release a new crop of Talents.
Rinse, Repeat as necessary.
You can see how this kind of paranoid, plodding perfectionism could become a problem. I know it seems cruel to poke fun at Blizzard now, since this is probably the only time in the company's
history that they could be said to not know what the fuck they're doing- but they really don't know what the fuck they're doing. It's great to envision an Massively Multiplayer game that is perfect on release; no matter that no other MMG has ever come close to such a meticulous standard.
But I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't want to compete with flying cars for ad space, and that's where this approach will lead.
The simple fact is that no MMO can be perfect on release because so many beta testers are mouth breathing invalids who think free online games kick ass and goddamnit this one better not "sell out." Even worse are Blizzard's celebrity testers. What a fucking concept that is.
Find catassing, showboating narcissists that every other player despises (if you're lucky, just out of jealousy) and give them all beta
accounts.
So WoW, like every MMO before it, will not be perfect on release because the beta freak show can't measure up
to hordes (no pun intended) of paying customers. It can be perfected after release, but trying to iron out specialization lines until next summer isn't going to effect that, and Blizzard is better off getting back on the pace they were on this past spring.
D
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