Cataclysm

I've been a little remiss in posting to this blog. All I can say is that I have been busy and I view my blogs as on going journals where I accumulate thoughts over time rather than daily postings of current events. Whew! OK, I feel much better now.

I have been focusing, almost exclusively on World of Warcraft. It is an amazing thing to study. Yeah, yeah, I know, its fun to play as well. But, I seriously doubt that it would have held my attention for this long if it were just fun.

Cataclysm came out in December and this is the third majorly successful expansion of World of Warcraft. I tried out the new characters (Worgen on the Alliance side and Gobblins on the Horde side) and I have to say that the expansion designers did a pretty good job. They also fixed a number of my pet peeves which is always good.

As I play this game, I am always reminded of when I first learned operating systems. There are many parallels. They are both wonderfully complex. I find myself amazed that somebody actually thought things through as well as they did. And the devotees seem to have way too much invested in the learning curve to acknowledge the flaws.

My highest toon is now a 77 which has two major implications. First, I heard that the game changes dramatically when you hit 80. I have heard other such claims in the past which have turned out to be way over stated. But, I will wait and see on that one. Second, Cataclysm raised the bar from 80 to 85 and I have no idea what that will mean. Will it be just more of the same. Or will it be a whole new world. I have no idea.

Most of the changes I have noticed in Cataclysm (Cata for short) are positive changes. Some very positive. It would be interesting to take them one at a time and pick them apart. I may even do that some day. But for now, I have something else in mind. As I play one of my characters and pursue quest after quest I often get a visceral reaction to the quests which ranges from "that was a really good quest" to "that was a majorly dumbass quest". In a fit of frustration, I wrote in guild chat "I am getting tired of doing quests that were designed by people who got C's in design school." One of my guildies types "Agreed".

Being a reflective person I began to wonder what differentiates a good quest from a bad quest. It there some sort of theory that would allow one to assess the quality of a quest? Is a quest good because it matches a theory of good design? Or is it good because people say they like it? This has given me much to think about. I think World of Warcraft will become an object of study in the future much like, say Moby Dick or The Brothers Karamazov. Designers studying WoW will point to its major design success and its major design failures. Next time I am pursuing a majorly dumbass quest I am going to try to curb my frustration with the knowledge that this will be a good example for designers of the future of what not to do.