This one, is none other than one of the most popular MMOs out there: World of Warcraft. As luck would have it, I managed to get an account and I have been playing as a Night Elf priest, with a classmate of mine, who is playing a druid.
It was quite a big leap. I had sworn off MMORPGs for their various flaws and time-eating prowess. However, as I found myself in a period of way-too-much-time, I agreed to play. I was sort of curious about how WoW worked, anyway. That was important, because gameplay mechanics are a large factor in deciding whether or not to play a game. I did not want to play another MMORPG with clunky fighting and "sandwich-ness".
What exactly is sandwich-ness, you ask? Well, there's really no good way to describe it. Basically, sandwich combat is a system that binds your character to the target he/she is attacking. Instead of leaving you free to blast at everything(and nothing, sometimes), the game only allows you to use skills and shoot stuff when there is an opponent nearby. And also the bindy-ness. They stick you into combat and make you unable to run away, or at least, not easily.
This makes using ranged weapons a real pain, because you can't employ hit and run tactics. Instead, you shoot your target until he gets close enough to you to whack you, then you shoot him in the face at point blank range, hoping that your weak fabric armour saves your life.
The best comparison I can make for RPGs is... Diablo 2- Not sandwich. Hell, even Diablo 1 doesn't have sandwich-ness. Just about every MMORPG- Sandwich.
I get the feeling that no one really understood that. I probably would not understand it, either.
Fun fact! Sandwich-ness plagues every MMORPG out there, that isn't a two-dimensional sidescroller.
The closest I have ever gotten to a non-sandwich, 3D game, is probably Priston Tale. Which, unfortunately, is a money-guzzling grindfest that just takes too much effort to be rewarding. You would agree with me if you spent over a hundred hours to get to level 15, and then realised that you would need three times that amount of time to start using some mildly interesting skills.
I digress. World of Warcraft, while not being a classic sandwich game, still falls under my definition of sandwich. So the combat can only be described with "meh". The world, on the other hand, is amazing.
It is huge. Amazingly large. The starting island of the Night Elves is what appears to be this giant tree stump. I can't really tell. The edges of the island are all planty and root-like. About the edges... You can actually fall off the branches. I fell off, landed in the sea(died) and when I respawned, I swam over to the mainland.
That in it self was really cool to me. Being able to swim from one island to another. Basically, World of Warcraft breaks away from one of the issues that older MMORPGs had, which was that the world was cut up into a series of maps that had a portal/opening that lead to the next map. In more graphically intensive games, there would be a loading screen. WoW doesn't do any of that. Instead, it boasts a seamless world. Even the caves and dungeons don't have annoying little loading screens before you get into them.
So basically, you can run from one end of an island to another, and not stop to load.
Another great thing about the world is that it actually makes use of the 3D engine it runs on. In the past, the most 3D you had was characters and buildings made out of polygons, not sprites, and having slightly different ground levels. World of Warcraft decided that it was going to use the third dimension a little more. We now have buildings that reach up into the sky, being beautiful (albeit troublesome) skyskrapers that elevate the statuses of various NPCs.
You know, if elves are so magical and all, why don't they invent some kind of elevator? Or do they enjoy running up immense flights of stairs, laden with weapons and heavy armour, just to visit some old kook who'll charge you money to talk to him?
Oh, and not to mention jumping down. That was hilarious.
In a nutshell, great World, great Warcraft. Not enough war.
This is one of those games that is going to help me wait Diablo 3 out. I downloaded the gameplay video, so that I could watch it in full screen.
I watch that thing at least twice a week.
(Read it from the bottom up. Also, a Dark One is a low-leveled cannon fodder kind of monster.)
-Joe