Will It Ever Die?

Probably not, but it appears that Arthas, the nemesis of Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, will.

After being older than five years and boasting millions of subscriptions, W.O.W. continues to thrive off the multitudes of addicted computer gamers stupidly hunched over their keyboards, flirting with pixelated, non-existent night elves from another world. Oh, and unfortunately those millions include me, too.

But there is a reason for this shameless stupidity. Last week marks the release of patch 3.3. Blizzard continues to add instances and content even a year after its release, including the unveiling of Tier 10 armor, three more dungeons, and a 25-man instance (also able to be down-scaled to a 10-man raid instance). The three instances involve a linear story where players take part in a small infiltration party attempting to exploit weaknesses in the Icecrown Citadel -- Arthas' home and fortress. The dungeons involve dramatic scenes that players take part in with Jaina Proudmoore and Arthas; the raid involves a joint Alliance-Horde siege on the Citadel go to hell in a hand basket with a gunship battle between the two factions, confrontations with the various denizens of his realm, and a confrontation with Arthas himself.

I have tried all the new content including the Icecrown Citadel raid, and I have this to say: the raid instance is quite challenging for those who aren't prepared. In typical modern World of Warcraft style, the battles are very dynamic, usually involving multiple phases, and require incredible management, skill and attention on the part of the players. No one is ever left out of the chaos. For some, this may be too much trouble. For others (including myself) this is the most exciting thing to come out of World of Warcraft in years. And as for the dungeons, they are by far the most difficult I can think of within the game. And this damned game has over five years of content.

But that's just the icing on the cake. The biggest advancement is the game's new cross-server looking-for-party tool. Before, players had to pray and go across the four-corners of the earth to find party members for certain dungeons. The new cross-server system allows for players across different servers to find each other rather than being limited to one server. What this means is that, instead of being limited to a pool of a few thousand players, a player now has a pool of tens of thousands of players to draw upon and party up with in dungeons. Instead of taking an hour to find players to party up with you, it now sometimes takes only a minute (five minutes at most). Never before have the game's player-versus-player battlegrounds been so empty -- they're all flocking to the new dungeon system. Blizzard says that the technology exists for raids and can be turned on like a switch, but they refuse to do it right now because of several problems they believe such a thing might introduce.

Five years ago I would have thought that the game would have died out by now, in favor of other competition. But that's really not the case -- instead, WOW continues to swallow the computer gaming industry up. And with a new movie coming out, it doesn't seem like its going to slow down. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? As much as I love World of Warcraft, I also love to hate it. I enjoy it, but I feel as though, these days, there just isn't enough competition for it to breed new, better games. In fact, the only real competition I can think of is Blizzard's other flagships -- StarCraft II and Diablo III -- neither even being massively multiplayer. When one company can afford to throw its own gaming convention, I think that says a lot. I hate Blizzard! But ... long live Blizzard?