My cousin’s foray into a more traditional massive fantasy title has come to an end. Her desire to transition the fun she was having in her first MMO, Free Realms, into the gaming experience she’d heard about in World of Warcraft didn’t take.
Even in the vanilla-flavored, on rails and spoon-fed character progression you find in a WOW, there are complexities of “real” progression that can’t be avoided. Unless of course, you’re off tooling by yourself in a corner, which isn’t what she wanted.
Besides the fact that the “Recruit a Friend” XP boost levels you faster than you can even afford to buy class spells and abilities, the nature of knowing your role, specializing for it and playing that role in a group, can only be watered down but so much. At some point, you have to dig in your class’ undies to deal with choosing a talent spec and making somewhat sensible gear choices when presented with options.
You could take the character ride completely clueless – I suppose. Level all alone and move through the content at a pace that would eventually feel like crawling on broken glass. If that’s not your brand of amusement then yes, you need to know that a Mage has Arcane, Frost and Fire specs, and when you’re in a group they expect you to how have the Sheep spell and know how to use it. They expect you to have Blizzard and Frost Nova, and know that when they send you into the middle of the mobs bubbled and you're being healed, that you need to use those skills to... well – kill shit. Oh you don’t have those skill or know how to use them? Well then, “ktnx bai l2p gtfo noob!”
While no one was that cruel, it quickly became obvious to her that a traditional MMO isn’t just about showing up, winging it and having a good ole time, while being unprepared and clueless. She decided WOW was interesting but it was more than she wanted to deal with in terms of gaming entertainment. She has happily returned to her Free Realms Mage. Those of us who “really” play MMOs might look at such as her and think, “You’ve got to be kidding me. If you can’t make it in WOW, you can’t make it in any traditional fantasy MMO.”
WOW brought MMO goodness to the masses. Its polish and ease-of-use are now infamous. It’s playing legion 11 million strong. Yet for someone who knows nothing about online gaming beyond FR, even WOW isn’t easy enough. That’s an interesting bit of perspective. Will there be more players that think to make the leap from FR to a WOW-like game, only to slink away whimpering? Will you have FR Tourists skipping through your MMO? More importantly, will you dissuade and abuse them when they arrive, decry they’re not man enough and send them off packing?
I doubt that players whose first massive title is FR, have blogs out there so we can follow them as they attempt to make the leap to a more traditional MMO. I wish there were. I’d love to see how this plays out for others. Maybe some will pop up in the not so distant future.
