It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.
– Galatians 5:1
The realm of additional choices results in a territory fraught with pitfalls and traps.
Mists of Pandaria HAS TO BE my favorite expansion of World of WarCraft thus far. Surely, I’m a sucker for “generic Asian” themes, but this feels particularly respectful of the material from which it is derived. Pandaria is a wholly new combination of Chinese and Japanese elements that cribs from every cultural resource in the region. Blizzard knows it has to work within their already established European fantasy conventions, and I believe it does this well without falling into any stereotypes. Well, except for unbelievably cool samurai helmets:
Ah, Kongming, you are the only character I am playing now, and you give me great tanking joy as you drink beer to sustain huge blows to your fat person.
The new talent system adds a host of improvements – no longer do you make 61 choices to distribute an increasing amount of talent points. The problem, other than sheer complexity, was that many of the stat boosts were required for any specialization that was viable in raid content. Thus, you would only have the illusion of freedom in how you wanted to play a particular spec. Could you make wrong choices? Entirely possible! But anyone serious about the game just looks at exterior websites with mathematical calculations (yes, ElitistJerks does this for fun) that determine, once and for all, what talents you should pick. For an example of how big they were getting, you only need to see this talent tree from Wrath of the Lich King to get a good idea of HOW MANY CHOICES you were given. And, unfortunately, how little your choices mattered.
So, Blizzard cooked up a new concept. Every fifteen levels (90 is the new level cap), you choose one of three abilities or stat augmentations. Rather than give you too much choice and force you to figure out what even constitutes a good choice, Blizzard presents a simple choice with increased complexity. The first branch of the Monk talent tree has this in spades. Monks are defined by their mobility; they have an ability, called “Roll” which allows them to roll in any direction about ten yards. You can roll twice, but each roll has a 12 second cool-down period. This ability’s usefulness runs the gamut – so how do you improve it? Well, there’s three choices on offer in the level 15 section of the talent tree. Celerity gives you an additional roll charge and reduces the cooldown on rolling by 5 seconds. Tiger’s Lust, instead, gives you the ability to free yourself from movement and ability impairing effects and get a short burst of speed – this complements Roll when you’ve used them up. Momentum, on the other hand, gives you a walking speed increase when you Roll.
So, which do you choose? Well, they could ALL be useful – that’s why the system works. Blizzard now gives you all the abilities you need to play effectively in your spec; now, you need to choose your preference on what would work better in a particular fight or encounter. Since you can now change talent trees easily, this encourages experimentation and FUN. I’d call it a rousing success.
On the other hand, providing choice can also constrain, bizarrely enough. Blizzard wants player to explore the world they create; after Cataclysm, which turned into “wait in towns for dungeons or raid” due to a lack of integration, they learned their lesson. Thus, we see that PvE content nearly requires questing to make progress in the game. This wouldn’t be bad if not for the daily quest integration. Surely, daily quests have existed since Burning Crusade, and they’ve been tied to PvE content before in previous expansions, but Pandaria takes these to another level. Now, you need reputation to get certain items, and the only way to get said reputation involves daily quests. Lots of daily quests.
Reputation with the Golden Lotus takes THREE WEEKS of daily questing to hit revered – hence, being able to buy epic quality gear. I’m not sure about you, but this absolutely SCREAMS “time sink” to me. i should expect a game with a monthly subscription fee to require such a thing, but really? Before, we could do dailies AND champion a faction in a dungeon (thus, you could grind reputation rather easily if you had a group of four). That’s no longer the case – if you want stuff, you have to grind it. Blizzard can say all they want that such things are “optional”, but anyone playing WoW knows that gearing up fast requires time – the things you want to drop may never drop in a given instance, and reputation rewards fill the holes (and SERIOUSLY, nothing ever drops in heroic dungeons that I want. Lots and lots of time wasted). These are guaranteed pieces of gear, for the most part, and who wouldn’t pass that up? So Blizzard says “invest time in our game, or get out”. You either do them or go insane waiting for the stupid bracers to drop before you become catatonic. Will I do this? Apparently I am!
As I said in the beginning, the idea of “choice” brings its own set of possible problems, and here’s one staring right at me. Game design works much in the same way as real life. Think of it like this: all games have reward structures, whether those rewards help you beat the game, are merely the endorphin rush that makes overcoming a challenge satisfying, etc. In either case, making a good game doesn’t require either of those elements; in fact, an innovative game may combine, rescind, or totally ignore its genre’s past and completely change into something new and exciting. It’s the freedom from those same conventions that provides us with new game experiences. However, slavish devotion to an outdated model can hamper a game’s innovations – not to say the same old thing isn’t good, but it’s still the same old thing. So it is, in this case, with World of WarCraft – it is still tied down to the MMO notions of grinding. The only way to make people quest was daily quests in this vein, and that’s a shame. I suppose that’s why Paul was so adamant about freedom from the law in Galatians 5:
2 Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. 3 And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. 4 You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. 5 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.
The ability to be free brings choice. Reasoning. Thought. That isn’t the life of a sheep, but a person in constant awareness of themselves and others. That’s what makes it much more frightening than a simple Law – if we just follow what it says, can we truly be free? Rather, Jesus says the fulfillment of the Law comes from loving God and loving your neighbors as yourself. That’s a very different prescription from 613 very specific laws – that’s some dangerous stuff. It’s a challenge we should be eager to tackle!
