Like many others who carry the spiritual stain of prior MMO contact, I’ve been spending some time in the WoW: Forever beta. After piloting a freshly-minted orc through the introductory quests in the Valley of Trials, I emerged into the wider Durotar scrubland where I soon entered into combat with a hostile scorpion that had strayed too close to the road I was following to Razor Hill.
For the next 38 consecutive seconds, I did nothing but watch my orc slowly bludgeon that scorpion to death with a wooden club. And reader, I say this with full sincerity: Those were 38 seconds of peak gaming.
I haven’t just been playing Forever to sample Blizzard’s distillation of year one WoW nostalgia. I’ve been testing a conviction that I recently forwarded after a week with Star Wars Galaxies: a belief that MMOs would be better off if they rediscovered their lost willingness to burn more of our time.
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My half-minute and change of scorpid combat has left me feeling pretty confident in the hypothesis.
The notion that slower could be better might feel antithetical to current trends in game design, particularly in MMOs. Games have given themselves over to the pursuit of acceleration: the drive to win faster, kill more, and make the numbers bigger as soon as possible—to achieve the most gaming in the least amount of time.
Judging from the ecosystems of optimization guides and meta build videos, players seem very eager to indulge. But when the rhythm of retail WoW is tuned with the assumption that even low level characters should enjoy a frenzy of special attack animations, button presses, and near-instant kill times, a meditative arachnid clubbing is a reminder of what’s been lost in the exchange.
Namely, a chance to appreciate the rest of the videogame.
When I’ve been acclimated to years of high-speed flying mounts and an abundance of off-cooldown abilities, the contemplative pace of my orc’s club-swinging opened up so much room for admiring the surrounding space—room I hadn’t realized I’d been missing so badly. I could savor the way the in-game sunrise spilled over the Horde heartland’s redstone crags, or the interplay of ambient wind samples and the soundtrack’s intermittent war drumming.
And crucially, unlike when an MMO is doing everything in its power to propel me along a highway of reptilian brain chemicals, those 38 seconds give me time to think: about what spells I might unlock over my next few levels, which zone I might want to quest in next, or what business that troll warlock is running towards in the distance. It’s time to wonder, weigh options, and linger in the concepts and possibility spaces that WoW proposes.
Knowing how WoW—and games like it—have gradually become a blur of constant doing, Forever’s massive popularity is validating how much satisfaction there can be in slowing MMOs down. Maybe this time it’ll stick.
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