MMO Gnome. Act Three. The World of Warcraft.

After inexplicably spending some time with the completely uneventful and not particularly massive ChainSAWn MMORPG -the only game ever having you explore a completely blank 100x100 grid- I went on and created a brand new e-mail account. What for? Well, it's a long silly story, but all you really need to know is I finally managed to enter the pop world of World of Warcraft and join a couple of million people in slaughtering its well-designed fauna. For 14 whole free trial days, mind you, during which (at least the 4-5 of them I actually played the thing) I absolutely failed to grab any screens whatsoever. So, here's all the WoW related eye-candy I'll be posting for this 3rd MMOG act:

Not bad, is it? Better look for more at the official site. Better yet, try the 14 day demo, as I did, but do expect downloading massive amounts of data and then some more. And then come another hundred Mbytes of patches, a simple registration bit, a pretty basic character creation process and you'll be ready to see what this WoW thing is all about, which frankly isn't that much.

To be fair, though, I must admit the game's not so much at fault, despite featuring little more than glorified fetch and killing quests. It really started off with the wrong foot, by having my online persona, Gnomie Freeware himself, a roguish gnome and a lover of butterflies, kill dozens upon dozens of harmless hogs, dogs and other monsters of the kind, during the exact same period I was reading William Cronon's account on the slaughtering of millions of buffaloes in the wider Chicago area during the 19th century, which had put me in an admittedly rare ecologically sensitive phase. Killing harmless beasts wasn't -at the time- exactly what I had in mind.

Thankfully, things picked up as quests shifted from killing fluffy things to killing orcs, ice monsters and an assortment of other typical RPG baddies, that apparently don't have mothers. The interface, the comic book quality of the graphics and a shockingly fine community of players started making WoW a fun experience, let alone an addictive one. For a couple of days all I kept thinking of was progressing my character and exploring the major cities, even though they offered a pretty low -unacceptable even- level of interactivity. Heck, I actually went as far as socializing a bit, joining raid parties and even sharing a joke or too.

Finally, after reaching level 13, starting a couple of non-gnome characters out of sheer curiosity and taking a short WoW break, I just got bored. Yes, despite being part of the phenomenon that gave birth to the particularly NSFW (especially for priests, rabbis, ayatollahs, but not for the more humane shamans) and seemingly defunct Whores of Warcraft. Just didn't feel I cared enough for Azeroth, which -better face it- is as derivative a fantasy setting as they get, to spend more of my time on it. Apparently, clicking on stuff and waiting for them to die isn't my thing... Decided I'd better wait for Warcraft 4 and started fantasizing about the glories of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. More on the later, next time.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: MMO Gnome. Act Two., Urban Legend review, Ron Gilbert in the Penny Arcade, freeware CRPGs