In the beginning…

What are your fondest memories of videogames? For me, it’s the gameplay, with story as a close second. I’m an old school gamer, brought up on a healthy dose of Dungeons & Dragons. RPGs and Adventure games were always my favorites: Legends of Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Monkey Island, and Quest For Glory III (still the best RPG ever made as far as I’m concerned, part IV and V were crap) are just a number of games I remember from the time games were genuinely fun. And you actually had to Work for your enjoyment. Puzzles were frustrating, requiring actual  brainpower to solve; being stuck at an area for hours trying to use that Magic Tear in your inventory to click on everything hoping to activate a plot device was the norm.

Then came the age of Action-adventures. You know – Diablo. The game was extremely fun and addictive, I’ll give it that, but they fused RPG and adventure elements into a simple clickfest. This started a whole trend in games where you could basically win with one or two buttons. People were getting lazier and lazier.

Story devolved into an afterthought of design, instead of the driver. It is no wonder when a game comes along that provides rich story-driven gameplay and lore, it becomes an instant hit. A decade ago, this was System Shock. Today, you’ll probably recall Bioshock.

Dead horse beating

But, to make my point and not sound like I’m just pulling bull$#!^ out of my arse, I shall use the history of a single game to prove the degrading quality of gamers today, and how you, yes YOU, are effectively ruining the modern videogame. This game is incredibly well known, and has 11.5 million subscribers around the world – World of Warcraft.

James Lu a.k.a. Jimmy Wartooth actually ran a commentary about a similar issue back in November titled “How World of Warcraft Broke the Interweb”. In his commentary, he focused on the elitism in gamers, of power leveling, and general complaints of overpowered-ness in the forums.

What I’ve noticed on the other hand, with every subsequent patch and expansion, is how easy the game has become. World of Warcraft, when it first started out, was HARD. That’s right, people had to work their way up to level 60. The game world was a living and thriving place with people working together to complete quests. You hardly ever saw anyone going lone ranger all the way. Even for world quests, grouping up into a party got you places faster, and you learned valuable experience in teamwork, and how different classes complemented each other.

Dungeons were an exercise in cooperation. Everyone had a role to play, and you actually needed SKILL to be good at playing. Healers, needed to know how to heal and manage debuffs; tanks needed to know how to juggle mobs; crowd control was an absolute necessity and they had to be carefully regulated to manage any dungeon or raid encounter. Highly skilled crowd control players were in high demand, and kiting was a science not many could master.

Hunters earned the nickname ‘Huntard’ (a cross between Hunter and Retard) which still sticks today. This was because, as the most played class, Hunters had a lot of unskilled players who had no idea how to control their pets, set traps, or kite enemies, resulting in the first to be blamed for dungeon or raid wipes.

I can has skillburger?

As the years rolled on, the term Skill is now a thing of the past. I’m what you will call a “serial grinder”. To date, I’ve numerous level 80s of different classes, and what I’ve noticed is that in Wrath of the Lich King, I can now basically level all the way to 80 soloing through world content. With most characters, even supposed 5-man Elite quests can be soloed.

Sure, you still need coordination in dungeons, but only at the highest level of raids, everything and anything else turned into simple routine. Crowd Control is a thing of the past; every tank can effectively hold multiple mobs. Damage dealers hardly need to worry about anything, leaving healers as the only ones that still require active monitoring of what they do. Essentially, World of Warcraft has turned from an RPG that required competency to play well into a Diablo clone. The latest Ulduar content update has given me new hope, but only time will tell.

And this trend threatens the entire videogame landscape. Gamers no longer care about gameplay, story or skill. Quick gratification through fancy graphics hide the repetitiveness of most gameplay mechanics, and you cannot but help notice that games, while being more advanced in every other aspect, are in danger of becoming brain dead. Have you noticed a resurgence of retro game remakes of late? Well, now you know why.

Zachary Chan,
Editor, GameAxis