WORLD OF WARCRAFT 3-PART SERIES FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

1. O Brave New World That Has Such Gamers in It

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: January 19, 2007

This week it’s likely that thousands of people cut school, called in sick and otherwise turned away from the real world so they could be among the first adventurers to traverse the Dark Portal and battle the demons of the Burning Legion in the broken world of Outland.

Call it the World of Warcraft effect. This is what happens when Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, the top online computer game with more than eight million paying subscribers, releases the game’s first retail expansion set.

The Burning Crusade, as the set is titled, went on sale at midnight Tuesday. For people who don’t play online games, it can be a little difficult to describe the freakout many gamers experience as they try to explore and conquer the new content. Imagine the convergence of rabid fans if, say, Luciano Pavarotti were to star in a long-hyped live remake of “Star Trek” at Carnegie Hall, with special appearances by Tom Cruise and Kiefer Sutherland.

It’s a bit like that, except for people who mostly don’t read People, care about Jack Bauer or subscribe to the Met.

I’m one of them, which is why I spent 24 almost consecutive hours at my computer playing and why I will be playing the game for most of the next couple of weeks as I write an online serial review and travelogue through the most successful virtual world in, well, the world.

The reason World of Warcraft has become such a cash factory (the game has attracted more than eight million subscribers, most of whom pay about $15 a month to play) is that it delivers an overall entertainment experience that goes far beyond what one might expect from a mere game.

For example, in the new addition, as soon as you cross through the mystical Dark Portal and into the new continent Outland, you are immediately confronted with an epic battle taking place on the gate’s steps between the grotesque Burning Legion and the heroic defenders of peace and justice.

It is an effect meant to impress that the player is merely part of a much larger, more important story. It is the same device used in the opening scenes of war films like “Saving Private Ryan” to viscerally establish the broader context before narrowing to focus on a much smaller-scale human drama.

Of course in an online role-playing game like World of Warcraft the biggest and most central draw for most players is in exploring that virtual world and making one’s character more powerful.

The two concepts — exploration and growth — go together. In W.O.W., as in most such games, characters begin life as a weakling at what is called Level 1. And since W.O.W.’s debut in late 2004, characters have been capped at Level 60.

After two years of players champing at the bit to advance, Burning Crusade has raised the cap to Level 70 and opened seven new high-level zones for players to explore, complete quests and defeat monsters.

The fun part is that on each server, or copy of the game world, thousands of other players — humans and orcs, wizards and rogues, druids and warlocks — are trying to do the same thing. What naturally emerges, at least among some players, is a race, or land-rush, mentality. There is a whole new continent to explore, all this new power to attain; who will see and experience it first?

And so at midnight Tuesday the starter’s gun went off. Around 5:45 a.m., after completing most of the available quests in the first zone, called Hellfire Peninsula, I became the second player on my server to reach Level 61, around 20 minutes after another gamer in my guild. I moved west to the moody, slightly creepy bogland zone called Zangarmarsh and became my server’s first Level 62er just before noon.

By then I was receiving dozens of private messages in the game every hour from players I had never met who could see that my guildmate and I were out front: “OMG how did you level so fast?,” “Hey you must have a lot of gold, can I have some?” and of course “You guys are huge nerds.” (Yes, and proud ones, I might add.) The chatter only increased after I became the first on my server to reach Level 65 early yesterday morning.

In addition to bragging rights there is a very practical reason for wanting to stay in front of the pack in a situation like this. Only by maintaining a lead does one gets to experience the world in an almost pristine state. As I moved into lush Terokkar Forest Wednesday, there was almost no one else there, creating a blissful sense of exploration akin to hiking into Yosemite well before the tourists arrive. In a week Terokkar will be packed full of the equivalent of tour buses and noisy R.V.’s.

As I continue to explore I will share my impressions and progress. After I reach Level 70 I hope to loop back and explore some of Burning Crusade’s other new features, like the new alternate starting areas for low-level characters.

2. ACHIEVING THE TRIUMPHANT 'DING' AT LEVEL 70

By SETH SCHIESEL

Monday, Jan. 22

Every few years it seems there is a report out of South Korea, where gaming is practically a national religion, about some young man who sat down to play an online PC game, didn't get up for a few days, and literally keeled over dead.

To my knowledge there haven't been any episodes like that in the United States – yet – but I can now say I understand how those young men felt. Almost.

As I wrote on Friday, last week the first expansion pack for World of Warcraft, the world's biggest online game, hit shelves and screens around the world. The big draw in massively-multiplayer online games like WOW is that they bring together thousands of people into one shared real-time virtual world. And so when a new expansion arrives, providing a bunch of new areas to explore, a natural land rush mentality can emerge among some players as they compete to conquer the new content.

In the new World of Warcraft expansion, called The Burning Crusade, that has been the race to level 70. Since the original game was released in 2004, characters have been capped in power at an arbitrary level 60. The main attraction in TBC is that it raises the level cap to 70 and provides a host of powerful benefits who players who reach that plateau – first among them the ability to fly, or at least to buy a flying mount like a gryphon.

Each of WOW's hundreds of servers, or copies of the game world, is home to thousands of players. (The game has more than 8 million subscribers total.) And so on each server – within each community - the big question on many players' lips as the expansion approached was "Who will be the first to level 70?", "Who will be the first player flying around?"

I am proud to report that on my server, it was me. After racking up about 76 hours of playtime in a little more than 4.5 days of real time, shortly after 4 pm Saturday my warlock became the first character to hit level 70 on my server. Unhealthy? Probably. Exhilarating? Definitely.

I'll report Tuesday about some of what I've seen in the game world and on Wednesday about the social dynamics of the race and about the hundreds of players I've heard from as a now-(in)famous citizen of my server. But today I'll share a bit about how I did it.

So the expansion opened for business at midnight last Tuesday (late Monday night). I was the first player on my server through the Dark Portal and into the new continent of Outland because I had received my game discs a couple of days early, but at that moment hundreds of stores opened their midnight madness events and thousands of gamers grabbed their copies and rushed home.

From inside the game it was fascinating to watch. At 12:02 a.m. Tuesday, and for 20 minutes, I had all of Hellfire Peninsula (the first region in Outland) to myself. By 1:02 there were 24 people in the expansion. By 1:30 I had maxed out my Hellfire list at 49 people and by the morning there appeared to be hundreds of players on the peninsula alone.

I played for almost 24 hours and went to bed the first time late Tuesday night after hitting level 63. I didn't get back to the game for about 15 hours, my longest break of the week.

I picked up early Wednesday afternoon in corrupted Terokkar Forest and hit 64 around 9:30 that night, second to a mage in my guild we'll call Goldie. I went out for a brief cocktail (for the muscle relaxation), played straight through Wednesday night and hit 65 around 7:15 Thursday morning, a server first.

A sane person would have gone to sleep then, but I made some breakfast and pushed through all day Thursday, hitting 66 in the verdant plains of Nagrand around 5 p.m. Thursday and getting about two-thirds of the way through that level before going to sleep for the second and last time around midnight.

I logged on around 11am Friday and felt fear. When I had gone to bed the night before, the only other level 66 was my friend Goldie. But now there were two other 66's as well, competition in the form of a hunter and a druid from another guild.

It was disconcerting, but I knew they must have played all night to catch up with Goldie and me. Hopefully, they would have to sleep some time.

In the jagged Blade's Edge Mountains I recorded level 67 early Friday afternoon, about 10 minutes after Goldie, but the big shock came just a couple hours later when one of our competitors, the hunter, also hit 67. They were only a long lunch behind!

Even worse, my friend Goldie had to log off to go to work. I had mostly played solo as I leveled up, completing quests as I went, but Goldie had been a good source of friendly competition and we could chat we as we explored the new zones at the same time.

Still, I hit level 68 around 10:30 Friday night. And then, providence. First the hunter then the druid logged off. "Guess they're human after all," I cackled at my monitor as I crossed the bridge into the floating archipelago of Netherstorm.

The big moment of decision came around 7 a.m. Saturday, when I reached level 69. The competition was still offline. I had been awake almost 24 hours. There was only one level to go, the longest. Do I go to sleep or do I put the hammer down?

As a gamer might put it, sleep ftl (for the lose, as opposed to ftw, which means for the win). I stayed up and reached level 70 later Saturday afternoon, while the competition was still at level 68.

In World of Warcraft, players refer to a level-up as "ding" after the triumphant sound the game plays when you do it. When I dinged 70 outside the Wildhammer Stronghold in demon-infested Shadowmoon Valley, it was one of the best sounds I've heard in a while. When I bought my epic purple gryphon and took to the skies for the first time, after being landbound for thousands of hours of play-time, it felt like a real accomplishment.

Of course, there is a toll. Even a day later my neck is killing me. My back is sore. My hands are claws and my eyes look like something out of the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo.

The next World of Warcraft expansion probably won't be out for a couple of years. By then I may have recovered.

3. HOW WOW RESEMBLES NEW JERSEY

By SETH SCHIESEL

Tuesday, Jan. 23

So I stopped in a bar in last Thursday during one of the brief breaks in my push to Level 70 in The Burning Crusade, the new expansion for World of Warcraft, and this guy asked me about the scale of the game's virtual world.

"So I get there's a few thousand people playing at the same time and you can see them and talk to them,'' he said over his beer. "But how big is it? Like how long would it take you to cross on foot? What would you see?"

I told him: "Well, on the ground it could take you a couple hours to get across each continent. And there's all kinds of different terrain like mountains, jungles, plains. There are big cities and then there are dungeons and lots of dangerous places, but also some beautiful ones."

He took a sip of his beer and thought it over.

"OK, I get it,'' he said. "So it's kind of like New Jersey."

That got a laugh at the bar (which was in Brooklyn). But it also got me thinking, not about New Jersey but about how a successful video game, more than other storytelling media, must be based on an engaging, cohesive setting. And that got me thinking that in trying to figure out why World of Warcraft has pulled in more than 8 million subscribers, nothing has been more important than the fact that the world itself is the star of the game.

Here's what I mean. In stories there are two basic elements: a setting and characters. In most linear media - books, movies, TV shows, theater - both elements are under the control of the creator: the author or director. And while creating a believable setting is obviously important in a novel or film, the stories tend to be told through the characters, the actors and fictional people who become stars.

Games are also about stories, but the key difference is that in a game the consumer is creating his or her own narrative, not following a tale that has been written ahead of time. And so the essence of great game design is in creating a virtual environment that players want to spend within making their own stories.

Think about something as simple as Pac-Man or Tetris. Those games are 100 percent setting; you the player provide all the character action. Think about the millions of young girls playing The Sims - a safe virtual environment for experimenting with family dynamics - or the millions of young men playing Grand Theft Auto - a safe virtual environment for experimenting with guns. In all of these games, the real genius has been not in great characters or fabulous graphics but in providing settings that draw in players like an inhabitant.

That dynamic is even more important in online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and may be the prime reason why the game is set to take in more than $1 billion this year. People who play such games can end up spending hundreds or thousands of hours in them over many years for two reasons: the other real people inside them and the overall virtual environment they occupy. The real people, once again, aren't under the game creators' control (more about that tomorrow). So the environment itself has to be fun to be in, great to look at and rewarding to explore.

And providing such an environment is the one thing that World of Warcraft does better than any other game. As I have spent most of the last week playing The Burning Crusade I have been impressed over and over again at how richly textured the world is that the team at Blizzard Entertainment has created and how much care they clearly lavished on making sure it is almost impossible to get bored. Everywhere you turn is a new spot to discover, a new monster to gawk at, a new problem in need of solving.

In fact I know players who spent most of their first few days with the game not killing monsters, not completing quests, but simply riding around taking in the landscape and at least some of the seemingly-innumerable nooks and crannies there are to explore.

There is so much to do and so much to see across Outland that I did nothing but follow quest chains around the continent all the way from Level 60 to Level 70 and I still barely touched one of the game's high-end zones. In most games, players often feel like they've run out of content. That was almost never a problem in the original World of Warcraft and certainly won't be one for expansion players any time soon.

Geographically, my journey across Outland began in Hellfire Peninsula, a scarred wasteland filled with demons and crazed orcs. From there I journeyed west into marshy Zangarmarsh, where I confronted tribes of naga, and then into Terokkar Forest. After slaying the wild beasts on the savannah of Nagrand I journeyed north into the high Blade's Edge Mountains and took on the ogres there. And then it was into the otherworldly, floating Netherstorm, home to nether dragons and ethereal princes.

Next I'll hop on my gryphon and head on south to Shadowmoon Valley. The air might be green and there might be demons everywhere, but hey, I'll just tell myself I'm in New Jersey.

VIDEO GAMES; Game On: Hero Returns To Slay His Dragons

NYTimes

By

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: February 11, 2007

THESE days, when MySpace and YouTube seem as ubiquitous as television and newspapers, it can be tough to remember that just eight years ago the Internet was still a gee-whiz curiosity for most people. But 1999 was the year online entertainment really began, not with grainy streaming video but with a game that let millions of players explore a vibrant 3-D fantasy world for the first time.

It had a lot of familiar elements, like monsters and treasure hunts. But in this world the brawny barbarian you were fighting beside or the mysterious wizard in the corner of the tavern wasn't a clunky computer construct. It was the on-screen apparition of another player, who might be huddled over a keyboard thousands of miles away.

The game was EverQuest, the unlikely brainchild of young fantasy fans including Brad McQuaid who had been toiling away in an obscure division of Sony. By 2001 EverQuest, with Mr. McQuaid as producer, had almost 500,000 players, each paying a tidy $15 a month for the thrill of spending hours -- many, many hours for some -- immersed in a virtual world.

For Mr. McQuaid it was a heady time. Having wanted to be a game designer since eighth grade, he had poured himself into EverQuest and soon found himself anointed a ''Game God'' by PC Gamer, one of the industry's top magazines.

''No one really knew what to expect, so when EverQuest just took off, it was really more overwhelming and bewildering than it was a top-of-the-world feeling,'' he recalled recently. ''It was great to know we had made such a popular world.''

EverQuest was a huge leap in gaming but in some ways ahead of its time, which was not lost on its core audience of tech-savvy young men. Some of the savviest were working just up the freeway from Sony's offices, at Blizzard Entertainment. After investing hundreds of hours playing EverQuest, they set out to take online gaming to a global, mass-market level by making a game that would be more accessible for casual players.

What they came up with, in 2004, was World of Warcraft, today's online megastar with more than eight million subscribers around the world. Not only is its audience far bigger than EverQuest's (which is now around 350,000), but its welcoming design has attracted a far broader and more loyal fan base, at least for now.

Now, after watching the industry he essentially created all but pass him by, Mr. McQuaid is back. After spending five years and more than $30 million bouncing from Sony to Microsoft and back to Sony, he has returned with a new bid to become the No. 1 dream maker for the millions of people who spend their leisure time online.

His new game, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, opened on Jan. 30. But in a surprising twist Mr. McQuaid isn't pinning his hopes on appealing to World of Warcraft's millions of casual players. Instead, Vanguard is a gamer's game. While World of Warcraft uses a cartoony visual style that runs fine on slower computers, Vanguard can humble even the beefiest PC with its emphasis on fantasy realism and its huge, richly detailed virtual universe. Where the older game tries to impress with its accessibility, Vanguard is about more complexity, more choices. In short Mr. McQuaid is bucking the conventional wisdom of a $2 billion industry.

He says he's going after ''players who are looking for something deeper, more like a home.'' He adds, ''I don't expect to get six or seven million players, but if we have 500,000 by the end of the year and keep growing after that, I'll be happy.''

In that sense Mr. McQuaid is like an auteur who turns down a midsummer action blockbuster in favor of pursuing his own personal, if less commercial, vision. And as in Hollywood that obsession can cause conflicts with the people paying the bills.

IF Vanguard is a gamer's game, it is because Mr. McQuaid, 37, is a gamer's gamer. His journey from fan to designer and executive almost perfectly reflects the evolution of computer entertainment itself.

Like millions of people now in their middle and late 30s Mr. McQuaid was part of the first generation to discover computers in childhood. His first encounter with online gaming came in the early '80s through single-player role-playing games, in which players could go off and explore a two-dimensional countryside in search of monsters (but could never meet, much less interact, with other real people). The experience transformed him.

''I realized that unlike reading a book or watching a movie, where you're just following the protagonist, in a game you could actually be the protagonist, and that was the closest thing to actually being in a fantasy world,'' Mr. McQuaid said. ''In a book, if the guy goes right, he goes right. If he goes in the tunnel, you never have any control over that. But in a game you get to make those decisions, and ever since that moment I wanted to be a computer game designer. That's all I ever wanted to do.''

In the early '90s, even before the advent of the World Wide Web, Mr. McQuaid and thousands of other Internet pioneers discovered the first global multiuser dungeon games, or MUDs. MUDs didn't use any graphics at all (players would type commands like ''kill orc''), but for the first time the other characters in the game were being played by real people -- other players, just like themselves. They could talk to other players in real time, then go off to rescue the princess together. It was a far cry from sitting alone at a computer, and some players spent so many hours typing away that the games came to be known as Multiple Undergraduate Destroyers.

''When I started playing MUDs, it was like the light bulb went on a second time,'' Mr. McQuaid said. ''What brought me in were the social aspects. You'd see these high-level people running by and want to emulate them. And what really fascinated me even then was how the players could get completely obsessed with these kind of games, and it was just their life, and they could log in for 10, 12, 16 hours a day.''

Meanwhile a young executive at Sony named John Smedley started looking for a team to take a real production budget and make a graphical version of a MUD. Casting around, he found WarWizard 2, a crude shareware game that Mr. McQuaid, who was tending the computers at a plant nursery at the time, had posted online.

''I had put my phone number on WarWizard 2, just in case anyone wanted to call and publish it, and the phone just rang out of the blue one night and it was this guy calling with the idea of making a 3-D MUD,'' Mr. McQuaid recalled. ''I gave two weeks' notice at the nursery the next morning.''

Three years later EverQuest was released, to great acclaim, and Sony quickly kicked Mr. McQuaid upstairs. By 2001 he was overseeing a half-dozen game projects for the company. He had become an important figure in the industry, but something was missing: he wasn't actually making games. ''I wasn't getting that sense of accomplishment I had with EverQuest,'' he said. ''It just wasn't hands-on. You're just walking around talking to producers and executive producers, and you're very distant from the actual creative process.''

So in late 2001 he struck out on his own, starting a new company named Sigil Games (after Crimson Sigil, his guild in his favorite MUD) to keep chasing his eighth-grade dream. Publishers were basically throwing money at him, especially Microsoft, which was eager to catch up to its rivals.

But the continual march of technology and expectations had changed things forever. He made WarWizard with a couple of friends in his apartment, and the full-time team on the original EverQuest topped out at about two dozen people. But these days making a top-notch game is as much an organizational challenge as it is a technical and creative one.

''Originally we thought that if we did EverQuest in three years we could do this game in three years, but that was naïve both because of how ambitious our design was and how other games raised the bar,'' he said. ''Twenty-three guys and three years wasn't going to cut it anymore. Now we have 110 people on one project. Figuring out how to set that up with different levels of managers and teams was quite a learning experience, and it cost us a lot of time and money.''

And two and a half years into that learning curve World of Warcraft roared onto the market and eclipsed its rivals.

As the years passed and the price tag neared $20 million, Microsoft began to lose patience with Mr. McQuaid, who insisted on adding more virtual landscape and other features to the game. By 2005 Microsoft was focused on introducing the Xbox 360 console and was looking for someone to take Vanguard off its hands. (Microsoft representatives declined to discuss the matter in detail.)

Mr. Smedley, at Sony, was happy to oblige. ''We just didn't have enough in the pipeline,'' recalled Mr. Smedley, now president of the company's main online entertainment division. ''This was an opportunity to pick up a game that looked great, played great and fit into our release schedule.''

So early last year the companies announced, somewhat awkwardly, that Vanguard had returned to the Sony lineup. But as recently as six weeks ago Sony still had not announced a date for introducing the game. Furthermore the beta version -- available to testers -- was still embarrassingly incomplete. At Sigil's anonymous low-slung office building in Carlsbad, Calif., after five years in development, the effort to whip the game into shape became a frenzy.

''In the last six weeks there have definitely been people sleeping here,'' Mr. McQuaid said. ''Come in at 3 a.m. on the weekends and there are programmers quashing bugs, people working on server issues.''

David Gilbertson, Vanguard's producer, met Mr. McQuaid riding dirt bikes in the desert in 1991. ''Brad tells me what to do, and I make it happen,'' he said. ''Basically it's a lot of frantic running around trying to figure out what's broken, and keeping more than 100 ducks in a row can be a real challenge. But we've had people here 24 hours a day for a while now. I don't think we've had to turn on the alarm system in two months.''

I JUMPED into the retail version of Vanguard soon after it went online two weeks ago and from the beginning found it to be standard high-fantasy fare.

I began by creating a human cleric and entering the game near the once-peaceful rural village of Tursh. Very quickly I learned that Tursh has problems: the local wizards' academy had recently mysteriously exploded, unleashing a plague of demons. And if that weren't enough, the corpses of farmers that had been resting in peace at the local cemetery had risen from the dead. Naturally, I joined with other players to help save the town.

And so it goes. If I had created a goblin, I would have started my new life on a slave ship on a distant coast. As an elven sorcerer I would first appear in the enchanted woods outside the city of Leth Nurae. All through the virtual world thousands of other players are starting their own journeys in search of adventure and new friends.

The general reaction to Vanguard has been mixed. Almost no one in the industry or online seems to think that it will overtake World of Warcraft any time soon, not least because the game seems to have glitches and crash occasionally for most users. But the vitriol of just a couple of months ago, when gamers found the test versions almost unplayable, has given way to grudging respect that Sigil pulled together a product worthy of its heritage. Both Mr. McQuaid and Sony acknowledge that Vanguard is still rough around the edges and that they pushed it out the door basically because the money ran out.

''Microsoft had wanted to launch this thing in July of 2006,'' Mr. Smedley said. ''We felt like the game needed more time, and we have given it more time, but at some point enough is enough, and we have to ship the game and start generating revenue.''

Mr. McQuaid's view is that ''I'd love to be a billionaire and fund it all myself and take more time, but all I can do is make the best game I can at launch and get the message out that it isn't as polished as WOW but it also has a lot more depth and a lot more freedom.''

In the end he may have good cause to be upbeat. ''In some ways this is just the beginning of a long journey,'' Mr. McQuaid said. ''People ask me, 'Are you launching a finished game?' And the answer is no, we're launching a game that is good enough to launch, but it's not finished. And that's why I love these games: because they should never be finished.'