http://thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1095668.html
When the Lich king calls After 18 months without Warcraft, new expansion lures gamer back By SETH SCHIESEL The New York Times Sat. Dec 13 In March 2007, I stopped playing World of Warcraft. At the time I had recorded 3,265 hours of playing time on my main character, a powerful warlock who binds demons to his will and corrupts his enemies with eldritch decay. For more than two years I had played the game as if it were one of the most important things in my life. Four or five nights a week, promptly at 8, I and a few dozen companions around the country would sit at our computers for a highly disciplined session of virtual dungeon raiding that would usually end around 1 a.m. It worked because my girlfriend during much of that time was an investment banker. She rarely left the office before midnight and preferred I spend my evenings slaying dragons rather than running around New York City without her. Call it codependent gaming. We broke up, but I stuck with WOW through its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, released in January 2007. I slept twice in four and a half days as I raced to be the first player on my server to hit the new power plateau: Level 70. Then I burned out. One random Thursday I realized I had become hooked on the impossible notion of "beating" the game, of not only seeing everything in the game but also seeing it before anyone else. More important, I realized it was interfering with the rest of my life. I quit my guild on the spot, logged off and never went back. Until three weeks ago. I had never experienced deep emotional trepidation in relation to a video game until I reinstalled World of Warcraft on my computer just hours before its latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, went live for the games more than 11 million players (up from around 8 million when I began my hiatus). I knew Wrath would be immense in scope, accessible and stylized in its art direction, rich in its lore and head-shakingly careful in its overall design. I knew that World of Warcraft had propelled Blizzard Entertainment, the games developer and publisher, to a level of staffing, craftsmanship and wealth unmatched by any other maker of massively multiplayer online games (known as MMOs). Over the last dozen years Blizzard has released not a single clunker. Across the Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft franchises it has had an almost unnervingly consistent run of one global blockbuster after another. (It was no surprise that Wrath set a record for PC games with 2.8 million copies sold in its first 24 hours.) So I knew there was about as much chance of Blizzards dropping the ball with the latest expansion for its flagship product as there was of Plaxico Burress catching a touchdown for the Giants. And I am happy to have been right. With Wrath, World of Warcraft remains the consummate online game and in some ways the pinnacle of what video games are supposed to be about: melding lush production values with a profound appreciation for what people find fun, bringing people together cooperatively and appealing to both families and hardcore players. Instead of worries about the game itself, my trepidation stemmed from selfish and at times contradictory concerns. Would I get sucked in again? Would I want to get sucked in? Would I resent the loss of my old status as a top player? And most important, would I still know anyone? I am happy to have been wrong to be concerned. It has taken me about 110 hours to progress from Level 70 to Level 80, but at least I spread it out over three weeks this time. I actually enjoyed my anonymity as I moved across the new continent of Northrend, travelling from the Howling Fjord to the Grizzly Hills, the verdant Sholazar Basin and the peaks of Icecrown. As other players crowed about being the first on my server to reach various achievements, I discovered a new humility as just another journeyman adventurer. And most heartwarming, I have felt a bit like one of the Blues Brothers as my online teammates have started putting the band back together. Logging on that night just before Wrath went live, I was stunned to find that at least a dozen of my old friends had started a new version of our guild. Fifteen minutes after logging in for the first time in more than 18 months, there I was back in our guilds chat channel catching up with names and voices that I had once spent most weeknights with. From person after person I heard stories like mine, of players who had taken extended breaks from WOW only to come back for Wrath of the Lich King. How long will they stay this time? How long will I? One complication is that I have another online gaming family to worry about now, in Eve Online, the science-fiction MMO Ive been playing in my absence from World of Warcraft. Then again, Eve is a very serious, complicated game, while WOW seems to have grown easier over the years. Even the best players used to spend weeks or months figuring out the most difficult encounters in WOW. With the new expansion, hard-core players blew through all the new dungeons in a matter of days. All of which may make World of Warcraft a nice, casual change of pace for me now. At least until I find a new girlfriend who works nights.
