MMO Weekly: 28/04/09

28 Apr 2009 at 11:09:20 by Jeff Hollis

Hey there, fellow gamers, and welcome to this, the very latest installment of MMO Weekly.  In this week's article, we're going to talk about wee, tiny, little MMOs.  Well, sort of.  Read on, and you'll see what I mean.

First up:  you can now play the tiniest version of World of Warcraft imaginable.  It's super small, very convenient, and will allow you to carry your virtual self around in your real self's pants pocket.  I'm referring, of course, to the red-hot application by Vollee that lets you play WoW on your iPhone [Ed: This software application video has since been pulled from YouTube and Blizzard has issued a “no comment" statement refusing to confirm any official app software.  Read our report here]. 

When this news broke earlier this week, 800,000 fanbois and fangurls issued a collective statement that went something like this:

“WoweeeeeTHATSFREAKINAWESOMEomgIcantbelievethisisactuallyhappening, THISISTHEMOSTEPICTHINGEVAR wheredoIgetthiswherewherewhereIneedthis, c'monsomebodypleasetellmeNOWNOWNOWNOWIHAVETOKNOWisthisdownloadable, orcanIgetitontheofficalappsstore, anddoIhavetoJAILBREAKmyphonecuzIwillImeanthat'snotaproblem butIdontreallywannadothatcuzmyitsreallymydadsphonebutIwillifIneedto CUZTHISISMOTHERFRAKKINGWOWONACELLPHONEYEAAAAHHHHBOYYYYYYYY!”

Based on this, um, somewhat enthusiastic response, we checked it out.  Our thoughts are varied.

First of all, the Vollee software doesn't really allow you to play WorldofWarcraft on your iPhone.  It allows you to move around Azeroth, check your in-game mail, mess around on the auction house, chat with your guildmates, /dance, perform other emotes, and otherwise hang out.  However, the moment you step outside of the safety of Orgrimmar, you'll be utterly killed by the first level 7 mottled boar you happen to run across. 

“No way!  I'm a level 80 death knight!  I can't be killed!  And least of all, not by a level 7 mottled boar!  I'LL SWALLOW THAT BOAR'S SOUL!” 

Yeah, well, let me tell you a thing or two, Captain Amazing.  That level 7 mottled boar is going to give you a fair run for your money.  The reasons for this can be basically boiled down to one, simple explanation:  you're trying to play WoW on a cell phone. 

I mean, come on.  The average WoW player has a setup that involves a special $79 mouse, a $149 keyboard that automates her macros, a nice HD screen in 1080p, a liquid nitrogen cooling system, an external SATA drive for faster load times, and a tricked out headset that makes both NASCAR drivers and NASA scientists jealous.

An iPhone, on the other hand, has the processing power of a stegosaurus' midbrain, and the screen is the size of an index card.  Oh, and it doesn't even have any buttons for you to mash. 

In a nutshell, you don't really play WoW on the iPhone.  You kind of manage it.  There is no way you could get all the buttons needed for even the most basic abilities on that tiny screen.  The interface, in order to give you access to all your basic functions, zooms in and out.  Thus you don't just hit “C” to open your character screen.  You hit a handful of buttons to get to that feature.  And yes, you can move around, but it's a stop-and-go affair.  You aren't using your WASD keys and a mouse; you're hitting the forward, left, right or back arrow on the left side of the iPhone screen, while trying to watch your character move on the right half of that same tiny screen.  Get the idea?  Your ability to fight anything – even a lowly level 7 mottled boar – is going to be completely hamstrung by these kinds of compromises.  The app works, but it was forced to make some compromises to get all of WoW work that tiny screen. 

Our other impressions of this app were equally tempered.  While you can do all the things we mentioned earlier – chat with guildies, emote, buy, sell, check your in-game mail – how much of that will you really want to do on your iPhone?  The app turns the process of chatting – typing messages on a full keyboard – into texting.   As any adult knows, texting is really just typing garbled messages on a smeared screen with your oversized thumbs.  Most of my text messages look something like this: “Wht tine r wee spoSed to meet?  I though it WAs at 8 butt no w Im notsure.”  If I type that crap to my guildmates, they'd have me kicked inside a week.  “He's not a good player,” they'd say.  “We think he's a six year old.”

Our final impression, when this hulabaloo started, was that we'd seen all this before.  We did a bit of checking, and sure enough, there are other iPhone apps similar to this one.  The new Vollee software is certainly more refined, but we found other apps dating back to 2007, and they ran WoW with the same nearly-unplayable compromised quality that this one does.  And let's remember, 2007 is like the dark ages in internet years.  If you'd like to check out the various iPhone WoW apps, you can do a nice side-by-side video comparison right here.

It's at this juncture that I should probably mention the other story of tiny MMOs that sprang up this past week.  Of course, I'm referring to the death of Shadowbane.  Shadowbane was an ambitious game, one that tried to embrace all the open-world PvP loving MMO players out there.  The game had an awesome system (well, on paper, anyway) for building player-controlled cities, for controlling territory, and for building an empire.  The PvP was chaotic and awesome, the character classes were varied, and the race/class combinations were surprisingly balanced. 

Unfortunately, the game had a few flaws.  That awesome empire building system?  Well, it could be easily exploited.  Also, the game seemed to run out of content – almost completely – by about level 30.  There were no dungeons, and moving from camp to camp, killing the various orcs, gnolls, and bandits really began to feel the same pretty quickly.  Worst of all, there were game-crashing bugs galore. 

These weaknesses began to bother people and Shadowbane went into the typical MMO death-spiral soon after launch.  You know the drill:  you still enjoy the game, but when you log on, and find that your guild is disbanded, none of your friends are online, and the nearest city is almost empty.  You try for half an hour, and you can't find a group at all. 

The game started out as a tiny effort, almost just a startup.  If I remember correctly, it had just 10 servers at launch.  There were server merges, the world map was redrawn, and a lot of other tweaks were attempted.  Eventually, there was just one server.  All the attempts to keep the game alive, even on this single server, proved to be too little, too late.  The game hung on for six years (about a year ago the game even went free-to-play) but it just couldn't turn a profit.  As of May 1, it's shutting down for good.

I'm sad to see it go.  I loved many aspects of Shadowbane; in fact, the balance of the classes in PvP really struck me as nearly perfect.  It was also the first MMO I ever played that was launched before it was finished.  That's become something of a trend, unfortunately, in the industry.  In fact, Funcom repeated this mistake with the launch of Age of Conan last year.  The results were similar.

And that, my fellow online MMO geeks, is all for this week.  What say next week we all meet here again, and I'll tell you a story involving cosplayers, crazed fanboys, and furries?  Until then, ciao for now!

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