I think I’m finally over World of Warcraft.
As you can see, I scrounged together enough honor to purchase four pieces of the season 2 honor gear. Sure, they’re welfare epics, but at least I finally look cool again. I’m just not motivated to log on and play any more, and didn’t even touch the game all weekend. While World of Warcraft is a significantly better game at 70 than it ever was at 60, The Burning Crusade lacks that original magic that infused every tediously repetitive moment of vanilla WoW.
For me, World of Warcraft, and MMOs in general, have always been more about goofing off with friends than playing the actual game; we raid and run PvP trains because it’s an excuse to play together. And at this point, none of my friends are playing. The majority of the characters on my friends list have transfered to other servers, and most of those who remain are banned or inactive. Running around Shattrath, I don’t recognize any of the names I see in any of the chat channels; the players and the guilds on both sides of the Horde-Alliance divide that once made the game so much fun for me on Dark Iron are long gone. Most of the characters standing in my way at the bank or in front of the flight master probably didn’t even exist before the expansion, back when Insane Kitties was neck-deep in Naxxramas.
That was in the Fall of 2006 (18 months already!), which was also the last time I played Diablo 2 with any real seriousness. At the time, the dorkclub.com extended family and I would spend most of our gaming time leveling a handful of oddball Hardcore characters, only venturing back into Naxx at night when the Australians woke up.
The differences between the two games were startling, and we joked in channel ikpriest that you could run a dozen Baal runs in the time it took to get the raid together and inside Naxxramas. Finding new loot in Diablo 2 took hours, not weeks, and you could reach any place in the game world in minutes. Obviously, we were having a lot more fun with Diablo 2 than we were with World of Warcraft.
Though I’ve sunk more hours into Blizzard’s MMORPG, no other game has held my interest as long as Diablo 2. Just yesterday I started up a new raise skeleton/dexterity necromancer (clearly a recipe for success) after a few unsuccessful minutes spent with SamWaterson, the fist of the heavens/holy shock paladin. It’s a game that never gets old. For all its failings – and there are many – Diablo 2 is a game that is infinitely replayable, and always rewards teamwork and cleverness. I can see myself still hoping on Diablo 2 every few years and leveling a character to that “proof of concept” point even after downloading Diablo 3 through Blizzard’s proprietary digital download service in 2011. I can’t imagine myself ever spending much time with World of Warcraft again, except maybe to level a Deathknight to 80.