Dispiriting adventures in instrumental play
Struggling to vibe it out in a goal-oriented culture
I finished a BUNCH of games in the past week. Shadow Generations, Alan Wake 2: The Lake House, Sam & Max 204, and the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign. I'm not sure why I was on such a roll, but wrapping up so many ‘stories’ gave me a craving for something that would make me GaaSy. So I did that thing I do, now and then, where I weigh up committing to a new MMO or live service game.
I honestly envy the position some people are in, where they finish a workday. Some freelance humour for you there. No, let me continue. I envy the position some people are in where they finish a workday and are vivacious about hopping on Destiny 2 to run a few raids with their friends. I used to be like that with DOTA 2 and PUBG in my late adolescence, and I’m still kind of like that with GTA Online, Sea of Thieves and, for my sins, Left 4 Dead 2’s Versus Mode. But before I go any further and undermine my credentials, I need you to know that I’m talking about how I spend my free time here, not my working hours.
As a professional obligation, I regularly play and hold expertise in several trendy live service games. Your Zenless Zone Zeros and your Fortnites, etc. It’s a toss-up as to whether it’s fun for me: World’s tiniest violin and all that! But in my old age, I’ve become much more of a leisure-time video game loner, unable to make anything stick outside of cooperative survival games like Satisfactory. Deadlock is the only new game that has managed to seep into it lately, but my commitment to it almost undoubtedly relies on my DOTA 2 muscle memory.
So I bought three months of World of Warcraft game time
Maybe the Jason Schreier book I’m reading made me do it1, but it was also a thorough assessment of my options that led me towards WoW. As a rule, I decided I wouldn’t pick a race-to-the-bottom reaction time shooter. Unless they’ve just come out, I often find no opportunity to play like Carl Jung in the sandpit in his backyard, ambiently figuring stuff out as a late bloomer.
You just google ‘Gun + Loadout’ or ‘Hero + Loadout’ every time a balance patch or season drops and fall in line. Or you get your shit rocked every time you matchmake. Let’s be honest; employing your unorthodox strategy will lead people to call you a washed noob and kick you from the party. This isn’t blanket shade, though. Over the years, I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into Valorant and Counter-Strike because the round-based structure is a hotbed for satisfying creative coordination and unpredictability. There’s a meta, and you might not hit top rank without adhering to it, but you can still dominate an entire round with a pistol if you outthink your opponents. That rocks, and I long for the halcyon days of early PUBG, too, where nobody knew what they were doing.
But I wanted a chill game that I could watch YouTube videos to, not an adrenaline-pumping shooter. It turns out that it’s pretty challenging to relax these days. And because my prefrontal cortex has been ravaged by Phone, a second-monitor-friendly game means I don’t fall behind on my stories. See, if I get any free time to game, I usually sink it into something old and complex from my backlog… some brain-nourishing, attention-demanding thing that scratches a different part of my brain and leads me to imaginative pitch ideas. Fallout 1 and Sanitarium would be some stellar recent examples.
I bloody loved those games, but I can’t switch my brain off and play them, as I want to imbibe the lot. But it’s hard to commit something challenging into your memory if you aren’t giving your grey matter some comfort food elsewhere. My 10K morning walk in the beautiful Brisbane sunshine helps, but I want the video game equivalent of that. Something I don’t have to give my full attention to moment-to-moment but could gradually get better at and eventually reach the rewarding end of the rainbow.
So yeah, an MMO. And particularly, a ‘Loremaster’ experience, where I’m just beating all the quests and not really thinking about my character’s build over time until I need to, and then the raiding and all that business is just icing on my expertise-flavoured cake. But why WoW?
I’ve tried this before with Final Fantasy 14 because of everyone yapping about how good the story is, so I finished A Realm Reborn. The combat is fantastic, but it just didn’t click with me that way, and despite the endearing buy-in of playing a catboy rogue, I was terminally out of the loop. I had to force myself to get into the story and the dated way it was told, and there was a lot of bleary-eyed Wiki reading about backstories that just wasn’t sinking in. There’s just so much homework to it, and I’m not sure what was waiting for me was anything but more homework.
Alternatively, many of my friends (and millions of people worldwide) swear by Old School Runescape for this particular predicament. OSRS has a magnificently British vibe to it. I love the cheeky dialogue and the soundtrack, which is god-tier. The quests have remarkable depth despite the intentionally laborious gameplay and humble visuals. When I inevitably get bored of WoW, I think I might work through all the Free-to-Play quests and see if it justifies a subscription for the rest.
Some MMOs better cater to my specific interests, like Myst Online Uru Live or The Secret World Legends, but they aren’t in active development and don’t have many players. So it goes.
With that in mind, I thought I’d give WoW a try instead. Like everyone in my age bracket, I’ve played it before but never really stuck with it. I have six or seven starter accounts on Battle.Net, forgotten toons wasting away in the digital aether. But you don’t just decide to ‘Play World of Warcraft’ in 2024. It’s no longer as simple as choosing between World of Warcraft or World of Warcraft Classic. Within the choice to pick World of Warcraft Classic, you now have specific forks like Hardcore or Season of Discovery. Then, within that, you must consider PVP, RP-PVP, or NormaI servers, as well as classes and professions and how they fit or don’t fit the current meta. There’s an optimal guide for everything, naturally, and it’s easy to get lost down the rabbit hole and forget why you decided to do this in the first place. I tried my best not to fall prey to that, with mediocre results.
Ultimately, I landed on Season of Discovery, which boasts an interesting premise. It’s a remixed take on WoW Classic, with Blizzard adding new content to the game over time instead of providing a wholly-maintained vanilla experience. Unlockable runes allow you to specialise classes in bold new ways, for example. SoD also started with a Level Cap of 25, which has grown gradually over time to simulate the classic levelling process. That ship has sailed now, but my server has a solid player base, so I figured it’d be an excellent way to experience the original game’s questing and try to understand why it still enamours people. It’s also a medium to keep up to date with what Blizzard is trying to do with its ancient but still-beloved MMO in 2024, a topic that fascinates me.
LEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOYY
I’m rolling a Dwarf Paladin. I’ve never played a tank in an MMO before, and I’d like to tick a little fantasy off my gaming bucket list - being helpful in an MMO raid and actually enjoying it. Perhaps it’s a lost dream, but I’m having fun trying to figure it all out. There is a fear setting in, though. With any new game you play, especially something as convoluted as a 20-year-old MMO, you need the skinny on the broader systems to settle in. Thankfully, an army of guides, writers, and content creators exist for this specific reason, but very few are focused on anything but optimisation. Live service games engender this mentality by default, which is anathema to me. We have precious free time, so you’d be stupid to spend it trying to soak in the majesty of Dun Morogh, right? No Leeroy Jenkins for you; maybe wallop these specific creeps for five hours and then slump into bed so you can hit Level 30 by the weekend, soldier.
Alarm bells started ringing when I began looking for beginner guides, and nearly every single one of them assumed I had played to max level before and regarded the levelling process as this quaint thing you do before you can play the game. I get that at the top level, raiders need specific meta kits to help them run the dungeons in record time, but it means that if you’re not building towards that, you probably won’t get invited to the proverbial birthday party.
After much deliberation, I picked the Engineering profession for my Paladin because building weird trinkets to blow up bosses sounds cool. It also happens to be what other players suggest for my class, but either way, I was just interested in the idea of it. Alas, every guide I read is so clinical about giving me exactly what I need to level it up rather than offering tips that might lead me to try and figure it out on my own. I got the impression that I shouldn’t craft what looks interesting to me based on what I stumble upon but instead go away and farm resources until I have the correct amount that would allow me to advance to the next level in one sitting.
World of Warcraft, and particularly the Classic aspect of it, has been ‘figured out’ over the years. There’s so much wisdom in the community and established ways of doing things that it can feel claustrophobic if you’re just trying to vibe it out.
This guide by Lucky Ghost is the only shelter in the storm I could find. I appreciate their comprehensive explanations, which account for a newcomer’s perspective:
I understand that I’m probably in the minority here. Meritocratic exceptionalism is the most critical part of an MMO to many people, and it’s the reason they’re still playing. There’s nothing wrong with that! But indeed, those people were like me at some point, and I feel like a game cannot cater only to its most engaged subjects, or the castle walls rise higher and higher. I’m not even opposed to goal-oriented efficiency-maxxing. I love it in the proper context. I’m sure I’ll be a tremendous max-level BIS raidlord andy when the time comes.
But I just want to enjoy a historically significant game and watch my silly little videos. I’m honestly considering whether it’s worth switching to an RP server, where players focus more on atmosphere over numbers—or just playing World of Warcraft Retail, where there are more communities for players like me. I thought that trying to complete the early-game content with the updates of the present may compromise it, which is why Classic is an excellent place to start. But everyone is still sweaty here, so maybe not?
The obvious answer is to ignore all the noise and keep playing. Many people shun the offputting meta culture and find a lovely guild that caters to them. So, I will continue my adventures in instrumental play. And when my head emerges from the levelling sand, I’ll try to pick up the pieces and see if anyone wants to play with me.
Or maybe I’ll just go back to GTA Online and Sea of Thieves…
Go buy Play Nice!