Roleplaying is an enigma wrapped in a thin coating of slim jim meat. Its hidden in most MMORPGs and many people who want to find it, don't want to dig through whats on the outside to get to it. The same seems true thus far with WoW. I will add the caveat that this is Beta and we're all supposed to be testing the game and not roaming the countryside throwing weddings and irritating power levelers either.

The world itself begs to have Role Players careening around inside, but the combat system makes RP tougher than in any other MMORPG I have played. The reason for this is the speed of the game. There is no down time other than travel. Combat is frenetic and only relents when you want it to, or get sent on a corpse retrival by a mob.

I am now level 10 and have grouped with a dozen or so people and in each case, I can not think of more than one time where we had to sit around waiting for more than two minutes. Not to heal, not to sell, not to go get quests....nothing. Now in EQ, there were dozens of times an hour where groups would need be forced by the game to take long extended mana breaks or waiting for a warrior to run through three zones to get back to the group. This just doesn't happen in the early levels of this game. At first this bummed me out, as I missed the opportunities to banter and do a little RP. However, there are other pros to balance out this one con.

I am pretty sure I love the frantic pace. It seems more real. The immersion level is far deeper than other games because of it. I have yet to camp anywhere. By that I mean, I have yet to be in a location where I felt the need to stay in one spot and just sit there waiting for a mob to pop. In WoW, you hunt. Like a pack of wolves your group will. You will spiral inward killing and maiming. But that’s when the fun starts.

In WoW combat is visceral and you end up truly feeling like a group of adventurers. Whereas in other games I have felt like a mathematician as I attempt to calculate my chances of surviving an attack on something. In WoW, you can easily kill ten Murlocs from the outside of the camp and then assume you can take the three inside sitting by the treasure chest. When taking one or two, your comrades have timed their skills to maximum effect. Your warrior hamstrings them to slow the runners. Your mage nukes when appropriate and perhaps a buff or two is used. Basically, you kick some butt and took some names. Yet when you add a third murloc to the equation, numerically you should be fine…..this is precisely when the fun starts. In EQ and other games you could almost do math in your head to figure out if you could take the camp. In WoW, there is this third factor to add in to the equation, skill. In many ways it is like playing Warcraft III. A good player can decimate an entire army with his hero when fighting an unskilled player. On paper the noob might have the advantage, but when the experienced player uses skills to maximum strategic effect the scales are tipped. The same is true in WoW. You may have beat down two Murlocs without so much as a scratch, but the third might cause your mage to panic or your tank doesn’t hamstring one of them and it runs off to pull another three. This is true in other MMORPGs but not to this extent. It is almost like playing a real time shooter, but with the strategic and thoughtful aspects of RPGs. In short, combat feels like combat and that tastes good to someone like me who appreciates immersion.

Sure I can’t do a ton of emotes while healing and RP with buddies, but with WoW for the first time I felt like combat actually felt like RP. I know that once I find some RP buddies to link up with, we’ll make time for it. However, if I had any doubts about the combat system, the quests made me a believer. Check out tomorrow’s entry to read a little story that has me brimming with hope for RP gamers in WoW.

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