Boasting millions of players around the world, World of Warcaft is a sweeping success and a model for the future of the MMO genre. It has captivated the traditional gaming demographic blocks and, defying belief, expanded them. But can they continue?

WoW's success derives from three distinct features:

First, by varying content delivery to keep several play styles happy. While releasing just enough content to string people along is a standard in the business, Blizzard did it better by releasing much of the content for ‘free’ in its patches, rather than in pricey expansions as the previous contenders have, which is a boon for kids living with their parents or for frugal cheapskates such as myself. Blizzard’s second achievement is its strict adherence to the KISS principle. By keeping the game play so easily accessible an untrained monkey could do it, Blizzard vastly expanded their potential market. Finally, the title bills itself as allowing the player to immerse himself in the lore rich world of Warcraft and uses that world as window dressing covering the endless process of acquiring and replacing loot, and it is here that the first of WoW’s four major flaws becomes apparent.

 Early in the game, most of the players come across the zone of Westfall and quickly learn the plight of the kindhearted people living there. As the resident hero, you rush around assisting in any way you can and as the quests unfold you learn of the root cause of the ills which plague the land, trudging into the depths of the Deadmines in an effort to end the threat.

This instance, and the entire zone leading up to it, is a perfect example of the facade covering the game’s loot distribution mechanisms, where the storyline creates the desire to play while the loot acts as the reward. This design philosophy can, to some extent, be seen throughout Azeroth, the world in which the Warcraft storyline takes place.

Another example: Blackrock Depths.

Ask most people about this instance and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth. The instance itself is huge and mapped in such a way that it is virtually impossible to reach any part of it in a reasonable amount of time, with pitiful rewards once you do manage to get there. However, many will also tell you that it is one of their favorites despite its many shortcomings. They will cite the importance of the location within the storyline and how well the instance captured the feel of a huge city on the warpath. The chief issue was that the veneer, the huge labyrinth of a city going to war, got in the way of the loot mechanisms. Blizzard did make an attempt to fix the rewards issue and vastly improved the quality of the loot; however, they took the wrong lesson from it: scrape away any vestige of immersion which might get in the way of their hamster wheel.

 Fast forward to the Outlands in The Burning Crusade and the veneer is virtually stripped away. Unlike our Westfall scenario, many of the instances in the Outlands have little or no connection to the outside world. Possibly the worst of these is Terokkar Forest, half of which was destroyed by some force though the inhabitants of the world seem to pay it no attention at all. You are left to wander and wonder in an environment that is obviously damaged in some way, and yet you are not connected to it through any form of interaction with the world’s inhabitants. That is, until many levels later, long past the time that you have left the Forest and its concerns behind, when you receive one quest which, without much more than a, “The bad guys are here,” sends you off to collect loot, I mean, save the world!

But that in itself is the problem. The instances have always been nothing more than a loot delivery system; it is the lore around the instances which keep them, and the game, interesting for such a large portion of the player base. But as time has progressed Blizzard has slipped farther down this path, mutilating its own world and storyline, quite literally going back in time and altering it for absolutely no other reason than to deliver loot to the player in the Mount Hyjal 25-man raid instance. The loot and the lore have switched places, the former becoming the motivation with the latter as the reward.

Should Blizzard continue down this path, they will gradually turn away an ever larger portion of disillusioned former fans.