World of Warcraft | Worst PC Game Of All Time

Having played to level 80, I can honestly say that World of Warcraft is perhaps the most awful majorly successful game ever to darken the doors of PC gaming. Here's why I'd rather allow termites to eat my feet off than renew my World of Warcraft subscription.

The game play is entirely carrot and stick. You work to get rewards which will allow you to work to get more rewards. The actual game play itself, ie, the reason why you play the game is very rarely rewarding, and hardly interesting. The lore is there, but it's in the small print and I've met very few people who even pretend to care about it. Overall, in spite of some pretty nice environments and even some passably mood inspiring music, the game has the atmosphere of a limp fish.

Nothing aside from your face, race and body is customizable. Gear is all standard, which means that everyone pretty well looks like everyone else. All you can hope for is the fact that the higher level you are, the more bulky and shiny you are and the more outlandishly large swords, staffs and other such accouterments you carry with you. I'm assuming that in a few years, top players will just be giant spiky flashing spheres.

NPC's may as well be wooden sticks with signs on them. They're useless. Text dialog makes them out to have some sort of agenda and feelings, but because it is so difficult to interact with them in any way other than the game designers intended, they are nothing but props. It's not possible to attack many NPC's even if you wanted to (and trust me, on one of the many 'escort' quests, when you have to escort an NPC from one place to another, an NPC who will invariably saunter directly into the path of every mob within a five mile radius, you're going to want to run them through with a rusty spoon very quickly.)

There is no reward in Warcraft simply for enjoying the game. If you play on a PvP server, expect to be fairly regularly killed for no reason by higher level players from about level 15 onwards. This will quickly become frustrating and you will dream of the day that you become level 80 and free from ganking, or at least, able to fight back. Bad news though, when you hit 80, you realize that everyone who hit 80 before you (and given the sheer numbers of players who have been playing for years, that's several hundred thousand people,) can kill you just as easily as when you were a puny level 20. Seriously.

People say that leveling is not really the game, that the end game is where all the fun is. It's not. The end game is where you're forced to play with other people in order to advance. It is possible to level to 80 alone, but after 80 you have to play nice. If you're a new 80, you probably suck, which means that you'll be unceremoniously be kicked from most groups you join simply because a better player comes along.

The solution to this is to join a guild, however any guild worth getting into doesn't want you, and the guilds that accept new 80s and whatnot are very rarely up and running to the point where you'll actually get to play the game. In other words, unless you're prepared to suck up to people, you're done for. If you do get into a good guild, be prepared for drama, lots of it. People good enough to play in good guilds take the game very seriously, and that means you better not screw up too often.

On top of all of this, World of Warcraft costs almost $180.00 per year if you pay monthly. Seriously, on top of the cost of the game, you have to pay $180.00 just to kill x number of y over and over again. If you hate yourself enough to pay $180 per year to play a game that spends most of the time punishing you, why not roll your money up, set it on fire, and burn yourself with it?

It actually stuns me that World of Warcraft breaks every basic rule of game design (variety, interaction, rewards which actually mean something,) and yet has people coming back month after month, year after year. They're not necessarily enjoying themselves either, most of them are just angling for the next carrot, hoping that this will be it. It won't be, because WoW is less a game than a slow torturous way to send you towards your grave without ever having achieved anything of any real consequence. World of Warcraft is a vortex that sucks players in and ultimately leaves them hollow and unfulfilled. Stay away.