Food for thought on remake and genre designation

Just a week ago, I found myself defending WoW from the accusation that it has become too linear of a game, yet as time has gone by and I have consumed more of Cataclysm's content, it has become apparent to me that WoW really has changed in terms of how linear it is. I remember in my last post before Cataclysm came out, I considered whether Cataclysm could really be called WoW 2, as it has frequently been called, since the setting hadn't changed much. If only I had known just how little change was really wrought by patch 4.0.3, and how much awaited me once the switch was flipped on Cataclysm itself.

Suffice it to say that questing in Cataclysm has more linear than it was in expansions past, especially compared to questing in vanilla WoW. It has become so linear that WoW really has become a different game, at least in terms of its questing, so I would say the title of WoW 2 is not undeserved. In fact, it really deserves the title of WoW 2.0, rather than WoW 2, because Cataclysm is really an updated version of the old WoW. See, when I heard everyone calling Cataclysm WoW 2, I assumed they meant that it would be like a sequel to the game, like the way Metroid 2: Return of Samus was a sequel to the original NES Metroid game. It continued the story of Metroid (which Cataclysm does) and provided some updates to the gameplay and the player's arsenal (which Cataclysm also did). However, considering how greatly Cataclysm has changed WoW, it now seems to me to be more analogous to Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid released almost twenty years after the original. Zero Mission completely updated the original Metroid, adding all of the new features, weapons, and abilities fans had grown accustomed to over the years as new games had come out, while also expanding the game's universe to add new areas to the remade ones. Cataclysm, to me, seems to be more of a remake of WoW than a sequel to it, which is why I say it deserves the title of WoW 2.0 more than that of WoW 2.

Yes, WoW feels like a very different game now. In fact, after doing enough quests to see just how much WoW has changed, I can say that it reminds of another game I spent a lot of time playing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I never got into the other entries in the series as much as I got into San Andreas, so I don't know whether they all have this same design or not, but in San Andreas, you often had a few missions you could do at any time, and once you finished those, a new segment of the story would open up. Maybe it would involve one mission that would progress the story to its next stage, or maybe you'd have more missions to do, but the story missions were very linear, and the game itself was very story driven. However, that wasn't to say you couldn't do other things. There were a plethora of side missions you could do, items you could collect, and there was always the option to just go out and cause mayhem. A game with linear story-driven missions in addition to side missions you could complete if you wanted to? Sounds a lot like the way I described WoW but a week ago.

Yet San Andreas was not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination; it was a sandbox game, a genre which shares many elements with the RPG genre, including an open world and many things to do, yet it was not nearly as open and non-linear as WoW was in its earlier incarnations. Could this mean that WoW is moving away from its MMORPG categorization and becoming something new? Not likely. Linearity or lack-thereof is not a defining feature of an RPG, though RPGs tend to fall closer to the non-linear side of the spectrum, but this is more by convention than by definition. No, what defines in RPG is really stats, numbers, leveling up, and things of that nature, game aspects that are reminiscent of the table-top RPGs of yore. What this means is that WoW is still definitively an RPG, not a sandbox game; it is simply and RPG with sandbox elements, which could always be said about it to some extent.

But with that said, WoW is most definitely very different from its vanilla days; the newfound linearity of the quests is enough to prove that is true. If anything, this is the culmination of changes to questing that have been made with each expansion pack, for each continent's quests became more and more linear as time went on, until we got to the point where we are now, where questing has become much more linear than is typical of an open-world RPG. Is this a sign that WoW is moving away from the conventions of the open-world RPG genre and taking on aspects of other, more mainstream genres? And if so, what will that mean for MMOs as a whole? It's probably too early to tell at this point in the expansion, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for as the saga of World of Warcraft continues.