Project Lore

We dedicated players can bicker all we want about Arena balance or Rogues being over-powered, but what about the presence of PvP available in the game itself? When you have a game as popular as World of Warcraft, you're bound to attract the ire of the gaming community at large. In my travels around the internet, I've learned that there are quite a lot of people fed up with Blizzard's baby, and one of the chief complaints, next to simply being an MMO, is that it doesn't focus enough on Player versus Player combat.

I suppose this isn't a new argument. After all, the game's been criticized for its "care bear" approach to open-world ganking since before its launch, and, at that point, I can understand why. It stands to reason that the people most interested in the game at the time were those that had spent extensive amounts of time playing through the Warcraft strategy games. WoW offered them a new, interesting, and more intimate way of engaging in the age-old conflict between the Alliance and the Horde.

With so much standing animosity between the two factions, it would be reasonable for your average pre-release gamer to expect copious amounts of wanton bloodshed and for all-out war to consume Azeroth whole. Well, the fight with the Burning Legion mellowed those tensions. The Alliance lost their core leaders and Thrall tried his best to pacify the more chaotic aspects of the Horde. So when it came to retail, the only thing you could do in WoW was to attack someone on the opposite side if they let you, duel with fellow players, and play a silly game of "capture the flag" in Warsong Gulch (though, if memory serves correctly, Arathi Basin may have been available, as well).

Quite the disappointment for some, but a great boon for others. The game's population swelled not only on the brand name, but the number of players who wanted to work cooperatively towards their goals. But Blizzard didn't completely forget about PvP. Instead, they made great strides to make it more and more a part of the game without completely alienating their base. But to this day, the game takes a lot of guff from those who have long-since quit the game or never played it in the first place.

In fact, so heralded is this mythical PvP nirvana, that a lot of people believe that's the only way to make a dent in Warcraft's armor. That its players simply continue to bide their time and play such a "boring" game because a real, honest, PvP-dedicated MMO has yet to come along.

Isle of Conquest... on of Warcraft's most recent PvP additions.

The problem is that they have. Guild Wars, Warhammer, Aion. Countless other Korean MMORPGs. More games than I'm willing to list here have used PvP as a selling point to distance themselves from WoW. And yet, its success remains unparalleled in the genre. Now that's not to say that they're bad games or that they don't present a viable PvP option, but rather, I propose, the market for such games isn't quite as big as one might initially think. After all, not only are these games competing with Warcraft, but also games in other genres: Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, HALO, Gears of War, Madden, Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros., Starcraft, Warcraft 3. Taking a quick look at the pro circuit will allow you to see what sorts of titles are dominating the competitive gaming scene at any given moment, and MMOs are curiously absent... aside from, ironically, Arena play in WoW.

In my experience, the vast majority of competitive gamers prefer instant action, as opposed to the typical need to grind to a certain level to even start playing seriously. Now here is where WoW excels: it's got some excellent PvE content to pull you along, making that grind more or less worth it (at least the first time through). PvP, even if it isn't in its ideal form, is layered on top of that core structure. But some people maintain that the game simply doesn't go far enough.

Really?

Currently, you've got your choice of six different Battlegrounds, an extensive, rating-based Arena system, and World PvP objectives like Wintergrasp (and, to a lesser extent, Venture Bay, Halaa, and the Bone Wastes as the next most popular locales). The next expansion will add ratings to Battlegrounds, three brand new ones to fight in, the Tol'Barad PvP zone, and most certainly several unrevealed Arena maps, to boot. I contend that the sum total of World of Warcraft's PvP content eclipses that of  nearly any competing MMORPG. Is it as integrated into the game as it is in other titles? Perhaps not, but that's splitting hairs. If a game's PvP is restricted primarily to certain zones, regardless of whether or not they are physically connected to the core game world, I don't think it's any different from the way Battlegrounds are set up.

And, of course, there's always rolling on an open PvP server if that's the way you really want to play the game.

Blizzard may have shifted their focus to PvE content early on, but I think that the concept of PvP in Azeroth has come back in a very big way. With those old conflicts rising once again, both the Horde and Alliance marching to war against each other, even with a greater threat looming, I think the game's potential for competitive player combat can only become greater. So, I ask you readers: Is Blizzard really short-changing PvP? Have you been satisfied with the amount of content added, or do you think other games have succeeded at competing on this front, offering a better, and supposedly more comprehensive PvP experience?