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Tobold recently commented on the polish prevalent in World of Warcraft’s recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK), in that it outshines Warhamer: Age of Reckoning (WAR).

I prefer the term quality of execution over the term “polish”, but however you call it, Wrath of the Lich King has oodles of it. And if I compare it with the last two major MMORPGs released, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, I can only say that Wrath of the Lich King wins easily in the quality department. That isn’t to say that somebody can’t prefer the faster combat of AoC, or the PvP of WAR. WoW remains WoW, and if you prefer a fundamentally different sort of gameplay, WotLK won’t deliver that. But at no point in Wrath of the Lich King does one have the impression that one is playing an outdated game.

There’s a stark difference between an expansion built on a game four years old, and a game not even one year old yet. That’s not to say that we want to take anything away from Blizzard’s execution with WoW’s graphics, as they certainly meet our expectations of graphics in modern games. We are, after all, more for the gameplay experience than pretty moving pictures. Nonetheless, WotLK should have a strong execution because it does little to evolve the MMORPG scene: it’s more of the same, and that’s certainly a good thing for the WoW faithful, yet utterly bad for its critics.

WAR, on the other hand, attempted to move MMORPGs towards a more PvP-centric base, or at the very least, capitalize on the fact that WoW has a horrible PvP implementation, in that Blizzard clearly ignored PvP aficionados for years, and then patched in a piss-poor e-sports initiative. To this latter end, Warhammer has been successful. As for the game’s polish, it’s naturally not at the level that WoW is today, but compare it to where WoW was a few months after its respective release, and we can draw much clearer parallels.

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