Anyone who has spent time with the Warcraft series knows it can get gruesome. Sure, there's not much graphic violence, but a lot of mature themes are considered. I mean, it is Warcraft.
World of Warcraft players must also understand this to some extent. Well, two expansions and 11 million subscribers later, MUD and MMO veteran Richard Bartle is expressing concern over some quests in Wrath of the Lich King that have players torture captive NPCs.
In regards to this, he wrote:
"I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. Worse, the quest is part of a chain you need to complete to gain access to the Nexus, which is the first instance you encounter (if you start on the west of the continent, as I did). So, either you play along and zap the guy, or you don't get to go to the Nexus.
I did zap him, pretty well in disbelief — I thought that surely the quest-giver would step in and stop it at some point? It didn't happen, though. Unless there's some kind of awful consequence further down the line, it would seem that Blizzard's designers are OK with breaking the Geneva convention...
When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting. It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. JKR can put that kind of stuff in her books if she likes, freedom of speech being what it is and all, but it's shattered your expectations. I wasn't expecting consequence-free torture quests in WoW. Getting one was a shock."
Actually, torture existed in WoW before the Wrath expansion, as anyone who's been to the Scarlet Monastery can attest to. Aside from that, I fail to see how simulated torture can be worse than simulated incineration (fireballs) or general mass slaughter. What I want to know is how can he be complaining about the torture when he's participating in an MMO that revolves around an ongoing war driven by racial hatred.
That is what Warcraft is about, in the end -- how not to deal with racism.
