Aesthetic Values

World of Warcraft is a beautiful game. While most MMOs appear to consist of hues of drab greens, grays, and browns, World of Warcraft is vibrant.

Many MMOs have a specific set of gear for each class for a range of levels. The numbers on each item can change, but the artwork remains the same until a certain level is reached. This provides very limited options for character aesthetics.

World of Warcraft offers a wide variety of artwork in its gear line up. The options compress somewhat at end game level caps, but there is still far more variety to be found than in most MMOs.

However, things could still be better. There could be more aesthetic options within the game.

I have a level 42 hunter. This hunter's pet is a wolf. It is the first pet my hunter chose and I have grown accustomed to it. This wolf is not the best pet in the game. If I wanted to raid with this hunter, I would not be allowed to bring the wolf to the raid with me. This is because there are only a handful of pets that raid guilds consider worthy of a raid. I would have to go out into the game world and tame a beast that I might not otherwise care to bother with. This is a good example of where the aesthetics in World of Warcraft seem to break down. I should be able to choose from a wide variety of pets, all with the same stats, so that I might be able to stand out a little better from other hunters in the end game raids. I am not asking to be able to "carry" more hunter pets, but for there to be more variety of raid worthy pets that raid leaders will actually allow.

Sometimes, I just think it would be nice if the gear and pets in the game were more about aesthetics than stats. There is so much art that is simply vendor trashed.

I understand that the developers have a limited amount of time to design what we have. In order to give players more asthetics options, they would have to give less attention to other content.

Money well spent?

With all of Blizzard's billions of dollars they make every year with World of Warcraft, sometimes I wonder if they are really doing all they can.