The game that I am choosing for this post will be World of Warcraft. I believe that this game has an experience-based theme, mostly because of the fact that there is such a huge plethora of content all with different truth-based themes. For example. in the expansion Wrath of the Lich King, the truth-based theme was that no king can rule forever, and that good will always manage to find away to vanquish evil, whereas in the Burning Crusade expansion, the theme was that lust for power can turn even the most noble of heroes over the edge. However, I believe that the simple experience-based theme in the game as a whole across its 12+ year run, is to provide the player with a fun and enjoyable experience, and to give them a wide range of content to play. It accomplishes this theme with a deep and involving story, presented clearly throughout the game and rewarding the players who actually take the time to learn more about it. Simple to learn but difficult to master (depending on the content) mechanics to learn in multiple facets such as class mechanics, PvE endgame raid mechanics, PvP mechanics, and others. The aesthetics have always been one of WoW's strong suits, as when it first launched, the cartoony visual style meant that it was easy to run on most computers compared to other more graphically intensive games at the time, and just because it's cartoony doesn't mean that it can't be dark and disturbing to appeal to a more mature audience, for example, pretty much everything about the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Old Gods. The technology that Blizzard uses, although not perfect, ensures that hundreds of thousands of players can be on servers together without crashing everything (although there have been some exceptions).
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The main thing which makes a video game different from a puzzle or a toy is that you are the one in control of that experience, and that experience is something that you actually interact with. A game that I've started to enjoy playing is World of Warcraft, and throughout its lifespan it has been a game that embodies this. Blizzard have placed things in that keep players coming back, such as loot rewards that aren't guaranteed but instead have a specific chance to drop from enemies. Originally this was the main force keeping players in but as the game updated over the years, they progressively added more and more things that would appeal to different types of players such as Pokemon style pet-battles and more fleshed out player vs. player interactions.
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