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Fatherfucking World of Warcraft.

I’d given up on this game months ago–tried playing it with the gf as a bonding experience, which went well until our interests in the game diverged dramatically. (Her: “Let’s take things seriously; if we die, we get in-game penalties.” Me: “Let’s fight that big spiky thing with a huge skull icon.”) Then I had nobody to play it with, and then I got lost in the game’s gigantic world.

Alone and isolated in World of Warcraft? Nothing is lower on the social ladder.

But I got a one-two punch in the mail today: an invite to preview the new expansion content set for release either late ‘08 or sometime ‘09, Wrath of the Lich King, and news of a new “recruit-a-friend” update.

Used to be, the game would give you a month of free play if you got a friend hooked on this crack. Now, in addition, the game gives you virtual loot like a zebra. Is it sad that I kinda want a free, 3D zebra?

Still, any inkling I have to return to World of Warcraft is sprinkled with contempt.

Playing WoW with another person is fun in a way most co-op games aren’t; the fighting and challenge of the game peaks in brief spikes, which makes the game casual-friendly, yet the team-up aspect is downright necessary in terms of checks and balances within the game.

The game starts you off with basic, simple stuff to do–and usually other new players to team up with–all within a very small radius of game world. But once the game tells you to visit other towns and pick up quests, you have to set your little characters to run for maybe six minutes at a time to find the next thing to do–usually with no challenge during the run, just unnecessary distance.

Any time I wanted to play WoW, I had to set aside an entire afternoon–and I spent probably 2/3 of that afternoon running. Got too much stuff in your pockets? Let’s interrupt the quest to run to a town and sell it. Did you reach a new level? Then we gotta run and fly even further to get to a capitol. Finished this quest? Let’s run back to turn it in. Huff, puff.

Halfway through the game, you finally get a horse that speeds your running up by 50%. What a reward–too bad you gotta run even further to get anything done by then. If D&D forced people to roll dice every five virtual footsteps, a lot of nerds would’ve left the basement.

MMOs are big and popular, I know, but they are so unbelievably broken with grinds that hardcore RPG dudes have been scraping off to for decades. The locally produced Pirates of the Burning Sea tried eliminating these by warping players to and from missions. Would’ve been great if the missions weren’t monotonous (and if the sea battles weren’t abominably slow).

Maybe I’m not the ideal MMO player, though. Some people truly love losing a full day to 3D forest runs and finding deposits of ore on the side of the road–millions still pay monthly fees to do just that in WoW. But I like to think even the hardcore would prefer something more refined. Hell, I like killing LOTR-style critters, learning new spells, and digging up rare bits of armor as much as any other bonafide geek; I just want to go faster than a Segway in the process.

So what would make for a better MMO?

One that has challenge and a sense of a large gameworld, along with the fantasy aspect that makes it feel like an “escape” worth investing hours and hours into, yet trims away the crap?

Here’s my idea: space colonization. You pick a home planet. You explore that one to get your feet wet, team up with experts of various technologies a la Mass Effect–no teamwork, no success–and then work up enough cash to buy a ship and pilot it through space. Eventually, you’ll fly to planets whose surfaces are too dangerous to land on except for safe spots. Work and wander to explore the surface of a planet, collect raw materials on that unique planet, and when you’re done, you can warp back to your spaceship (since you’ve set coordinates). And then, you can warp back and forth to that planet in your fricking spaceship whenever you please, since you’ve already proven that you could do it once.

More: Have hostile encounters on rogue space stations. Pilot ships full of trash away from Earth to some other podunk planet. Choose to support your home planet as either a military-minded fighter, a NASA-style exploratory scientist, or a tycoon-mercenary who wants to rule the galaxy Halliburton style. Allow players to control aliens whose “technology” comes from, I dunno, lasers in their eyeballs. I know other sci-fi minded MMOs have come out–Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa–but none have allowed people to get into a spaceship and turn space itself into the “overworld.”

Oh, and this dream game would have no experience points. And tons of aliens with eight boobs a piece. Someone get on this, stat.