Editor's Note: This story was originally published at the launch of World of Warcraft.

What is it about role-playing that developers forget in creating an MMO?

Ever hear about the greatest game on earth? Ever thought you were playing the greatest game on earth? There are likely several "greatest game" answers for every gamer on the planet, but for the subset of gamers who like to call themselves role-players, the greatest game has yet to be made.

"What's a role-player?" you ask? A role-player is someone who allows the character on the screen before them to take on a life that is apart from their own. To some this just means that their toon is a digital representation of something they could never be,and that's role-playing. To others, that toon is just a conduit for their own thoughts and emotions to show themselves in the game. But to a growing minority of players, role-playing means a whole lot more.

To them, that toon is a living and breathing entity. They go to great lengths to learn about the history and culture of their toon. They learn to talk like the rest of the NPC's (non-player characters) in the game, and to them, the greatest compliment they could ever receive is "Oh, I thought you were an NPC."

Recently I had the chance to spend about three months playing in World of Warcraft (WoW), a recently released MMORPG from Blizzard Entertainment, creators of games such as Diablo and Starcraft. To my dismay, I began to see the flaws in their gaming design as it relates to those of us whom the majority of MMO-players call the "role-playing elite".

Don't get me wrong; WoW is a great "game". But if you want to truly immerse yourself in the game world around you, you're going to have to make a lot of excuses in order to make it work with the universe as the developers have envisioned it. And while the graphical visions in the world are stunning (and believe me they are; Blizzard Entertainment won a gamut of awards for their graphics last year), the beauty and dynamic feel to the world is simply crushed when you start looking at it from a role-playing perspective.

For starters, many of the instanced and epic quests are repeatable,which means that even if you've all ready killed that big baddy in the Deadmines, you can do it again and again. Fun-filled entertainment for the money-seeking, equipment-hording characters who have the time (or the levels) to spend on the affair. What makes this difficult for role-players is the fact that no matter how many times you thought you killed so-and-so, there they are again. While WoW never claimed that they were planning on making this a dynamically changing world based on the actions of its players, this is nevertheless one of the few reasons that it will be hard for role-players to accept the world.

Leaving that aside, though, as all of the quests are things that you will be repeating in your WoW experience as you train up new characters and the like, many role-players can explain away the lack of NPC deaths (they never -really- died; their henchmen fixed them up or raised them from the dead). And after all, their characters don't die either.

In fact, dying in WoW is about the easiest and least troublesome of affairs. You died? No problem. You're whisked away to the spirit realm, and can talk to the spirit "angel" in the graveyard where your "spirit" spawns. They will restore you back to life, albeit sick and with a lot more damage to your equipment, or you have the option to run all the way back to your corpse to be revived with nominal health and mana but without the sickness and armor damage. Now, let me begin by saying that I thought this was an interesting idea, and then let me continue with all the ways it failed to be as interesting as I had hoped as a role-player.

"Great! I'm in the spirit realm! Neat, I can talk to this spirit angel thing. What is this spirit angel thing? Well, no matter, spirits are everywhere in the world; I'm sure this one is just a rebirth spirit of some sort. Right. But I don't want to get sick and have to pay a ton of coin (which I probably don't have) to repair my armor; so, I'll just run back to my "corpse" and re-mesh my spirit to my flesh."

So I click the little button, am revived, and look to see, my skeleton? What the hell is my skeleton doing there? Do I still have all my bones? Yep, I sure do. Man, that's, just, odd.