Why do you like WoW?

[Treesh]

See, now, I find WoW completely immersive.  I completely relate to my characters and on a fairly regular basis when I walk into a new area I find myself just stopping to look at stuff.  And the little touches are brilliant.  I love the fact that the default camera position matches your height so if you move the camera right behind your dwarf/gnome you end up looking up at everything and the world seems taller.  And most computer RPGs aren't role playing at all, they line you up with the story they want to tell, and drive you through it.  There's no RPG in FF, for example, just a linear story they set up that you play through.  There's a TON more RPG in WoW.  PvP servers drive this substantially.  A lvl 30 Tauren killing low level night elves in Darkshore getting taken down by a player working patrol for newbies is a great example.  You can always choose to get so into power leveling and the numbers that you lose sight of immersion because everything is seen as "what can I min/max?" but if you let yourself relax and enjoy it it's quite a ride.  The first time I wandered across from Elwynn to Darkshire I got seriously creeped out - now that's immersion.
[right][snapback]65832[/snapback][/right]

I am definitely not a min/max gamer and there are some decent flashes of immersion (the spiders in the undead areas and in Duskwood give me the willies every time I see them so of course I feel compelled to kill all of them I see), and there are some areas with wonderful ambience (love Mulgore, Tirisfal Glades, and Dun Morogh/Loch Modan), but overall (ignoring the PvP aspect) WoW is still extremely linear. You have no input into the world; you just follow what the devs have set out as the story. Yay! I defeated the groups of centaurs thretening the barrens and killed the Warlord. Oh, wait, they're back 5 seconds later because someone else is doing the exact same quest now. I do admit I thought that was a really neat quest, but it somewhat loses that neatness knowing that all the horde can do it and ultimately, nothing actually changes in the world because of it. So how immersive is that? I bust my hump to help protect my land and my peoples, but even if I didn't bust my hump, everyone would be safe anyway. Even in PvP, we can't take over towns that belong to enemy factions, we can't burn the ships to keep them from sailing to us, we can't build bridges, build ramparts, rebuild cities that have been razed. That, to me, is so immersion breaking in a world that is supposedly still at war. My characters (who belong to the same factions anyway) will all follow the same quests, will all end up at the same place with some equipment differences and talent point differences, but really, they'll follow such similar paths in game that I may as well not even bother. I do still roleplay when I feel like it simply because I enjoy that, but the world is still so linear while yet somewhat open-ended (you aren't forced to do the quests and are allowed to be explorers) that I can't call it a true RPG. For what it's worth, I don't consider Morrowind a true RPG for the same reasons.