World of Warcraft

Average customer rating: 4.0

WOW
How is the so called World of Warcraft PC game?
Been playing the game since its release almost 2 years ago........
Disregard Initiates' Bias
Good game, but what is it with the "monthly payment"

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World of Warcraft

Manufacturer: Blizzard Entertainment
Product Group: Video Games
Binding: CD-ROM
ASIN: B000067FDW
2004-11-23

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From Amazon.com

World of Warcraft didn't invent the online role-playing genre, but it certainly benefits from the missteps of other titles that have come before. A mind-boggling array of improvements in graphics, gameplay, networking, and interface--really every category--makes this game the crown prince of the genre, a great starting place for newbies, and a challenge to any other MMORPG currently in the works.

<table cellpadding="5" border="0" width="210" align="right" cellspacing="0"> <tr valign="middle" align="center"> <td><img alt="Inside the human camp" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/environment.jpg"> </td> </tr> <tr valign="middle" align="left"> <td>The game's beautifully rendered locations are filled with small details, such as flying birds and flowing water.</td> </tr> </table> A History of Conflict
WoW takes place just four years after the real-time strategy Warcraft series, which chronicles a 25 year struggle between the Alliance (humans, dwarves, gnomes, and elves) and the Horde (orcs, tauren, trolls, and undead). Even though there's tons of accumulated story to the series, new players should not be daunted. The background is there for you to explore, but you don't have to tread a lot of Azeroth history to get into the action. <table cellpadding="4" border="0" align="left" width="155" cellspacing="3"> <tr> <td><hr noshade="noshade" size="1"> The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature.
 <hr noshade="noshade" size="1"></td> </tr> </table>

The game looks magnificent. There's plenty of detail and variety to the landscapes and interiors, and the artwork has a refreshingly playful style. There's not a lot of variety in the character creation process, but with all the skills and proficiencies to combine in the game, WoW focuses its customization not on the appearance of your character but rather on the character of your character. The game lets you adopt any two trade skills, regardless of character race or class, and combine those skills in useful ways. If you choose skinning and leatherworking, for example, you can fashion bags from the carcasses of monsters you defeat, which will allow you to carry even more inventory items.

Expanded Commerce
You can sell the items you make, find, and loot through a variety of outlets. Like any role-playing game, WoW has merchants who will buy your cast-off items for fixed prices, but you can also sell to other players at your own price through in-game chat or by leaving it with one of the auction houses located across the map. This virtual free market is a game within the game, like Monopoly somehow inserted into the middle of Chess. Heck, you can even send items C.O.D. to other players via the game's mail system.

<table cellpadding="5" border="0" width="210" align="right" cellspacing="0"> <tr valign="middle" align="center"> <td><img alt="In-game quest log" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/questlog.jpg"> </td> </tr> <tr valign="middle" align="left"> <td>The game's Quest Log keeps track of up to 20 quests at a time.</td> </tr> </table> In other online role-playing games, starting players have to invest dozens of hours whacking at small prey and doing other odd jobs one at a time to gradually "level up" to more interesting challenges. WoW lets players accept a variety of quests--up to 20 at a time without penalty for abandoning any of them before they're complete. The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature. Where some games only grant experience through battle, WoW grants experience for exploring and fulfilling quests too.

A Level Playing Field
There's also a built-in handicap for casual players where your character enters a rest state when you log off from the game. The longer you're logged off (up to a week), the bigger the experience bonus you'll get when you return to battle. An enemy tagging feature--the player who lands the first attack on an enemy claims the loot for himself or his party--prevents onlookers from swooping in and pilfering items from a monster that you brought down. That resolves a common complaint of other titles.

<table cellpadding="5" border="0" width="210" align="left" cellspacing="0"> <tr valign="middle" align="center"> <td><img alt="WoW interface" src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/xpbar.jpg"> </td> </tr> <tr valign="middle" align="left"> <td>Icons and pop-ups help put complex controls easily within reach.</td> </tr> </table> Most games severely penalize players when they die in-game, usually by shaving experience points, funds, or both. In WoW, death just relocates your ghost to the nearest graveyard, and the only penalty is the time it takes you to get back to resurrect your character's corpse.

All of this makes for a very complicated game, but the well-designed interface puts all the game's elements into icons either visible framing the action or within a simple keystroke. The enemy's artificial intelligence is quite strong too: Monsters will join nearby fights to aid their comrades, switch targets strategically midbattle, and ambush players. The map system fills in details on places you've visited, so you always know where you are and where you've been.

Overall, World of Warcraft is a game that's easy to learn, challenging to master, beautiful to watch, and tons of fun to play. --Porter B. Hall

Amazon.com Product Description

For the first time, players can experience the lands of WarCraft's Azeroth from a new, in-depth perspective. As heroes, they explore familiar battlefields, discover new lands, and take on epic quests and challenges in Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Blizzard has taken care to make the game accessible and fun both for hard-core 60-hour-a-week players and for more casual adventurers.

Product Description

World Of Warcraft lets players experience the lands of Azeroth from a newer, in-depth perspective. They'll discover new lands and take on epic quests and challenges in massive online multiplayer action. Adventure together with thousands of other players simultaneously A monthly subsription fee is required to play online

Customer Reviews:

WOW.......2007-05-21

I had been looking for a great new MMO to play and i thought WOW was very good, but as good as i thought the game was i don't think i'll be playing it too much longer. I just could not really get into this game for some reason, it was a bit too easy for my tastes and i'm probably going to be moving on from it but aside from that the game has wonderful graphics, great sound, tons of quests, cool classes and i think anyone who is even mildly interested in this game should give it a try.

How is the so called World of Warcraft PC game?.......2007-05-17

World of Warcraft is an overall fun PC game it has RPG (Role playing game) and PvP (Player v.s. Player) capalblities. You can meet other players from around the world and interact with many different things in the game. The graphics are great but if you do not have the right graphics chip it won't look as good as usal. There arelots of things that you can do which I can't explain so check it out for yourself.

B.E.N.

Been playing the game since its release almost 2 years ago...............2007-05-16

Well I think by this time everyone including non-gamers have heard about World of warcraft. Its in the news, its on tv, its talked about at work, school, college etc. Families play the game together and the game has even contributed towards breaking of relationsips, falling of grades, people losing jobs etc but inspite of all these facts World of warcraft is still the best MMO out there. Lots of MMO's have come and gone trying to compete or take over the throne from this game but none have suceeded thus far. I have personally over the years have switched back and forth between wow and others mmo's to only come back to wow. This game has some strange and almost majical allure to it.

This all being said I throughly enjoy the game. It's very solo friendly. Has top-notch graphics and the biggest aspect is the huge world which truly does justice to the words 'epic' and 'massive' when its comes to mmo's. The game has both a good and a darker faction to play. The classes are numerous and well thought off too. You have everything from pure specialized classes to hybrids. Choose your faction, pick a class and off you go. The game caters to different playstyle too...for pve oriented people you have pve servers and for hardcore pvp oriented people you have pvp servers(full of gankage and griefing if thats what you like). However, the great thing about the game is that even being on pve servers you have various option to pvp and test your mettle against real players. A person can flag themselves for world pvp or participate in instanced battlegrounds(my favourite)to pvp at your time and choosing. The game also has the feel that there is a constant war going on among an epic struggle between different factions for resources and philosphies. Cities gets attacked, players gets attacked and there are constant raging battles going in battlgrounds.

But aside from all this the game offers some of the most fun questing that i have ever come across in mmo's. If you want to just quest and better your character via leveling it up than the game will grip you too and no wonder people are known to loose a part of their life to this game. But my advice....'Moderation' and you will be all happy both in real and your virtual life.

In conclusion....I will advice this game to anyone who is intrested in playing a great mmo that is not a bore also. A testament to this is my 2 years with this game among all the other posters who gave this game high marks too. Check it out yourself but 'BEWARE'..they are lots of 'clones' out there but none have even half the majic or charm or fun which is the hallmark of a game called World of Warcraft.

Disregard Initiates' Bias.......2007-05-15

I think it's important to be properly acquainted with a game before it is reviewed, but in order to rate it it's necessary to be acquainted with the competition without having been stuck with the product for years developing a bias. Incessantly, World of Warcraft is reviewed, ranked, and revered as having 'charm' and 'fun' that its competitors cannot touch, and that the competitors are only mere clones. But in truth, World of Warcraft is a clone of many MMORPGs that came before it, and other recent games such as Guild Wars and especially Lord of the Rings Online do indeed have charm, beauty, and a level of detail that World of Warcraft cannot even come close to.

There are a few reasons why everyone and his brother, dog, and fish all play World of Warcraft: the game has a name that was already world famous for gameplay (Warcraft, which was a Real-Time Strategy game), the graphics are very, VERY low-end but with enough color and cartoony charm to appeal to an unusually wide range of ages of players, and as such the game targets the broadest common denominator.

That said, World of Warcraft is NOT the game for you if you're looking to push a new 512MB VRAM GeForce 7/8 series video card to its limits. There's nothing graphically spectacular here. Apparently, that's not the point of WoW.

It would seem that WoW is about peer pressure and hanging out with friends and being "cool" and developing biases about a now-archaic game to pre-judge all other viable games, no matter their merit, as "clones". Certainly, WoW has made itself a legend in gaming history. And newer games (such as LOTRO) do indeed reproduce a lot of trivial elements that are seen in WoW. But it's far too easy to forget that WoW itself was a rip-off of 3D MMORPG legends before its own time, including Asheron's Call and EverQuest. In fact, most of the gameplay elements in LOTRO were taken from Turbine's own original legacy Asheron's Call, not WoW. Only a few trivial touches seen in WoW were cloned, all other "cloned" elements derived from other sources.

The gameplay in WoW is decent, but the mechanics can be annoying. WoW has every bit as many grinding as the worst grinding moments of every ther MMORPG out there. The level of sophistication of the initial quests are rediculous: Kill 12 [breed of monster]s. No not those identical twin monsters directly adjacent to them. And wait your turn--everyone else is doing the same thing.

Getting lost in WoW is as boring as in any MMORPG. Given the outdated graphics and obsolete AI, you may find yourself severely uninspired to keep moving. Combat situations in WoW are unoriginal, and actually quite flawed. I don't know about what the other races are like or if you can turn it off, but every time I try to use a skill and don't have enough energy, my character shouts, "I don't have enough energy!" That is extremely annoying to me. I could tolerate a short and simple musical note or something, and would prefer nothing to happen at all. Equally annoying is the fact that visual feedback for this is isolated from the skills toolbar other than the fact that the skills are simply disabled / dimmed; one must monitor the Energy bar at the top of the screen. Most MMORPGs have this wrong; in Guild Wars, I rearranged my user interface so that the "mana" / "magic" (blue bar, whatever it's called) is directly adjacent to the skills bar. If WoW supports UI rearrangements, this would be necessary to me. I haven't checked yet.

I mentioned that the graphics are low-end. This is true; they do push systems of 2004 or so, but this is 2007. To make up for this, theming is very heavy--buildings are lopsided, players are shaped with exaggerated features, and colors are painfully solid (solid green flora, solid blue sky, solid gray brick buildings, etc.) If you dig that or don't care, great. I for one prefer to sink in my chair and inhale the beauty of Lord of the Rings Online, with the incredibly detailed sky, the flock of birds in the sky, the rainbow, the very organic-feeling grass, the beautiful moon, and so on. If I'm going to stare at a character's butt all day, I also prefer to stare at my quaint Hobbit in LOTRO or my beautiful character in Guild Wars over WoW's low-polygon cartoony ogre thug or lopsided human.

I don't doubt that those who have played WoW for a long time are thoroughly enjoying themselves. My frustration is with the fact that most WoW players are first-time players of MMORPGs--a fact proven by numbers alone--and they have no idea of how unfairly prejudiced they are about the game that introduced them to the genre when they judge other very fine games. *Of course* they will look down on them. It doesn't matter that they supercede many or all elements of what makes WoW great (other than sheer quantity of players). People will always be biased for what they have been playing for a long time.

My review of WoW, then, concludes with this: WoW is popular because of viral marketing, not because it's a spectacular game. Is it a good game? Sure. Does it stack up to other MMORPGs? Well, if you forget numbers for a moment, WoW stands on its own but it really does not overcome them all. Do I think it's worthy of 5 stars? Absolutely not, I reserve that for Lord of the Rings Online. 4 stars? No, I was annoyed and frustrated when I tried WoW.

So if your friends or family are playing WoW and they're trying to get you to join them, by all means, sign up and join the party. But if you're on your own and you have a good gaming PC and you just want to enjoy an MMORPG experience, WoW is nothing to be ashamed of, but I would recommend that you consider the alternatives--especially those alternatives that most of the MMORPG newbies (i.e. the bulk of WoW veterans) dismiss as "cheap clones". You might find as I have that the dismissal is with little merit, and that they aren't cheaply implemented at all but very well made iterations of a MMORPG genre that has a decades-old legacy.

Good game, but what is it with the "monthly payment".......2007-05-12

I like the game, but I really think the creators are stealing people with their monthly payment. Isn't the game already expensive?

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