World Of WarCraft: What a Wonderful World

World of What?
After selling nearly 400,000 units and already filling 40 servers of massive multiplayer glory in a just a couple weeks, World of Warcraft(WOW from now on because I'm lazy) has created quite a buzz in the gaming community. WOW is essentially the 10 year anniversary edition of Blizzard's famous flagship series that PC gamers have feeding on since us console gamers were playing SNES. For those that don't already know, WOW is a deeply quest based Massive Multiplayer Online RPG(MMORPG) that basically takes into account all of the various lore and information from past Warcraft games and puts them on servers for hundreds of thousands to play at a time. Unfortunately, with MMOPRGs, comes monthly fees, and the real question on the minds of undecided gamers is: "Is WOW worth the retail and the monthly fee?" Read in to find out...

Installation: If you can't run it, you can't play it
Being as large and beautiful as it is, WOW has some stiff system requirements associated with playing it. If you're planning on running it on a PC, the game requires at least 800Mhz, 256MB ram, a 32 MB graphics card(GeForce 2 or above) and 4GB of hard drive space. On these configurations, the game will run at pretty much minimum capacity. If you want to experience WOW in all of it's glory, look to run it at about 1.5Ghz and with a 64 MB graphics card. The requirements for MAC users are even a little steeper than that of PC users, requiring over 900Mhz and 512MB ram. If you have any questions on whether or not your computer can run WOW, either leave a comment here or visit Blizzard's web site.

Story/Create a Character
WOW takes place years after Warcraft III completed, when Azeroth(The "world" of warcraft) is once again war torn. This time, two factions, "The Alliance" and "The Horde" are at odds with each group fighting to maintain their respective way of life in the wake of the chaos war. This basis comes in to play when creating a character. Your first choice is whether you want to be a member of the Horde or of the Alliance. Each faction is comprised of 4 specific character type. For the Horde, you have your Orcs, Trolls, Undead, and Tauren(a minatuor-like create). Among the alliance are Humans, Gnomes, Dwarves, and Night Elves. Along with these character types are 9 different character subclasses, including Mages, Priests, Warriors, and Paladins, among others. These subclasses allow for multiple combinations of characters, setting up for great differences between things like Human Priests and Human Warriors. Once you select your type and subclass, all that is left is to name it, give it a gender, and customize some of its color and appearance features. Now we can actually play!

Gameplay
As I mentioned above, WOW is a deeply quest based MMORPG, and questing is what you'll spend the great bulk of your gameplay on. Each area in the World has multiple quests for you a complete, and quests are rated in different levels of difficulty via color coding. That being said, more difficult quests will reward players in more experience, more money, and possibly even better items than easier quests will. The best thing about this quest system is that you gain almost all of the experience you need to level while questing. This eliminates random "experience runs" that are seen in other MMORPGs like Final Fantasy where you spend a ton of time killing random enemies over and over again for the sake of leveling. From what I hear, you can actually hypothetically achieve the highest level possible in the game(60) without even exploring all of the world of and their subsequent quests. On that note, there are many hundreds of quests to complete in WOW, and months could be spent just questing with your primary character.

Naturally, leveling up your character is your main concern in any MMORPG, and the same can be said about WOW. And unlike other online supported Blizzard games like Diablo II, where you can level upwards of 40 times in one day, leveling in Warcraft is a much slower, more difficult process. It has more or less taken me 2 full weeks of playing an hour or two daily to merely make it into the high teens, and as it goes with most games of this genre, the higher the level you are, the harder it is to get the next. Leveling in WOW will allow you to upgrade your stats, and depending on what type of character you are, you may want to put your points intellect, while different character types will need strength attributes to improve. Of course, leveling will allow character to wear and wield higher quality armor, weapons, and accessories, which will, in turn, allow your him or her to defeat more powerful foes.

Along with the basic stat leveling in WOW there are also producing items and gathering materials, along with the ability to purchase "character training". The first of the two opens up the ability to have the knowledge to gather ingredients to produce things that your character can use and sell. A tailor, for example, will choose to level skills that allow him to find raw material to produce cloaks and robes. The higher level tailor he is, the higher attributes and bonuses his items will command. Character trainer, on the other hand, is system where your character visits NPCs in the various towns across the world, pays them some cash, and NPCs will teach your player new skills. All of these systems, among others, set up the basic currency in WOW. You earn money(in bronze, silver, and gold) by completing quests and selling items. You can sell items either in shops, or in auction houses, where other players on the server bid on items a la ebay(it even has a buy it now feature). You then use the money that you earn to either buy other items that you can use, or to pay NPCs to teach you skills. This system essentially generates a balanced flow of currency, and keeps players from having an unnecessary amount of cash.

Last but not least is the combat system. The basic combat system in WOW is set up much like its Blizzard counterparts, that being fairly basic and very hot key oriented. The interface, at first, may be hard to decipher, but once you gain a few levels you should be right at home. If not, the game comes with a 200+ page manual that, and take my word for it, will pretty much tell you how to do just about anything. The bases for combat in WOW as it stands is much more player vs. computer than it is player vs. player. Like most other MMORPGs, you'll spend much more time helping other human players than you will you will hurting them, although both are hypothetically possible. The only problem being that both players must agree to "dual" if any brawls are going to go down. The last thing worth noting is that Blizzard has installed an interesting "death" system into WOW. Instead of losing experience or cash, your "soul" will respawn in a cemetery somewhere throughout the world, and you have to walk it all the way back to your corpse. It can be time consuming, but it's incredibly preferable to losing experience or bullion.

Graphics
As you could probably tell from the fairly stiff graphics card requirement, the visuals in WOW are just short of astonishing. The graphical premise in WOW could be described as a well detailed cartoon, and I'd compare the visuals here to those of Fable, with some added vibrancy and much more diversity. Because the "world" of WOW is so large, the graphics really range from area to area. You have lush forests, barren deserts, open plains and just about everything in between here, so groups of quests will vary not only by objectives, but also by terrain. Another plus here is that the game runs incredibly smoothly and there are virtually no loading times seen over the course of gameplay because of the graphics. Lag is also fairly rare. And, to be completely honest, for those with less than top of the line PCs, I've run it on lower settings and still looks pretty darn good.

Audio
I was actually fairly surprised with the quality of the musical score heard in WOW. Of course, you're not going to hear famous artists and well known tracks in WOW like you would in a new EA game, but the background music is pretty soothing and serene, and it helps to build on the mood set by the visuals in each specific area. The sound effects are just what you'd expect them to be, and a lot of the "magic spell" sound effects are pretty cool. The game can also support full Dolby Surround sound, which I've taken full advantage of, and it sounds great with a good set of speakers.

What's wrong with WOW
At this point, you may think that I'm in bed with the higher ups at Blizzard judging by how kind I've been to the game. There is, however, a few problems with the game, most of them being problems in the online layout rather than the actual game code. The first, and I think most important problem with the game is the price. It'll cost you $50 to buy the regular game($80 for the collector's edition which I have), and then you have to pay $15 a month in addition to play the game. Essentially, you're paying for the game up front, and then paying for it again every 3 months. Now, you can get a little break in the price(2 bucks a month) if you sign up more long term, but it's hard to gauge whether or not you'll still be playing 6 months from now. Of course, we have to expect a monthly fee with an MMORPG, but with Blizz already having 300,000 subscriptions, making them over 4 Million dollars a month, it would have been nice for them to knock the price down a few bucks.

The next biggest problem is with the server quality. Blizzard was surprised at the sheer number of players that signed on in the early going, and all 40 of their initial servers have been totally filled. This causes gamers to have to wait in line for 10 or 15 minutes some days at peak hours, which is pretty unacceptable for what you̢۪re paying to play. This is a problem that they'll likely fix very shortly though. Finally, I would have liked to Blizzard allow gamers to customize their character more than they can, there are multiple faces that you can choose from already, but most players are using the same couple of faces. Not really a huge issue though.

Overall
If you like MMORPGs, and you have a computer that can run WOW, I can't really give you any reason not to go ahead and buy it and sign up. I really haven't played much Warcraft over the years, but I've really enjoyed this title thus far. In my opinion, this is the finest MMORPG on the market right now, so if you're into PC games and RPGs, you can't go wrong with WOW. Gamers will love its great addictive questing, its beautiful visuals, and its top notch audio. They may not, however, like it so much once a month on their credit card statement, or when they miss work or class because of it.

Thanks for reading,
-Pav