World of Warcraft Review
Played on:
Windows
MMORPGs have been around for years and years now, but World of Warcraft is the first one that thousands of gamers will actually try. Blizzard's name is very well known in the gaming industry, as every one of their titles garners massive sales and promises years of addictive gameplay. When WoW was first announced, it seemed like Blizzard would be coming down from the heavens to "redeem" the massive multiplayer world with another of their divine inventions.
Ok, World of Warcraft isn't that good - other MMORPGs aren't going to go totally out of business just because of this game. But at the same time, Blizzard has put together one of the most solid, purely entertaining MMORPGs I've had the chance to play yet, and I can say that if there's one game of this kind that you should try, it's this one.
Blizzard has taken the plot from Warcraft 3 and made a sequel of sorts out of WoW. No, this is not a strategy game, but the world will feel very familiar and much of the lore and locations can be seen and explored here. I find it funny that it's a MMORPG that wound up allowing one explore more of the Warcraft world more than the strategy games that the world's based on. A word of warning, though; if you hate MMORPGs and love Warcraft, I don't think that this one will be the great savior. Many problems evident in MMORPGs still linger in World of Warcraft, and while this one is about as close as you can get to perfect, it's still nowhere near it.
The developers have done an excellent job getting you acquainted with the basic ways in which this genre of online games work. You'll start off in a small village - away from the massive cities that are the hub of the major civilization in the world - so that you can learn things one at a time without being overwhelmed. Combat is easy, and the quests start right from the first few seconds you're in the world.
Let's take a minute to talk about quests. If you think of them in the Everquest sense, then you'd know that quests are a serious pain in the butt that are hardly worth touching. In the case of WoW, that's simply not true. Quests will send you to fight stuff you were going to fight anyway, and the rewards are very substantial. They're easy to track too, with WoW's excellent quest log interface. You can even share your open quests with other people, which can ensure that your group will want to hang around with you to fight monsters together.
But grouping is not a huge priority here in World of Warcraft; while it can certainly help, you can complete most quests on your own as any character class. The way this is done is by allowing even the support classes some pretty decent damage spells, which puts the classes at lower levels much closer together in ability. This overall effect diminishes as you get closer to level 60, but you can easily get into your 30s and even 40s as any class completely on your own.
Death is always looming in World of Warcraft, and with no easy way to run away from monsters, you will likely be dying much more often here than in most MMORPGs. The social and aggressive nature of most monsters in the game can almost guarantee a death for anyone who gets close, even if those monsters are of the same level as the player. Yes, Azeroth is a harsh world, and players who hate dying will not be happy with WoW in this respect.
Not all is lost, though; WoW uses a unique death system that's different from any other game I've seen yet. There is no experience loss at all in this game, and you don't ever have to retrieve your body if you don't want to. Upon death, you can be resurrected by a player or you can "release" your spirit. If you choose the latter option, you'll pop in town with a very freaky-looking "spirit world" effect, and you have the choice to ask a Spirit Healer to resurrect you on the spot (at a large cost of durability on your equipped gear, meaning extra cash to repair the items) or you can run out to your body and resurrect yourself for very little cost at all - other than the time taken to get out there.
This system makes death much more of a hassle rather than a soul-killing, "I quit this #$%^& game" kind of event. Even if your gear is reduced to a durability of zero, it's still there and while it acts like it's not even equipped at all, it can never be destroyed by player death. All you need is the cash to repair it again. I really enjoy this system, and when it's combined with the rather large number of ways in which players can get killed, it means that your group will still try and do things the smart way but aren't slitting their wrists because of a few deaths. To sum it up: the difficulty is high, but the penalty for failing is low. It's effective and fun.
WoW includes eight races to choose from, from the teeny Gnomes to the massive Tauren. Humans, Trolls, Dwarves, Night Elves, Orcs, and the Undead round out the cast, and four races make up one of two sides that you must choose from. The Alliance pretty much embodies your classic good guys, and the Horde is a combination of the more bad-guy side. Blizzard seems to want to press into our skulls the notion that "good" and "bad" have no meaning anymore in Azeroth, but either way, appearances and player behaviors do seem to match what side you pick so far.
I particularly like the game's structure of requiring you to pick a side when you choose your race; the Alliance and Horde are very distinct, even if the character classes are mostly the same for either side. While the races inside either faction will start intermingling after only a few levels of play, most races have their own cities and newbie lands complete with their own full set of quests. Starting a second character and picking a new race and class really feels different from the last one, and that unique feeling can last at least through the 20s and maybe even the 30s if you head to zones you haven't been to before. On top of this, the Alliance and the Horde both have totally unique sets of lands to explore, and these areas can take you pretty far towards level 60. Each side really does feel like a different game, and switching sides does add plenty of replay value.
WoW includes a ton of loot, most of which can be had from monster corpses or as a result of quest completions. This stuff really helps your character a ton, especially armor; since player health seems to be pretty close across the character classes, the difference in survivability comes from your magic resistances and the quality of your armor. Weapons come in many different forms, and the game also includes "damage per second" on each weapon's statistics to allow for easy comparisons. The game also includes many soulbound items, some of which bind when you receive them, and some that bind to the player that equips them for the first time. Soulbound items can always be sold back to an NPC vendor, so there's always a small monetary compensation for that item you can't use or don't want.
World of Warcraft doesn't include a private messaging system per se; instead, there's a true postal system that requires you to type out and send a letter to another player. The recipient must go to one of the many mailboxes around Azeroth, and can read, reply to, or delete your letter from there. You can also attach a single item if you want, so that players can hand items to each other without having to meet up - although since delivery of items takes about an hour, you can't quite get your instant gratification in the form of new gear. When I first heard that this system was set up, I thought it was pretty decent but not incredible; I was wrong. Guild members can very easily hand down items as they go, and also quickly make sure that anything they pick up and cannot use goes into the right hands.
And if that fails, there's always the game's built in auction system. Major cities include an auction house that can be used to sell your items, and it surprisingly includes a lot of options seen on eBay. Buy it now? Check. Long, medium, and short durations on auctions? Check. A fee for putting an item up for auction? You betcha. The nice part is that Blizzard hides the exact time that auctions end, which prevents "sniping". It means that buyers are more likely to bid what they are willing to bid rather than what they think they can get away with in a few milliseconds, and I think this system will really help the game's longevity.
A review of World of Warcraft without the mention of add-on interfaces is simply incomplete. There are several of these interfaces that are now available for free, the most prevalent and feature-rich being Cosmos. The amount of stuff this thing adds - extra toolbars, damage per second calculation, simple quest sharing, and literally dozens of other features - is astounding. I commend both Blizzard and the Cosmos guys for working together to make a great game even better. Seriously, if you're currently playing WoW without Cosmos or any other interface add-ons, go and do that now. Right now.
Some games make grouping a sort of burden that must be endured rather than enjoyed, but Blizzard has carefully worked on this system to make it fun - as long as your group isn't composed of complete morons, that is, and that's a risk you always take with online games. It turns out that grouping in WoW is almost always more good than bad, and partying up generally serves as an opportunity to better your character at a faster pace than soloing. Classes complement each other nicely, and the interface and gameplay options for grouping are excellent. The game automatically sets up a dice-rolling system for the really nice loot out there, and the group leader can set up several types of loot systems for his group; for example, free-for-all lets anyone pick up anything anytime, and round-robin has people taking turns picking up loot. The system is also pretty intelligent, making sure that one guy doesn't get stuck with the fish scales while another gets the Rugged Banhammer of Fate every time just by luck of the round-robin draw.
It doesn't end there, though; group members can mark spots on their map for others to see and go to, and the location of your group members is always marked on the map wherever you are. It's not all roses, though; Blizzard, for some reason, limits groups only to five members. This is the smallest number I've ever seen in a MMORPG where grouping is useful, and it really limited my experience with the guild I'm in. I have no clue why they did this, and while I'm sure there's some good reason buried in there somewhere, I'm just so used to seeing larger groups that it was a real disappointment.
Any MMORPG nowadays needs powerful guild and private-messaging-oriented features, and Blizzard has delivered some of the best stuff I've seen yet. The guild interface allows you to browse all members both online and offline, and you can check up on their levels, various public notices for each player, and even invite them to groups directly from the guild window. The raid interface also works well, and it isn't just for use during epic encounters; it's very handy in PvP as well. More on that later.
All of this is fine, but if the game world's no fun to be in, then all the kickass interface features and gameplay rules you can think of aren't worth a damn. Blizzard seems to understand this, and has made a world with many unique "zones" (even though Azeroth is almost completely a seamless world) that look very different from the last one you were in. This is most evident if you take a ride on one of the various types of travel in the game; soar from one area into a major city, and you can see the game busily loading up graphics dynamically as you go.
There's another point I'd like to make - World of Warcraft runs like a dream. It runs great on my home computer, listed above, but it also played flawlessly on my Centrino 1.6GHz laptop with a Radeon Mobility 9000 and 640MB of lowly PC2100 memory. Sure, there was some swapping and loading during gameplay on the laptop - that's expected with a rather sluggish 4200 RPM hard drive - but it was mostly a smooth, exciting experience. Basically, the game is at a point technically where I don't even think about the game engine or the frame rate; all I care about is the game, my guild buddies and my next quest. They say technology is at its best when you don't even know it's there, and WoW is a shining example of that.
That's the game client and its engine, though; on the server side it's a different story. During the launch of World of Warcraft, way too many players logged in. Blizzard seems to have underestimated, like almost all MMORPG developers do, the amount of demand for their game, and the players are currently paying the price. A few servers were down for upwards of two days starting only a day into the game's launch, and other servers currently have "queues" where you have to wait in order to log onto your server. This is only really evident on specific servers, namely the high-profile PvP servers. I'm on one of these, and it's frustrating, but I know that it'll go away soon. Until then, there are plenty of servers with low populations (88 of them, at last count), and I suspect that most players will have zero problems.
There aren't a whole lot of MMORPGs boasting any sort of Player vs. Player support these days. Basically, it's difficult to implement and balance alongside a PvE (or Player vs. Environment) game as well, and the benefit of a relative few subscribers isn't worth it from a money perspective. Despite that, Blizzard has gone ahead and included a fairly extensive PvP system into their game, and it comes in two flavors. Non-PvP servers allow players to choose whether or not to partake in the PK action by flagging you as such for up to five minutes. You can flag yourself with a console command, or you can attack another player or heal a PvP-flagged ally to open yourself up to PvP as well.
The PvP servers remove all this flagging stuff and simply make it open PvP. And even a week after release, there has been plenty of action in this regard, as each side heads into enemy territory to take on whoever they can find. So far, the fighting has been largely unbalanced and lopsided, but the defenders always manage to fend off the attackers eventually. As more guilds get together and organize more, we'll see PvP raids happening more often and with better coordination.
What's the reward for bothering with PvP? Well, players can rack up honorable and dishonorable points. Honorable ones will be able to be spent on unique gear, while dishonorable points can get you in trouble with NPCs of your own factions. It remains to be seen if this is truly a worthy motivator for PvP, as the lack of territorial control or player-built cities is a constant reminder that other MMORPGs have implemented PvP in a more robust way.
On top of all this, you can also duel people on your own side if you want. The end of a duel results in the loser sitting down rather than dying, so there isn't even any actual death involved in this. Overall, I like the PvP system, but Blizzard will likely need to continue working on it in order to keep the hardcore players logging on.
Even on the PvP servers, players aren't the only things you'll be killing once you hit level 60. Blizzard has included raid encounters that are reminiscent of Everquest's endgame, and this kind of gear will be needed for those guilds who want to have only the best. Again, this is something that was only briefly tested during beta, and even then it was shortcutted by the developers; whether or not this content is worth bothering with, few people really know.
The art of World of Warcraft is very unique; it's done in an almost cartoon fashion. The characters are well-animated, with plenty of emotes and some great combat animations, and the wilderness is sufficiently believable. Cities are massive and full of life, and the builds are put together in that strange, Warcraft-style angular way. If you love the art style of Warcraft 3, the graphics will please you in many ways here. Personally, I don't much care for the art in this game, and much prefer the darker, more realistic approach seen in most other MMORPGs. Still, I chalk that up more as pure preference than anything else, and Blizzard has undoubtedly packed in so much great gameplay here that I have no issues with ponying up my fifteen bucks a month to play this. Plus, any game with goofy-looking gnomes is a winner.
World of Warcraft may not be the great savior of MMORPGs, but it's certainly the most solid one to come out in a long time. The interface is top-notch, usability features abound, the world itself is unique and charming, the death penalty doesn't make you want to destroy your keyboard, and the combat is genuinely fun. It's not without its minor faults, but Blizzard knows what they're doing, and they've put together an excellent experience with World of Warcraft.
