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Background of World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft, more commonly known as WOW, is the traditional MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online), an internet game that is able to support hundreds and thousands of users simultaneously. There is a theme that focuses on the ongoing dispute between two warring factions of Azeroth (that’s the name of the "world"): the "good guys" Alliance (Humans, Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves) and the "bad guys" Horde (Orcs, Trolls, Undead, Tauren). This is not a new concept; Blizzard basically used the original Warcraft story line (their popular macro-management games Warcraft I to III) and expanded it into what WoW is today.
(Blood Elves and Draenei will be added next expansion).
Game Play
Like all other MMOs, players get to control a character within Azeroth. You, as the player will have the opportunity to explore the diverse world, fight various monsters and players, take on story line quests and make lots of gold by working hard (sounds a lot like real life work). You can find information on the classes and professions here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/#gettingstarted
The objective of WoW is to level your character to the highest level (currently 60 but soon to be 70 when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out), mingle with people by joining parties, guilds and raids. And because the game is an MMO, it is very "group/party centric", so mingling with people is necessary. The party numbers range from 2 to 5 for regular action adventure parties, and 10 to 40 raids for larger dungeons. Any party larger than 5 people will be converted to a raid. For those looking for challenge, partying with other players can be fun. In parties, you will be required to work together with other players to fight difficult monsters using various techniques and strategies. The bigger the party the more coordination you will need to succeed in a dungeon and your may also need to be selective of party members’ classes for certain fights.
Cons of partying would be finding the game play on the side of tedious. You are required to spend a lot of time grinding out your quests and levels while Blizzard sets up numerous time sinks, uh hmmm challenges, that prevent you from reaching your goal(s) along the way. 40 man raids can be time consuming to the point of spending at the very least 3 hours of your day going through an instance. Imagine taking your entire neighborhood to slay a couple of dragons in the woods as a day trip and having to coordinate the food, drinks and group responsibilities at the same time. The amount of micromanagement required to organize a large group of people can be exhausting, unless you are a natural born event planner. Not only do you need to get people together, you have to assign roles and job functions as well as set up strategies to defeat the monsters you are about to face. Some people may enjoy doing this from a hard-core gamer perspective, but it can get tiring for those who simply want to relax and push a few buttons to enjoy a game.
For players not interested in pairing up with other people for quests and raids, there is another option called PVP – or player vs player. You have the option to play against other players of the opposite faction either by choosing to start in a PVP realm or join in battlegrounds and arenas in a player versus environment realm. There will prizes and reputation gains for those who are successful in PvP arenas and battlegrounds.
Although Blizzard prides itself for being one of the pioneer MMOs that caters to casual players as much as hard-core players, it’s only fair to a certain point. It’s no secret that the biggest incentive in this game is gearing up. The harder you work at it (partying, questing and raiding), the better gear you get and a majority of the time, quests rewards come in form of gear. Why is gear so important? Gear basically outfits your character with pieces of equipment that increase your vital statistics as well as enhancing whatever skills you have. In order for players to advance, you need to spend quality time to obtain good gear, if you don’t have good gear, you will not be able to advance far into the game’s big dungeons. By no means am I saying that people with gaming skills will not go far without gear. BUT… gear makes your life easier, it’s the icing on the cake. You are what you wear and Paris Hilton will definitely appreciate your need to improve your gear by epic proportions.
User Interface and Controls
The game is designed in a pretty intuitive way in terms of control and user interface. There are a couple of bars that allow the user to basically drag and drop their spells, skills and whatever is needed into the empty slots of the bars to enable them to quickly access their abilities. When a new player starts the game, the panels are already pre-filled with a few abilities, so it’s pretty self explanatory on how that works from there, with or without the guide book’s help. There are also third party add-ons that you can download safely from sites like http://wow.curse-gaming.com/en/files/addons/". These sites provide the users with easy to use customized user interface to enhance a player’s efficiency. Since the last patch, players are now limited to only a few add-ons and customized tools.
Moving your character around is pretty easy. Blizzard made it fairly flexible for the user to choose either keyboard based movement or by mouse clicks. On the flip side the biggest complaint I have is how the views shift from moving about. There are times when you move your character up and down a hill and the camera remains in the same angle throughout and does not reset accordingly, so instead of seeing the right view, you get a nice view of your character’s feet or derriere. It’s quite a lot of work too to get the correct view back by turning the landscape, even when you set the camera settings in your user interface to "smart camera".
In Game Society
Since this is a social game, I will describe part of the WoW society. A majority of players are technically savvy males in their twenties and thirties, there are fewer women playing this game than men. An except of an WoW’s demographics project : "From the survey data, the average age of the WoW player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4). On average, they spend 22.7 (SD = 14.1) hours per week playing WoW. There are no gender differences in hours played per week." Reference: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php
It's not a big surprise that a majority of the players are young men. And because of that, a majority of the conversations you have with the players will revolve around games, entertainment and other stuff that interest young men. If you happen to be female AND announce it to to everyone, be prepared to be pampered or even harrassed. The advantage of a being a female or the illusion of being female creates the incentive for some men to play female characters to get attention and showered with online gifts.
Social networks and cliques tend to appear all over the place and so the creation of guilds became a necessity in WoW. The concept of a guild is to create an environment for like-minded people to cooperate and work together towards a similar goal. Personally, this game’s guild system feels like corporate America, where you need to climb the social ladder, network like crazy to get into the top guilds. On top of that, whether or not you enjoy this, you will be constantly bombarded with chat such as: LOL OMG OMFG LFM.
Game Balance
Overall, I fairly impressed with the level of game balance of WoW. Blizzard really lives up to its expectation as far as
"games made for gamers by the gamers". Each class has it advantages and limitations. If a class is powerful in terms of damage, it usually has a lot of weaknesses (like the inability to heal or defend) to counter its strengths. An example would be the shape-shifting druid, it is the only class that can replicate the actions of other classes in different forms. Druids can tank, heal and do damage. On the surface, that seems really unbalanced but a druid cannot do all at the same time, each form a druid shifts into, he/she will not be able to perform other abilities. While the druid may be versatile, its abilities are limited compared to those other more specialized classes. Furthermore, it’s a learning curve for anyone who plays a druid and you have to work hard to do well. Power is limited to ensure that there is no super class out there that can trump all the other classes. Other than just power, this game was made to require a lot of teamwork. All the classes will need to rely on each other’s specializations to do quests, dungeons or battlegrounds.
Blizzard will listen to its community and fix any severe weaknesses or super advantages if balance becomes a questionable issue. (But then again, you will have to wait a long time)
Graphics
Overall not too impressed with their graphics. The 3D rendering of their environment is quite ok. WoW is
cartoony in look and feel compared to other MMOs. The armor is something left to be desired. I don’t think dwarves appreciate wearing plate armor with some sort of pink netting over it. The shoulder armor will put any football player to shame in terms of size. I just wish Blizzard hired better character designers and armor designers. Some of the armor sets can be so hideous and so embarrassing, you'd want to avoid looking at your character on the log in screen.
Technical Support
I don’t have a lot of beef against Blizzard’s game masters or technical support. WoW has had a long history of bugs and lag issues but has always managed resolve a majority of the reported issues, although they take a very very long time. Blizzard do regular patches on Tuesdays to fix bugs or any other things that need to be updated. In terms of online customer support, game masters assigned seem courteous and responsive to the player’s needs. A fine example would be taking abuse reports seriously. Any player found harassing other players will either be warned or have their accounts suspended.
Conclusion:
World of Warcraft is a pretty good game in terms of game play and it’s obviously successful since it has one of the highest subscription rates. This game is so popular it has spawned machine anima videos on Youtube as well as comic strips that parody it’s world. WoW has also become a constant water cooler discussion topic at some work environments.
Before you consider purchasing World of Warcraft, you have to assess your current situation. Are you married with lots of kids who require a lot of your attention? Are you socially active and need to go out every night? Are you currently taking any medication for depression? Are you afraid of cows? Do you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder?
If you answer "Yes" to anything of the questions above, World of Warcraft may not be a good investment of your time or money.
World of Warcraft was designed to keep players online till the end of times.
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