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World of Warcraft has transcended the typical MMO to become the best MMO that has existed currently. I have fairly limed MMO experience, I have played Ultima Online for 2-3 years, as well I played Dark Age of Camelot for a few months and bit of the free Starport download. But I have a fairly extensive game profile, as well I am particular in the games that I like, I feel confident giving you my review of this game.
First of all is the general overview of the game. World of Warcraft is a MMO, or Massive Multiplayer Online game, this means that you are playing with anywhere from a hundred to over a thousand players. Basically WoW (World of Wacraft) is split in to many different servers, where identical worlds exist, but people cant interact between servers, aka different dimensions. The reason for this is to reduce the number of people on a server, this helps decrease the latency, and frame rate, for when people are playing, but this is hardly an important factor in the game.
The most important factor is this game is played through a 3rd person perspective, and in a Real-time Role Playing Game situation. This meaning that you interact with both Neutral Player Classes (Computers) and Player Classes (Real People) in a real time environment, both in interaction and combat. Everything progress as real time goes on, this is important because there no turns. This will be explained in my next sections
Without going into great detail, there are two factions that exist in the game, alliance and horde, which contain different races. Horde includes the races of, Undead, Tauren, Troll, and Orc. Alliance includes, Gnomes, Dwarves, Humans, and Elf. This does not include the new races that came with the expansion Burning Crusade, which are Blood Elves for Horde, and Draenie for Alliance. As well there are a few different classes that you can select and until the expansion 2 classes were only available to one or the other of the factions, as well only some races can play certain classes. The classes are, Mages, Warlocks, Rogues, Warriors, Priest, Hunters, Druids, Paladins (Alliance only), and Shamans (Horde only). Each class has distinct spells and abilities, and different importance to the game.
Combat: Combat is a 3rd person perspective, where you are able to target a single person and do a variety of different abilities against them. In-depth explanation is hard because you have to play for a little bit too fully understand how it works. But with how the game is set up its pretty intuitive, and you will be able to get a rudimentary understanding very quick.
Graphics:
This is a double edge sword given to the user by blizzard. The actual graphics are lacking, the blood, the gore; the attacking is done through basic, sub accurate definition.
But the actual art of areas, lakes, hills, trees, and caves, are very good. As you go through the game there are many different areas (or zones as they are referred to) that you will run into, such as a winter land, a scorched earth zone, or an open plains zone. In addition to these, there are separate areas that only you and a group of people are present in at a time, called an instance which I will refer to later. There is a problem however; these zones show no effect of you going there, minus creatures, or people that you kill, the scenery never really changes. They do include weather effects, but the terrain is not destructible. This isnt necessarily a huge problem, as to include a lot more depth of graphics and greatly changing terrain would increase the requirements on computers and connection speed that it would reduce its playability to everyone.
Sound:
Both the in-game sounds and the music are very important to the game. The music is very well composed and relevant to the situation at hand, a fast paced music will accompany a combat situation, as a melodramatic composure will along with a sad turn of events. The only problem is that as you repeat certain content, or areas, that the music will also become repetitive, and you may op to turn it off. However I highly suggest listening to certain bosss fights, as the dialogue is done extremely well by the voice actors, however for sounds you might be more require listening on a voice program to your group of people or guild.
General Play through:
I wont go into great depth, but I will include the three major parts of the game.
Leveling:
This is the most crucial part to the game as without it you basically dont have a character; as well it opens up the next two parts of the game. This system is fairly simple, basically you are given a set number of experience points required to advance to the next level, which scales the higher you go up. With just the normal WoW game and not the expansion there are 60 levels. Within about 2 to 3 weeks you should be able to get to level 60, even as a very new person to the game. With leveling you gain a few different things, increase in stats, also better and new skills every 2 levels, and new talents every level past 10, I will discuss both of these in a moment. As well you also gain the ability to use better items, such as armor and weapons, which give more stats, or damage the higher up they are. As well you gain access to new areas, which have higher level mobs, and instances which have level requirements. At level 60 all the things you gain are greatly increased, as you can do many more instances, different PvP oriented things, and have the most of your skills and talents.
----Skills and Talents:
These are the bread and butter of the characters in the game. Skills or abilities or spells are what your character mostly uses, these could include the spell Fireball for Mages, or Backstab for Rogues. Every two levels you gain a better level of a previous skill or you get a completely new skill. Talents on the other hand are different, you get 1 every level past 10, for a total of 51 points. This is important because you will have 3 trees, in which to put these points in, with a total of somewhere around 150 possible talent point placements. The trees work in a progressive fashion as you need a certain amount of points in one level of talents to progress to the next tier, which includes better talents. Now talents are things that you can put points into that increase certain things, like your critical strike ability, or casting speed.
Player vs. Player (PvP):
This is a less expansive part of the game, but it is very crucial to the game. Basically in WoW you have the ability to fight other real people in the game. For most circumstances you can only fight people of the other faction, except in arenas. To keep this simple there are 2 different places in which you can fight. The first is in the general outside world, there are certain circumstances, one being starting areas you cant attack unless the person flags themselves for PvP enabled. The second one is specific zones that are dedicated for fighting, and are set up with certain circumstances. These could include a capture the flag like area or a capture and hold points, or a zone where you both fight to push to the other persons base and kill a designated person. These zones are a type of instances, see later definition. These are for the most part the most common example type of PvP
----Importance of PvP
In the first two forms of PvP you get things called honor points. These come from either killing a person, or completing objectives in one of the PvP zones. These points can be spent to buy certain armor or weapons, or some other items that improve your character.
Instances/Raiding:
First to describe instances, they are areas that are separate from the normal world and have to be accessed through a portal, and have level requirements, also the may/may not require a key to access. What these are essentially is an area, that has specific mobs, as well as bosses, which are specific mobs with more health, damage, and special abilities which require more work to kill. The importance of this area is that multiple of them can be open at any given time, allowing multiple groups to kill the same mobs at the same time, because they arent actually in the same area, but instead are actually in a separate identical zone. For these, there are many different ones that exist in the game that scale from level about 10-60. These areas also offer better gear than you can normally get, as well more experience and money, how ever the mobs for what level they are listed as are harder than normal. They require around 5 people, except the last ones at level 60, which can require 20 40 people. The smaller instances reset within about and hour or two, where the mobs will start respawning, so they must be completed in a timely fashion, and in general you wont have any problem with this. The bigger ones wont fully respawn for several days, so that you wont have to complete the entire place in one attempt, as some of them require a lot of time to do.
---Raiding:
This leads me to the endgame most common thing done in WoW. At 60 there are several special instances that require from 20-40 people to be completed. The interesting thing is even though you have hit the maximum level, you wont be able to do all the content, because your ability to do things is tied into the quality of gear that you have, which will require you to do certain places. The better gear you have from lower places will increase your damage, health, or other things, which will allow you to fight in the harder places. These instances that you enter, are much bigger than the previous ones, as well the mobs, or creatures that you face in there require a lot more people to kill.
Gear:
In general you get to choose a few different pieces of gear to equip to your character; this can include armor, like a chest piece or helmet, or weapons like a bow, or sword. These pieces of gear have stats on them that the give to you when you equip them, the importance is that some of these stats are better for certain classes. You can get gear from random drops of creatures, or humans in the world, as well as from quest that you complete, and lastly from bosses and mobs in instances. As well some pieces of gear will go with a set of gear and the more pieces of that set that you have equipped you will get certain specific bonuses. The important part is later in the game and the more you play the better you will be able to determine what pieces of gear are good for your.
This is a basic look at what you will encounter, there is much more that you will find, but the game does a very good job of preparing you for what you will find next, as well there are a fair amount of people in the game that will be helpful to you.
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