Being one of the three main franchises for Blizzard Entertainment, and the first massive multiplayer online role-playing game Blizzard ever put together by the long running developer, it would seem almost too easy to have success with World of Warcraft, but it takes quite a bit to put together a MMORPG nowadays that will captivate not only long time fans of other MMO’s like Everquest, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage II, and Ultima, but also to get players who’ve never tried a MMO to start and play for a monthly fee. Releasing onto store shelves on November 23rd of 2004, Blizzard Entertainment tried to rise above every other MMORPG out there. Could Blizzard do it?

Having a huge success with the Warcraft series already, Blizzard chose this franchise to create one of the largest MMORPGs to date with World of Warcraft. Taking place ten years after the end of the expansion for Warcraft III known as the Frozen Throne, World of Warcraft begins with the Horde and Alliance back at each other’s throats. The Alliance consisting of Humans, Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves, while the Horde consists of Undead, Orcs, Taurens, and Trolls. Although there are only eight different races compared to some MMO’s who have no less than fifteen, World of Warcraft (WoW) takes these different races and make them unique from each other giving them not only different attributes and starting areas, but also different roles in their own society and personalities with which to play them with. While some of the races share starting points, this doesn’t take away from the size of Azeroth, which consists of two separate continents that have quite a bit of space to explore and dungeons to raid. The story itself for the game is simple enough, and although some of the quests to move you along this “all encompassing” story as you progress through the quests, you’ll never really be captivated to the point of caring too much about the entire story of what’s taking place in WoW. Instead, Blizzard made the quests interesting enough on their own to make you coming back for more. Instead of it’s predecessors following you through a main plot line with cinematics and in-game cutscenes, WoW will hold your interest with the individual quests you partake in. At least, for the first few times you play through up till level 60. After that, you’ll memorize the quests you need to level the fastest to become elite in the realm that you’re apart collecting epic gear by raiding and re-raiding dungeons along the way.

When you first begin the game, you get to choose which realm/server you want to be a part of and that can consist of a normal realm where there’s only player vs. player (pvp) when asked, or through different battlegrounds, or you may pick a server where it’s all pvp wherever you are at any point in the game giving you a little more risk when out doing quests. There’s also roleplaying servers to explore if you ever wanted to act as a orc or dwarf when you’re out and about progressing to level 60 for those who truly love to get into character. After you’re done choosing which type of server you’d like to start in, you’re given the option of creating your character by choosing between either Horde or Alliance, and from their your perspective race, class, appearance, and then name. in WoW, there may not be as much customizing of your character’s appearance as you might be used from other MMO’s, but that matter much after you start collecting different gear along your travels. You’re able to change hair style/color, facial hair, and facial features, but that’s about it. Again, how much do you truly look at the front side of your character during gameplay and after you get helmets and armor, you won’t even notice that a person right next to you designed his character the exact same way. And with gear, Blizzard did quite well with many each piece unique and different from the next to provide players the variety in appearance that they may be looking for. There are literally hundreds of different pieces of armor, and multitude of different looking weapons to control as your progress

After creating your character, you dropped into the world of Azeroth. What type of race you choose at the start of the game chooses where you’ll start your quest that could last for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. As you begin, you’ll be doing your run of the mill quests like collecting a certain number of items for a quest or delivering something from one place to another. Although, the quests may seem a little boring early on, just exploring the world and the detail that the Blizzard team put into it, for the first time, is quite fun. Staying true to the lore of the previous titles in the Warcraft series, players and fans alike will recognize certain enemies or places as they scour the world of Azeroth completing thousands of quests to gain experience for their player to gain levels in their quest to become a level 60 elitist, but this certainly isn’t something that happens overnight because it will take quite a long time to gain enough experience to level to 60, but that’s just the fun of it. My suggestion would be to try out the different races/classes leveling them up a few levels to see how they play, from there, choose one and then level that character up alone because if you keep trying out different characters, you’ll probably won’t make it to level 60 too early and you’ll be missing out on the great raiding content present at that level. Along your questing ways, you’ll come across dungeons where you and friends will be able to travel through, entering your own ‘instance’ and from there, you’ll have to battle through the rest of the dungeon completing the quests all by yourselves without the help of outside players. Whether you make it or not throughout the entire dungeon is up to you and your party. Just taking along your friends through the different dungeons is fine and dandy if one of you exceeds the actual level for the dungeon, but if not, if you’re traveling without a healer, you’ll be finding it quite hard to progress through the multitude of enemies that you’ll come across while navigating the instance to the end. You are able to solo quite a few quests in this game, and if you’re good, you can almost solo up to level 40, but the dungeons will always need some groups unless you a much higher level than the actual dungeon.

While leveling up your character, you’ll be able to join a guild of your choosing to be with friends or players with similar goals. There are hundreds of guilds out there waiting to pick up more players for the benefit of being able to strategize different techniques ore with different classes and races. All you need is an invitation and from there, you can buy your own tabard to wear around the world of Azeroth to proudly show which guild you’re apart of. This guild keeps you in close contact with other players who can help you out in different areas and quests. They’re almost always helpful in whatever you need, but be forewarned, you might get into a guild that could care less about you and my suggestion for that, is get out right away, you’ll find another guild along the way to play around with who will be more than willing to help you along your way to level 60. Because WoW is so huge, Blizzard has offered a mount for each race to ride, but only once you’ve attainted level 40 in which you’ll have to first buy a mount and then pay to be trained to ride. I would suggest to start saving for a mount when you’re around level 35 because it costs quite a bit.

The graphics in World of Warcraft aren’t the most up to date, but they’re not ugly by any standards. If you’ve been a long time fan of series, the graphics just ‘fit’ the series in their design and layout. What I mean, is that the world of Azeroth has a sort of cartoon flavored graphic sense, but it more than works for this great game. Something that is nice is that you don’t need a top of the line computer to enjoy this game and that helps Blizzard widen its marketing strategy to almost all gamers unlike some MMO’s with the latest and greatest in graphics almost making the player buy a brand new system to play it with a FPS over ten. Days pass by you just the same as they do in real life with the schedule of the servers being correlated to different times zones and this simply works. Of course, if you’re on a server that’s on your time zone and you only can play during the night, be prepared to play in the dark most of the time, but that’s okay. If you don’t like it, join a different server and Blizzard will even let you transfer your character, for a fee of course, unless the server is being overloaded with players, where Blizzard will then allow free transfers. World of Warcraft is totally seamless except for the different instances across the world of Azeroth and those load times are quite nice and quick compared to some other MMO load times.

The sound in World of Warcraft is excellent with Jason Hayes composing the soundtrack. Blizzard, like Lucas Arts, always provides its games with some of the best sounds and World of Warcraft is no exception to the rule. As you travel across the seamless, you’ll be able to listen to some of the best in-game music from area to area across the two different continents, not to mention the dungeons and battlegrounds where you can compete Alliance against Horde. The music keeps you motivated throughout the many hours that you’ll be playing this game. There is minimal voice acting in the game, but you don’t really notice it as you progress through your levels doing quest after quest for different people.

With most other massive multiplayer online role-playing games, World of Warcraft has a monthly fee that amounts to $14.99 a month; paying for more months at a time will lower the cost down to $12.99 which isn’t a terrible deal. Many people will complain about the monthly cost, but you either will pay monthly for a game or you won’t. Your mind will not change because it’s a certain price. But if you’re teetering on the edge of actually going through with it, look at it this way. You’re paying virtually fifteen bucks for a load of entertainment, safe entertainment, with friends and possibly family. But there is a different cost that isn’t the most talked about. It’s the cost of the time you’ll spend playing. If you’ve been a long time gamer for quite some time, you may not have trouble limiting your playing time, but there are those choice few who can’t handle saying no, or turning off the computer; always trying to get that next level and those people are usually the ones who become addicted, lose interest in everyday things. Those people are the same ones you read about online who lose their jobs, wives, family because all they do is play this game. Is that a con of WoW? Not at all, you kind of have to applaud Blizzard for creating such a fun and engrossing game.

Has the game had its quirks and bugs along the way? Yes, but Blizzard has been very adamant about fixing those as fast as they could. I couldn’t even begin to guess the amount of patches that have been available to download since release back in 2004, but I will say this; if you were to install the game today and want to play, you would have to download over one gigabyte of patches to start playing the game. Are those all bug fixes? Not at all. Since release, Blizzard has created and given away new and fresh content for the game that has enhanced it quite significantly. It seems whenever a class starts to do better than the next, fans scream for a fix to make that class not so ‘godly,’ but Blizzard has take into consideration if that classes is simply overpowered or if people are exploiting some bug of the class, but in the end, Blizzard is quite far in its decisions on what to add or take away from the game.

There is simply too much content in the game to surmise in one review, so I suggest pick up a copy today for only $19.99 and play free for month and decide for yourself.

Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 8
Sound: 10
Story/Plot: 9
Replay Value: 10
Stability: 9
Multiplayer: 10

Overall: 9.44

[Edited on 1-23-2007 by SadExchange]