World of Warcraft (WoW) is yet another entry in the overly-crowded massively multi-player on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) genre, but that doesn't mean it isn't special. No, I've come home, or at least that's what it feels like when I log on to play. I normally prefer to write these overviews with a non-committal tone, saving my conclusions for the end, but in the case of WoW I'm making an exception. Perhaps it's because WoW is the first MMORPG I've truly enjoyed enough to keep playing (and paying), or maybe it's because I've been searching for an MMORPG to call home for so long. Whatever the case, WoW is the MMORPG that gets it right.
Most gamers know that visuals in MMORPGs don't keep up with first-person shooters (FPS), and the reason is simple: there's a lot more stuff on the screen. I think the maximum number of simultaneously visible player/monster entities in Quake IV, for example, was around a dozen, whereas I've seen literally hundreds of different characters milling around at once in MMORPGs. That's a whopping number of polygons to be rendered. Having said that, the graphics in Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) were surprisingly good, and the graphics in Guild Wars (GW) were even better, but the graphics in WoW absolutely take the cake. Hands down, WoW is prettiest MMORPG I've ever had the pleasure of playing.
The modelling of the characters is very well done, including all sorts of subtle touches that make them instantly recognizable, and their animations are even better. I think characters' dance moves are more fun in GW—Night Elves engaging in Michael-Jackson-esque hip-pumping is just wrong—but on the whole the motions in WoW are more fluid and interesting than in the other MMORPGs I've played. The texture work is great, albeit sometimes at a lower resolution than I would prefer (probably due to memory limits given the large view distances), the special effects are fabulous, and the use of shaders is subtle and beautiful. The underwater view distortion is so realistic, for example, that I didn't realize it was happening for quite some time; the effect was so spot-on that my eyes didn't question it.
I have but three complaints with the visuals in WoW, two substantive and the other entirely subjective. First, the most substantive complaint is that "popping" is obvious to me in too many places. Perhaps I'm spoiled by having a very beefy system—Gorthaur the Cruel is my new gaming rig, and he scoffs at your paltry system requirements!—but I'm becoming more sensitive to annoying changes in the surrounding environment as I move through it. For those who don't get what I'm talking about, one of the many tricks game developers employ to make games run faster is the use of multiple levels of detail (LoD).
The issue is that each displayed polygon involves a finite amount of work for the CPU and video card. When the player is far away from something, there's little to be gained by rendering it as hundreds (or even thousands) of polygons, all of which have to be textured, lit, etc. If it's really far away, after all, it might be a whopping dozen pixels high on the screen, so why bother rendering hundreds or thousands of polygons for something so small? To address this issue, game developers create multiple LoD sets for their terrain and other objects, using a low-resolution set for things far away and a high-resolution set for things up close. This allows the game engine to spend its time where it really matters: on objects close enough to the player to matter.
The problem introduced by this approach is that switching LoDs can result in sudden changes in the environment, which is called "popping". In most games it's not that big a deal, but I notice it all the time in WoW, particularly when travelling large distances by sea or air. You'll know exactly what I mean when the hill you were just looking at suddenly changes shape. Perhaps there's nothing to be done about it, but I wish there were more options for systems like mine to use higher-resolution LoDs, interpolate between LoDs, or something else to minimize popping. Heck, the old Tribes 2 engine, buggy as it was, handled popping far better than WoW, so it's not like it's an intractable problem.
Still, that's not a big deal. I suspect I'm just goofy in the degree to which it bugs me. A less substantive problem, which might be the fault of my video drivers and not the game itself, is that the game regularly freezes under certain conditions. That is, if I've set my video drivers to use SLI display modes—SLI is NVIDIA's technology to let two video cards work together in one system for greater performance and/or image quality—it can freeze completely and/or reboot the system altogether. I find that when the problem exists, playing the opening game cinematic will cause an actual blue screen of death (BSoD), followed by a reboot. In contrast, simply playing the game will result in a number of "hitches" (periods where the screen stops updating and the music loops) until the game freezes completely and the computer requires a hard reboot.
I suspect it's a video thing because I can avoid it by resetting the video adapter prior to playing (courtesy of a software utility called PowerStrip for those who are interested). To be clear, WoW is the only game with which I've had any such problem. I haven't had any issues when using SLI with F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, or any of the other demanding games I've played of late. And as long as I reset the video adapter prior to launching WoW, I can play at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering; in that configuration the frame rate averages around 60 FPS and never drops below 50 FPS, which makes for a beautiful gaming experience.
Finally, the subjective complaint is that I really don't care for the "cartoony" artistic style of the game. It's hard for me to explain, but there's something about the choice of artistic direction with WoW (and the Warcraft series more generally) that bugs me: everything in the game is deliberately so "cutesy". I much prefer the style of other MMORPGs like DAoC, GW, and the like, because their art direction is less overstated. Still, I confess to gaping regularly in awe at the marvelously and consistently beautiful environments, so perhaps WoW will win me over eventually. This much is certain: even though I'm not fond of the art direction, I have to give Blizzard a lot of credit for absolutely magnifcent execution.
The audio in WoW is arguably not as impressive as the visuals, but it's still very good. I say this only because the sheer quality and variety of the visuals are overwhelming. The virtual world of Azeroth is amazing in its scope and detail. But whereas each new environment I encounter manages to be unique and interesting in its look, I notice a lot more repetition with the audio—particularly in terms of creature sound effects and voice work. And, of course, no matter how great the music is—and it is great, to be sure—it does grow old over time. In short, it's not that the audio isn't good; it's all uniformly well conceived and bears high quality production values. It's just that its diversity pales in comparison to the efforts expended on the game's visuals.
Aside from that one point, there is nothing negative to be said about the game's audio. All the sound effects are appropriate, well selected, and well recorded/generated. The voice work is absolutely first rate, to the point where some of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny—the whole "brotherhood of the bracelet" thing absolutely slayed me! The music is absolutely beautiful and conveys exactly the right feel in all cases. And the positional audio and EAX effects are subtle and well done. The player can easily determine direction, distance, and the environment(s) involved (where appropriate). WoW's audio is the full package; it's just not as staggering as the visuals.
Hands down, WoW's interface is the best MMORPG interface I have ever seen/used. It is true that one can complain about how it lacks certain features provided by some of its competitors. Not every window can be dragged anywhere on screen, for example, and extending the interface is a messy business involving XML and Lua—and any custom interface breaks with every new patch, just to complicate matters even further—but all these complaints are rendered nugatory by one simple fact: WoW's interface works beautifully.
The interface is a model of elegant simplicity. Left-clicking stuff in the world selects it, whereas right-clicking does things to/with it. And as to the myriad of actions characters may perform, these may be organized in a series of easily-customizable button bars for clean conceptual and practical grouping. All of the key bindings, along with video, audio, and other settings, are accessible from the main menu, which may be brought up at any time by pressing escape. If the power supplied by dragging buttons to and fro isn't enough, one can always create macros for even more customized functions.
Best of all, in my view at least, the interface does the smart thing whenever possible. For example, my first and favorite character is a druid, whose shapeshifting abilities give him a great deal of flexibility. The interface problem stems from the fact that different abilities are associated with different forms. When in bear form, for example, he has attack moves that are quite different from those in cat form. Thankfully, the player doesn't have to worry about any of this because the game brings up special interface bars for each different form, which may be configured independently. The act of shapeshifting changes the interface as well, and that's exactly how it should work. The bottom line is that it's simple and straightforward to craft the right user interface for each character.
As to information displayed, WoW shows the player everything he needs to see through a series of simple metaphors. The various spell and damage effects are indicated by nicely recognizable icons. Party members and their status are visible immediately through on-screen head-shots and health/mana/energy bars. The relative difficulty of quests, profession activities, enemies, and so forth are all indicated with a series of color codes, from trivial gray to forget-about-it red. Various combat details are conveyed with floating numbers, little symbols, and other simple, eye-catching mechanisms. In short, the interface is largely brilliant. I find some of the default key bindings more than a little odd—who thought of using the num-lock key to toggle auto-run?!—but aside from this trivial comment, there's nothing to complain about with the game's look and feel.
Perhaps best of all is the chat/social interface. Users can create multiple chat windows for various purposes, each of which may be customized to display various events/messages. This makes it possible to ignore trade-spamming with ease, yet easily give prominence to messages from party members or friends. And although I've heard complaints that the friends list should be maintained "globally", I much prefer the per-character approach WoW takes. Different characters have different roles and, as such, need/have different friends. Those who like to play with only certain characters/people all the time can easily add said characters/people to multiple lists, which is what I've done with my primary character for sake of simplicity.
It's also downright wonderful that the game provides so many helpful shortcuts. I can remember all the hassle of trying to explain the details of some nifty item I had found in other games; in WoW it's a simple matter of shift-clicking the item while chatting! Similarly, it's easy to peg quest data right onto the screen by shift-clicking the quest. A host of such shortcuts make the game's interface a true joy to use. I'm still finding neat little bits on a weekly basis. WoW is one of the few software applications I've ever used whose tip-of-the-day feature is genuinely useful, for it has introduced me to many interface shortcuts.
The only serious complaint I can level against WoW's interface is that the relative difficulty assessments are wildly inconsistent. Some quests marked as red, which means they hard and likely require assistance from others, amount to nothing more than running down a road to talk to a non-player character (NPC) and reporting back to the quest giver. Yet I've seen quests marked as green, which means they're of less than normal difficulty and can likely be soloed, that are essentially impossible alone and prove quite difficult even for multiple characters.
Consider the "Deep Ocean, Vast Sea" quest, which was yellow for my druid at level thirteen. The quest involves swimming down into the hulls of two shipwrecks to retrieve items from the chests contained therein. I didn't even try it until after I hit level sixteen because I wanted to use my druid's water form to avoid hassles with breathing underwater. For sake of reference, said druid tried the quest at level seventeen, when he could easily solo against any two, level sixteen monsters anywhere in Auberdine. In fact, I would regularly attract two bears/cats/striders/etc. to make leather acquisition go more quickly.
Imagine my surprise when I got killed almost instantly by two of the murlocs there, one at level twelve and the other at thirteen! "I must have been careless," I said to myself as I headed back from the graveyard in wisp form. Naturally, given my luck, three murlocs spawned right behind me the barest instant after I revived. "Still a fluke," I told myself on the way back again; just a case of bad luck. After deaths three through eight, however, I gave up in disgust. I could not get past the murlocs no matter what I did. Oh, I could carefully pull them and kill them one at a time, at least outside the shipwrecks, but they would respawn so quickly I'd get inside the ship just in time to be surrounded by their respawns.
Alternately, if I snuck into the ship through a hole, I couldn't beat the murlocs inside. Not because they were too tough, to be sure, but because the game would complain constantly about how I didn't have a line of sight or was too far away to hit them—despite the fact that they were standing right in front of me beating me to death! I'll say more about this later, but for now let's just say the game has freaky problems under certain circumstances. The bottom line was that there was nothing I could do to complete that quest on my own. And, all the harder to believe, when I enlisted the aid of a friendly, eighteenth level paladin, we could still barely complete the quest! It was a lot easier to kill the murlocs outside with his help, and we could get inside the ships and get to the chests, but by the time we were heading back out we'd get swarmed by five or six of the murlocs and get killed.
It was only by the slimmest of margins that we were ultimately victorious, and that was after several failed attempts. I'm sorry, but it's bloody ridiculous that two characters, with a total of thirty-five levels between them can't complete a quest that's considered yellow for one, level thirteen character. It's even more ridiculous that the murlocs in question aren't orange or even red to such a character, given their super-fast respawn rate, high hate factor, etc. Twenty-five combined levels of monsters were easily creaming thirty-five levels of players; that just doesn't make sense for a quest of "normal" difficulty sans elite monsters.
Finally, I must say I'm a bit surprised at the relatively minimal race- and/or faction-specific differences in the game's look and feel. One of the neat things about playing Warcraft III (W3) was that each side had a thoroughly different look and feel to its interface, sounds, and what not. In contrast, WoW uses the same stuff for each race/faction with few exceptions. Take the levelling-up effect; it's entirely appropriate for alliance characters, what with its beautiful flash of light and triumphant braying of horns, but it seems downright odd for the Undead. It's also a little weird that all of the user interface elements look the same for all the sides; I was expecting a darker, creepier UI for the Undead but got the same, attractive interface I've seen with Humans. Granted, this is a small thing, but it does stick out given the breadth and depth of the game's diversity in other respects.
First, the good news: WoW brings the perfect balance to MMORPG mechanics. What always drove me away from other such games were: (1) useless down time, (2) mind-numbing repetition, and (3) jogging. I will never forget all the time I spent in DAoC killing water beetles. I think those hours upon hours were the most boring gaming time I've ever spent. The only thing that kept me going was the promise of hitting a new level and getting on with bigger and better things. In fact, the only thing that kept me slogging through the twenty-plus levels my character ultimately achieved before I gave up and unsubscribed was the promise of realm vs. realm combat, the problem being that the game doesn't really begin until then and that's at level fifty. The cycle of killing was painful: go toe to toe with a monster until it's dead, then sit down and wait to recover health/mana. It was painful.
WoW brings perfect balance in this regard. Because health and mana regenerate reasonably quickly outside of combat, things remain interesting. And as players gain levels of experience, and thus gain far-larger reserves of health/mana, new complexity and possibilities emerge from the use of various buffs, food, water, potions, and the like. In short, WoW makes it brain-dead simple for the complete newbie, makes every single point of health/mana/energy important for the veteran players, and provides a smoothly transitioned set of health/mana/energy management options as characters grow and develop. The net result is that the game remains fun and fast paced at all times, solving problem number (1) rather nicely.
As to item (2), there's always something worth doing, aside from just beating on monsters. When I'm tired of hunting bad guys, I can take care of fed-ex oriented quests. When I'm tired of those, I can do some cooking, some leatherworking, or roll some bandages. Heck, if all else fails, I can sit down and fish for a while, which is an activity I dislike in the real world yet find strangely relaxing in the virtual world. As if this weren't enough, I can fight consequence-free duels against other players to hone my player-versus-player (PvP) skills, buy or sell things at the auction house, read books, visit neat spots in the cities, chat up "elders" or other persons of interest around the game world to learn more of the back story, participate in the battlegrounds, go on dungeon raids, and that's to say nothing of the myriad of possibilities that open once a character reaches level sixty. Frankly, from all the things I've read of late, it seems like life begins at level sixty in WoW, despite the fact that I've had so much fun at the lower levels.
Finally, though item (3) is something of a problem, insofar as I have spent quite a lot of time just running between cities, WoW has the best transportation system I've seen in any MMORPG. I really liked the approach in GW, where a character could teleport instantly to any major city he had already visited, but WoW is arguably even better. How could anything be better than instant travel, you ask? I'll tell you: because it brings more of a sense of coherence to the game. You just don't appreciate the size of the game world when you can teleport all the way across the world in an instant. WoW has a number of mechanisms for such quick travel (mages can open portals, druids can cast a spell to return to moonglade at any time, hearthstones let players travel to their home location, etc.), but most long-distance travel occurs more realistically by ship or air—both of which are fun in themselves I should add. I've grown tired of running around Azeroth, to be sure, but it's not the huge issue it was for me in other MMORPG games.
As to other game mechanics, the classes seem nicely balanced despite their diversity. All the classes bring their own, quite different strengths and weaknesses to the table. Playing my Human warlock differs radically from playing my Night Elf druid, which differs radically from playing my Undead mage, and so forth. Frankly, the only class I haven't found entirely compelling is the plain, shield-chewing warrior, but even warriors in WoW have a host of interesting abilities and very unique mechanics. They're the only class that has stances, for example, which are tied to particular sets of moves, all of which makes warriors worth playing. Some classes are clearly better at certain things than others, but I've yet to find any class that isn't interesting and capable in its own right.
Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay the game, however, is that its mechanics come together beautifully to be more than the sum of their parts. The mail system makes it safe and easy to buy/sell items at the auction house, the trade system makes it safe and easy to swap with players, the quest system makes it possible to pick and choose what to do (even abandoning quests temporariliy and coming back to them later when the spirit so moves), travel options unite major cities and make it easy to group while discouraging misuse, etc. It's rare indeed that I find a game with so much done right, but WoW aims very high and, with but a few exceptions, hits its target.
Yet some things do diminish the experience, first and foremost among which in my mind are the serious problems with line-of-sight and distance calculations in particular circumstsances. The problems all seem to be related to objects on a slope or actors near a sloped floor, or something like that. But in those cases, it's possible for monsters standing right next to you, who are actively beating the crap out of you I should add, to be out of range or out of line of sight! That drove me nuts with the aforementioned "Deep Ocean, Vast Sea" quest, and I've seen it more than a handful of times since. I don't really understand how something so fundamental could be so badly broken, so maybe there's more going on behind the scenes than I know? Whatever the case, you have to be very patient and careful in tricky spots, and that can be unpleasant.
I also confess that I just don't get PvP combat. And to be clear, my complaint isn't that I'm just ignorant of how it works, or it's too hard to figure out, or something like that; my complaint is more specific, namely, that there just doesn't seem to be much of a point to it. The thing I loved about DAoC, at least in principle, was that if you could hold on until you hit level fifty, then amazing and epic battles were in your future. I remember reading write-ups and tales told by my clan mates about defending a keep until three in the morning, or organizing an attack on an enemy position. And, best of all, it mattered. It mattered because the faction that controlled the majority of the sites, or runes, or something like that—it's been so long I don't remember anymore—gained advantages for everyone in that faction. It really gave you an incentive to make it to realm vs. realm combat and participate.
In WoW, I don't see any reason to do it. Yes, I realize that there are rewards for engaging in PvP activities, the most concrete of which seem to be epic-level weapons, armor, special mounts (which differ only cosmetically I believe), and the like. But somehow the whole prospect fails to engage my imagination when there aren't any consequences in the larger world. After all, I get goodies that drop from monsters too; the goodies that I get from PvP are just bigger and better. At the end of the day, no territory changes hands, and nothing of substance is altered beyond the gear that I'm using. More powerful gear is always nice, but the whole point of said gear seems to be to acquire yet more powerful gear; that kind of self-justifying cycle just doesn't appeal to me, though perhaps I'm in the minority of gamers in that respect.
I could be setting my standards too high, but the system of DAoC really appealed to me. The idea that the different factions could take and hold territory, reinforcing their keeps and such, seems far more powerfully compelling. To be honest, though, what I know of PvP combat in WoW is taken solely from what I've read about it; I've not yet experienced it myself. As such, you should take my concerns with a huge load of salt; they might stem solely from my own ignorance. As I've leveled up, I've found myself thinking about how much fun it would be to participate in the battlegrounds or a raid, so maybe I'll "get it" once I'm there. We'll see.
Finally, I'm also a bit surprised that the game's mechanics don't differ much for the various races/factions. I realize that one has to draw lines in the sand somewhere, but it seems rather strange to me that an Orc mage has exactly the same set of talents, spells, etc., as a Gnome mage. And that's to say nothing of the missing conceptual shift where the Undead are concerned, as portrayed so nicely by Penny Arcade. In short, just as a Human eats/drinks to regain health/mana, so too an Undead eats/drinks the very same things for the very same effect. Yes it's consistent, and yes it makes it easier to hit the ground running with another race/faction, but it diminishes the sense of wonder a bit when such obvious concessions are made. Would it really be so hard to make the Undead drink blood to recover mana, eat brains to recover health, or something similarly appropriate? It sure doesn't seem like it to me.
I fault a lot of games for their lack of a story, even though I think it can be overlooked more often than not, but I cannot fault WoW. It's clear from the first frames of the opening cinematic, which notes pridefully that the Warcraft series has been around for ten years, that the developers are all-too-keenly aware that they have an established fan base to please. WoW picks up shortly after W3, which ended with the burning legion defeated but only at the cost of Azeroth's razing. I'm not going to give any of it away, but suffice it to say that there is quite a bit of new story set forth in WoW, as well as lots of additional back-story for the Warcraft universe, which is available to be discovered through various quests and other mechanisms. It's all high-fantasy fare, and it's not going to be confused with The Lord of the Rings any time soon for its scope or quality, but it's exemplary as game stories go.
Jeepers, I don't even know where to begin. I'm in the middle of my third hundred hours with the game now, and I might be able to say optimistically that I've seen maybe half of the whole game. That might seem hard to believe, but if anything I'm overshooting the actual mark. I suspect the truth is that I've seen more like one third. If that seems utterly nuts, it's only because WoW is an absolutely enormous game.
Let me illustrate by talking about my druid. I began my time with him in Shadowglen, the starting area for Night Elves on the isle of Teldrassil. I logged maybe ten hours of play over almost a week of calendar time, during which he discovered the nearby town of Dolanaar, Starbreeze Village, the Oracle Glade, and eventually Darnassus, the main city on the far west side of the island. It takes a solid few minutes to run directly across the island and, painful as it may be for me to admit, I didn't know how much else there was to the game. I figured each of the races had a similar starting situation, so maybe it would be possible to explore all the game's areas inside of a few weeks?
Then I walked through a portal in Darnassus and ended up on the southern tip of the island in Rut'Theran Village, where I found a pier and took a ship across the Veiled Sea. That took me to the city of Auberdine in nearby Kalimdor, the western continent in Azeroth, where I found a whole new map with all new stuff and a completely fresh look. About that time I hooked up with a friend's high-level character, who was able to escort me safely to Ironforge, which required us to take another ship to Menethil—all the way over to the Eastern Kingdoms, the other continent in Azeroth—run out the city gates, and run, and run, and run, and run... We must have run for a solid fifteen minutes, and that took us merely to Ironforge.
That experience opened my eyes to how big the world really is. The maps at which I was looking are only "zones", and the continents consist of dozens of zones. In the case of Kalimdor, which I believe to be the smaller of the two continents, I count around twenty-six different zones on the map. Thus far I've thoroughly explored maybe five of those zones, though I've got bits and pieces from a dozen others as well, but this misses something very important: that doesn't count any of the dungeons or other special areas in the game, and there are many of those as well! WoW provides a great player-versus-environment (PvE) experience, PvP combat in any of the zones (albeit optionally on a PvE realm), quite a few instanced dungeons, and three different PvP battlegrounds with different game modes altogether. Players entering the battlegrounds (BG) for the first time will discover quickly just how different the rules of play become.
And that's just the environment! The classes provide numerous options. Each character accumulates talent points, which may be spent along three different paths of development. The options vary from class to class, but it's possible in each case to develop characters along multiple axis. Take my druid again, for example. Were he to be primarly solo-oriented, then I could pour points into his feral talents for big, plentiful damage in cat form. Were he to be group-oriented, on the other hand, then I could pour his points into the restoration side of his talents and become a strong, secondary healer. Coupled with the flexibility in weapons, and the variety of options the druid's bear, cat, aquatic, travel, and (optionally) moonkin shapeshifting forms allow, he can do the job of a tank, caster, or healer. Granted, he won't be quite as good at each of those tasks as those classes, but he can do them all well enough to matter and sometimes that's what counts.
A word about the system of professions is also in order. WoW provides several professions from which to choose, limiting each character to selecting a maximum of two primary professions. So, for example, a good choice for my druid was to adopt skinning and leatherworking because (1) skinning supplies materials needed for leatherworking, and (2) leather is the best armor a druid can wear. In addition to those primary professions, however, he can add all of the secondary professions: cooking, first aid, and fishing. Each character has a current skill level in each profession, which is raised by working in that profession. Practically, it means the character always has more to learn, do, and produce until he's maxed his skill levels—and then he can always start if things have become boring. Since each user can create up to eight characters on each realm, there simply isn't any realistic limit to the options available for play.
And as if these things weren't enough, Blizzard adds neat new content to the game, both as a regular part of the patches and as seasonal bits for players to enjoy. I'm told the Halloween festivities were neat, and I've recently enjoyed the Lunar Festival celebration myself. The latter adds a couple of fun and reasonably simple quests, one amounting to nothing more than travelling to Moonglade to talk to a particular elf—hardly thrilling for a druid but a pleasant surprise for other characters—and the other being essentially an easter-egg hunt. As for rewards, the characters participating can aquire spiffy clothing, fireworks, handy consumables, and even a special candle that will be useful when summoning a boss battle in which even the lowest level characters are supposedly helpful.
The bottom line is that WoW is enormous multiplied by huge with a super-sized side order of tremendous just for good measure. There's no way you're going to run out of lands to explore, professions to work, items to make, goodies to find, enemies to fight, players to duel, dungeons to raid, races to run, PvP battles to fight, and on and on and on for a very long time. There's a veritable ton of content to the game, and it's all good stuff. Oh, and did I mention that new content is being added to the game all the time? And that a huge "expansion pack" is on the way?
Since WoW is inherently a multi-player game, everything I've said thus far concerns its multi-player aspect. The additional things I'll mention here are those that deal specifically with the networking aspects, and therein lies room for complaint. Or to be more specific, I don't think the developers are coping very well with the size of the subscriber base. Maybe it's because I just picked up the game and started playing again—I was originally included in the beta but wasn't nearly so impressed with the game at that time—before Christmas of 2005, but the queues for some of the realms have been pretty long, and I've seen some pretty annoying lag issues as well.
Overall, it seems like the networking code and the structure of the game works well for realms at or just above medium load. But when a realm gets heavily loaded with a long queue, wait times can creep up significantly. Far more annoying, to me at least, is that after waiting in a long queue the game can sometimes sit forever at the "Retrieving Character Data..." dialog box. I've had occasions when my only option was to cancel at that point and get back into the queue, and that's no fun at all. Still, I do see from the community news page that new realms are being brought on line to service the demand, so perhaps these issues will soon be solved.
Of all the problems that an MMORPG might have, being so good that hordes of people want to play is probably a good one. Such a "problem" means big money rolling in, and that's often the only way to lubricate corporate operations. With WoW's subscriber base hovering at around five million, or that's the last thing I read anyway, the game is practically a license to print money, so we can only hope that Blizzard does the right thing.
In the final analysis, I didn't think that WoW was worth the monthly fee when I was included in the beta test. Many of the fundamental mechanics were there and worked as well or better than other MMORPG games, but it just didn't suck me in hard enough to get past the monthly fees. Why shell out money every month, after all, when you can play plenty of other great on-line games for free?
The answer to that question is pretty simple: WoW today delivers an experience you're not going to get anywhere else. I still wish that PvP had the potential to alter the events of the larger world, and I've mentioned a few other complaints as well. But when I log on at the end of the working day, I can lose myself in WoW in ways that no other game provides. I remember feeling a certain sense of belonging to the Hibernia realm on the Bors server in DAoC, but with WoW it's like coming home.
I enjoy fighting with my druid, selecting his talents, developing his skills, exploring the world, and generally engaging in virtually every activity offered by the game world. I'm not one of those poor souls who loses his own identity and starts thinking of himself as his character, but I can't deny the degree to which living my druid's life is compelling to me. Indeed, the more time I spend in Azeroth, the more I come to appreciate my character and the more I enjoy the game. So take my advice and go buy a copy, or at least download a trial. If you're susceptible to the allure of MMORPGs at all, then the odds are very good that you'll love WoW.
Now, if you'll excuse me, the Emerald Dream awaits.
03/1/2006