Hello, my name is Will and I am an addict. I was first introduced to this insidious destroyer of marriage and hygiene in December. It started innocently enough, just a cool looking box only a little larger that a DVD, but inside this cunningly designed deathtrap is a killer. At first it was just a few hours on the weekends. Then all day events where I would nearly soil myself rather than let my high slide. Now it consumes nearly every free moment. Intruding upon my precious family time and threatening to endanger my career. Yes my friends, I am an addict.
And my drug of choice is Warcrack…ahem…World of Warcraft.
Obviously I am making light of myself and my passion for this game, but make no mistake, it is truly addictive. Even those who have sworn they would never pay for, nor play an MMORPG are hopelessly hooked.
This article, like any other review, is entirely subjective and comprised entirely of my opinion. That said, my opinion accounts for two decades of work in and around the game industry with emphasis on massively multiplayer games. From the earliest MUDs to EverQuest II, I have tested, played or helped develop more MMORPGs than any sane man should. Incidentally I find it hilarious that so many users are spouting the term MOB, when so few actually know what the acronym means. So yes, I definitely have an opinion on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games and hopefully my opinion is both informed and objective.
And what I found was nothing short of brilliance. The world is rich and alive and filled with details. Textures on textures, layer upon layer. From the simple touches of birds in flight to the mice and rabbits that inhabit the landscape. As the saying goes, “the Devil is in the details”, and the details were attended to.
Basing their MMORPG on their popular Warcraft strategy series afforded Blizzard two very specific benefits. First, Warcraft is a known brand that thousands know and love. Second, building a backstory was already taken care of. All they had to do was smartly adapt it and move it forward. And so our setting is based on that of the Azeroth following Warcraft III and its expansions. The landscape of Azeroth is primarily divided into two continents with a few stray islands. Each continent is divided into areas controlled by each of the two factions. On the one side is the Alliance, comprised of the races of Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes and Night Elves. On the other, the Horde, comprised of Orcs, Tauren, Trolls and Undead. In the wake of the war between the Burning Legion and the races of the Alliance, the enslaved races that now make up the Horde have been freed. Free but not trusted. While the factions are not openly at war, they are not trusted and in some cases, openly despised.
And then there is you. No matter which faction or race you choose, you will soon find that the story doled out by quests and dialogs with NPC revolves largely around dealing with the aftermath of the war. Pockets of resistance, remnants of the legion, the simple tasks of gathering food and supplies, these are the challenges that all the races face. These are the tasks that are assigned to you.
Whichever race you choose, your journey will begin with an excellent cinema style opening that not only shows you the immediate surroundings, but also acquaints you with the recent history of your race as well as your current plight. As in most MMORPGs, each race is endowed with certain characteristics that are specific to that race. Orcs are stronger than humans, Night Elves are faster than Orcs, etc. However, I will not bother to detail each races specific traits. They are important, but not so important that it would prohibit a player from choosing any available class.
Each race is prohibited to a specific set of classes. Classes include: Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Priest, and Druid. Also included are two faction specific classes: Shaman for the Horde and Paladin for the Alliance. Each race gets a subset of classes, for example, Dwarves can choose from Warrior, Hunter, Paladin and Priest. Paladin is only available to Dwarves and humans.
Again, as with most MMORPGs, each class has a specific set of skills, abilities and spells that they can use. However, this is where World of Warcraft begins to really set itself apart and is just another example of how Blizzard attended to the details. Hunters for instance have both Hit Points and Mana. Mana can be used with ranged specific abilities. But the real bounty of the Hunter lies with their pets. At level ten a hunter can tame a member of the beast class of creatures. The pet can then be controlled by the hunter and used as an interceptor to keep enemies at range where the Hunter can pick them off with their ranged abilities. Rogues do not use mana. Instead the Rogue uses energy to execute its special abilities. Energy begins at 100% and the execution of each action requires a percentage of that energy. Most actions generate an ancillary ability known as Combination Points. Some of the abilities use these Combination Points as the basis for determining the power of that ability. Confused yet? Don’t be, it is harder to explain that it is to use. Here is an example. A Rogue can use their stealth ability to sneak up behind an enemy. Once behind their opponent, the Rogue can use their Backstab ability. Backstab requires an amount of energy, does a number of points of damage and generates one Combination Point. Sinister Strike is a straight up attack ability that requires energy, does some damage and generates a Combination Point. After two or three Combination Points have been generated, the Rogue can choose to use an ability such as Eviscerate. Eviscerate requires energy but rather than performing a fixed amount of damage, the damage is based on the number of current Combination Points. Sixteen to twenty four points of damage for one Combination Point, twenty nine to thirty seven for two Combination Points, etc. All of the classes boast similar features.
And of course there are trade skills, or crafting skills. This is another area where World of Warcraft really excels. Trade skills are divided into primary and secondary professions. Each character is allowed two primary professions and an unlimited number of secondary professions. Primary professions are designed to be complementary, such as Mining and Smithing, Herbalism and Alchemy. Essentially the skills break down into gather skills and manufacturing skills. You don’t have to choose one skill to complement the other. You could choose Skinning and Engineering, but you may have difficulty gathering the necessary components for crafting Engineering items. Secondary skills include Fishing, First Aid and others. They do not directly provide benefit to any of the primary skills but they can prove to be very useful.
My favorite feature, by far, are the griffon rides. This game boasts so many excellent touches that it would be impossible to relate them all in a single article, but the travel system is really something special. Yes, there are a few, a blissful few, teleportation areas that allow you to travel from location to location. Instead travel is accomplished by boat, griffon, hippogriff, bat, and even dirigible. Griffons (and bats and others) are meant as short range vehicles. Boats and dirigibles are used to travel large distances. In order to use a griffon you must know both the start and finishing locations. This means visiting the griffon master in a city or town. Once you have the points, and for a small fee, you get to take a wondrous ride through the landscape of Azeroth. You don’t just jump on griffon, transition to a cut scene and then cut back to the new location. No, you are taken on the back of this creature and transported over the live landscape, past hunting parties, past enemy raiders, over forests, alongside waterfalls. Everything is there, visible and just cool. My daughter and I literally spent two hours just traveling from place to place on the backs of griffons.
The sound quality is excellent. The voice work is specific to each race and done very well. Ambient sounds, music and special effects are all more than adequately done and nothing less than I would come to expect from a game of this magnitude and quality.
Graphics are a mixed bag. There is no way anyone could say that this game has top quality graphics. It doesn’t even come close to matching the graphics displayed in games such as Lineage II or EverQuest II. No, the graphics of World of Warcraft are simply efficient. They are good, but not heavy. That means there are fewer graphics issues and allows more people access to the game without requiring a significant system upgrade. For instance, the minimum system requirements for World of Warcraft involve a Pentium III 800 Mhz, 256 MB of RAM and a 32MB graphics card. EverQuest II on the other hand requires a Pentium III 1 Ghz, 512 MB of RAM, and a 64MB graphics card. Those requirements directly reflect the intensity of the graphics involved, but the lower system requirements opens the game to more people. Its that simple.
And, on a personal note, I think all of the graphics have a kind of cartoon quality. Like Manga gone horribly awry. The characters, animations and creatures have a sort of distorted quality, legs are too long, Popeye arms, loping gaits, just odd all over.
Although I give this game my highest possible marks, that’s not to say it without problems. Though I hesitate to tag these problems on the game itself, as I believe the software is damned solid. Its’ the infrastructure that needs work.
To say that there are problems with downtime, lag and instability is a tremendous understatement. The first “realm” I tried to play on was down so often I gave up on it and nearly gave up on the game altogether. However, other realms don’t have as many problems, though you can expect just about any of the realms to offline at least once a day. In its short lifetime, barely two months, I have experienced authentication problems due to what appeared to be downed servers, realm crashes that again appear to be from offline servers. Long periods where the realm was available but characters were not or character were available but obviously restored from some earlier point because I had to perform several quests over again.
And let’s not forget the lag. Lag is a killer, literally. Ironforge in particular is completely ridiculous. Now my connection is pretty good, my average ping times (according to the in game indicator) are usually between 90 and 200. That is far more than adequate and in game indicator is firmly colored a deep green. So why the exceptional lag? Sure many games suffer from lag in heavily populated areas, but all games scale up their backend to compensate. And eventually Blizzard will too.
In fact, I believe Blizzard was counting on the three month slide. For those that are not familiar with the three month slide, every commercial MMORPG to date opens strong and maintains great subscription rates through the first three months. After three months the subscription rate drops and the load on the infrastructure dips. For a company hosting a game service, this is an important issue. Next to development costs, hosting accounts for the majority of money spent on an inline game. In many cases a company will dish out big dollars to build larger server farms, only to have some of those servers go unused once the subscription rate begins to drop. Add to that the cost of egress, or the costs of sending files over the internet, and companies will get roped into long term contracts with network providers only to find out their paying for bandwidth they aren’t really using when the three month slide is on. This is what I think Blizzard is expecting. Or some form of this slide.
