.FLYINGHEAD SIX MONTHS LATER
.TITLE Forgive me Diary, for I have sinned.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY Our adventurous Editor-in-Chief has finally left Kalimdor for long enough to write a proper review of World of Warcraft. Is it worth your money and time? You’ll have to read his review to find out.
.FEATURE
Forgive me Diary, for I have sinned.
It’s been eight long months since I wrote my last diary entry. It’s been eight long months of hacking, slashing, killing, exploring, leveling, trading, auctioning, flying, dying, and questing. That’s right. I’ve been exploring the World of Warcraft pretty regularly for most of the last eight months. And I’ve barely seen a quarter of it.
Of course, during this same time, I got married, published 140 articles, found a new house in Florida so we can avoid the nasty New Jersey winter, and packed something like 19,480 pounds of belongings into a large moving van and unpacked them again here in Florida.
In other words, I’ve actually had something of a life during these eight months of World of Warcraft questing. And that’s why my ugly cow is only at level 38. That’s me, in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Here I am, armed and flying atop the strange cat that’s the WoW equivalent of mass transit.
.BREAK_EMAIL Tap here to read our full, detailed review.
Another way you get around the huge maps of World of Warcraft is on the Zep, shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B Riding the Zeppelin will take you between land masses.
What’s interesting is that the Zep makes its rounds about every ten minutes, so you can often find a bunch of players waiting at the stations where the Zep lands.
Another mode of island-to-island hopping is the boat. This picks you up at other locations. One warning though: I recently sneaked into the enemy’s boat dock and rode their boat to one of their private islands. If you get caught, they are gonna woop yo ass! I wound up in a world of hurt and I’ve learned not to do that again until my "toon" is a much higher level.
While I’ve managed to get married and have a life while still playing WoW, I’m far more worried about my friends. I have a couple of friends who are almost done with their second level 60 characters. These guys are both undead rogues, and if you thought my cow is ugly, my buddies are even uglier. And so are their characters in the game, as shown in Figure C!
.FIGPAIR C Here’s Odis and Mormo. If you see them skulking around in the woods, run!
In fact, Odis and Mormo seem to have something of an unhealthy relationship. They’re always killing unsuspecting Alliance players and, well, sometimes, uh, what can I say about Figure D? And why is Mormo’s ass glowing? Yeah, maybe I don’t want to know.
.FIGPAIR D Somethin’ ain’t right here.
My friends used to go out into the real world. They used to answer their phones. Now, the only way you can communicate with them is by going into the World of Warcraft and seeking them out in-game.
World of Warcraft is the most amazing video game I have ever seen, though I can’t necessarily say it’s the most fun. The most fun I ever had in a video game was with the original Tribes, when me and my buddies would protect and take over bases and the action got very, very involved and very, very fast.
But WoW is a close second in the most-fun category. The pace of WoW is far slower than a shooter like Tribes. But that’s because they’re different genres of gameplay.
That said, there’s a great deal of fun to be had in this massively multiplayer online game. As the example of Odis and Mormo showed earlier, it’s even more fun when you’ve got friends to play with. This is a game that’s a kick to play with friends. Even sicko friends like mine!
When I took their pictures in game, it was very much like a real-world photo shoot, admittedly with a slightly deranged twist. First, I asked them to model. Being the hams they were, they instantly accepted. But in a very interesting analog to the real world, I posed them where I wanted, asked them to move back, left, or right, and basically conducted the same coaching you would with any partially clothed model.
Since my first week or so, I’ve really come to understand the level of detail and the breathtaking care that went into the design of this game. If there were Oscars for game design, this would get them all.
As I mentioned last week, there’s a fully-operational email system in the game, as shown in Figure E. You can send money, objects, and messages among players.
.FIGPAIR E Yep, there’s cheese in this game.
In addition to email between players, there’s a vibrant in-game economy. There’s an Auction House that’s surprisingly close in feel to eBay. Do you want a Level 49 Mace that can clobber your enemies? Just look for it on the Auction House. Did you just collect ten pieces of heavy leather? Sell them at the Auction House, shown in Figure F.
.FIGPAIR F The Auction House is an actual building, but here’s the interface screen.
Each region in the game is the size of a small town. I and my friends have been playing this game for more than half a year, every few days getting to explore a different area, and we’ve yet to see the entire map. Some areas are ablaze with color, like the Hillsbrad Foothills area shown in Figure G.
.FIGPAIR G That’s me and my big hammer, flying into Tarren Mill.
Other regions are cold and forbidding, like the Alterac Mountains region shown in Figure H.
.FIGPAIR H It’s cold down there.
There are bustling cities like Thunder Bluff, shown in Figure I.
.FIGPAIR I Thunder Bluff was the first large city I discovered.
There are caves, waterfalls, and even underwater regions. Not only does WoW have enormous on-land maps, but they’ve also mapped out with considerable detail the coastline surrounding the map areas. One of the things I found to be truly amazing was the richly detailed underwater reef in Figure J, which I discovered in one particularly challenging quest.
.FIGPAIR J Watch out, it’s dangerous this far down!
Throughout the game, there are many different themes. For example, Undercity’s the creepy main town of the Horde on one of the islands. As you enter, you’ll see the very cool skulls in Figure K.
.FIGPAIR K You haven’t lived until you’ve flown through grinning skulls.
As you can see from my screenshots, the graphics are involved and have an interesting, cartoonish texture that somehow seems to work very well. Over and over, I’ve continued to find detail touches that really showed the dedication of developers.
Around Christmas, many of the trees in Thunder Bluff had decorations, there were a few snowmen around, complete with carrot noses, and one of the quests I got was to bring a glass of milk back for Father Time.
WoW is not without its problems, however. The servers do crap out every so often, but Blizzard, the game’s developer, does seem to fix them quite rapidly. Some of the areas often get particularly badly lagged and responsiveness can slow to a crawl. One of the Horde’s main cities is Orgrimmar, but it’s come to be known as Lagrimmar.
In the earlier months after the launch, communication between users and developers was very bad. In fact, some posts on their boards complaining about service were deleted by Blizzard, causing a customer uproar. Blizzard has definitely shown that they learn from their mistakes. There are still some server problems, but they’re not nearly as frequent and, even more important, their dialog with their customer base has become considerably more detailed and informative.
The genre of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) has been around for some time now. But it’s worth commenting on how real people interact in a not-so-real world. Some people are jackasses. Some people are cool. You can find new users in-game begging for in-game money and you can find more experienced players who are generous in the extreme to the newbies.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was much discussion of virtual reality and virtual worlds. While we haven’t seen these worlds show up in business, WoW is certainly a preview into what such a world might be like.
Different from almost any other online experience I’ve had, there’s a sense of place here. When you’re in the bank in Orgrimmar, for example, you feel like you’re in a bank, in place called Orgrimmar. When you travel down to The Barrens, over to Desolace, up to Ashenvale Forest, or way down to Gadgetzan, you really feel like you’re in a different location.
Given the pace of graphics change, I’d be really curious what something like WoW will be like in ten years. Of course, WoW is much less about the amazing technology needed to run the virtual world and far more about the craftsmanship involved in its creation. There will be many, many more MMORPGs coming into the future, but I doubt we’ll often see something created with the love and attention that obviously went into this product.
At last report, there are more than 3.5 million people playing WoW worldwide. That’s more than the population of some small countries. I’m likely to be one of them for quite some time more.
As the sun sets slowly into the West, I’m off to The Forgotten Coast on a quest for glory. Maybe I’ll see you around.
We give World of Warcraft a wildly impressed 5-out-of-5.
.RATING 5
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on World of Warcraft, visit http://www.worldofwarcraft.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
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