World of Warcraft Preview
GameSpot proudly presents this world-exclusive first look at World of Warcraft, Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the popular Warcraft fantasy universe.
"World of Warcraft." Try saying it out loud, and get used to the sound of it, because you'll be hearing it often in the foreseeable future. The title alone speaks volumes. Though Blizzard Entertainment is still hard at work polishing up its highly anticipated real-time strategy game, Warcraft III, for an early 2002 release, the company officially announced this brand-new product in the Warcraft franchise at the European Computer Trade Show in London on September 2, 2001. If all you knew about World of Warcraft was its name and that it would ship some time after Warcraft III, you'd wonder these two things, in this order: What's World of Warcraft? And why would Blizzard develop another Warcraft game so soon?
This preview will answer those questions, in that order, but will also reveal all the major details of this work in progress. Still, the project is but a year old, and its release date is undecided--and thus some of its details are as yet either undetermined or undisclosed. This preview will at least identify them as such. However, by the conclusion of this preview, you will still have more than enough evidence to conclude for yourself that World of Warcraft promises to be one of the most important massively multiplayer online role-playing games ever imagined. Simply read on and see.
Blizzard's Warcraft fantasy universe was first seen in the 1994 game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and was made famous worldwide by its sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, about a year later. Warcraft's fantasy world is instantly accessible: Determined human warriors can be found defending their country to the death against green-skinned, ferocious orc tribes. Up till now, the Warcraft games invited you to share in this struggle--to unite yourself with one of these two factions and to control its massive armies against its rivals. But whereas the Warcraft series has traditionally put you in the role of commander, merely overseeing the innumerable battles fought between these two races, World of Warcraft will be different. As the name suggests, the world itself will be the centerpiece; you will finally see this world firsthand and meet all of its personalities in earnest--not just in the heat of battle.
The concept behind World of Warcraft will be familiar to you if you know of games such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, and Anarchy Online--all of which are often referred to as massively multiplayer online role-playing games. These games allow for thousands of human players to coexist in a single gameworld, exclusively available over the Internet. It's still an exciting concept, even though Ultima Online, the first major game in this genre, was released back in 1997. The concept is made all the more exciting when applied to the Warcraft setting--one of the richest settings ever made for a computer game.
World of Warcraft will let you create a persistent character who will live, learn, and fight in the land of Azeroth. You'll have plenty of options even at the outset--namely, Blizzard has already announced three playable races (of an indeterminate total number) that will be featured in the game. These include both male and female versions of the stalwart humans; the fierce orcs; and the massive taurens, a bull-like race that will first be seen in the forthcoming Warcraft III. These characters look extremely impressive already, as does the rest of the game, if only from a visual standpoint, thanks to the game's striking visual design. Read on to learn about how appearances will be important to World of Warcraft.
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- GameSpot Score9.5Editors' Choice
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- Release: Nov 23, 2004 »
- ESRB: Teen
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