Wow, what an insane turn around. At first I gave this game a 5.7, saying it was overhyped, boring, ugly, monotonous, and badly designed. After seeing this game through the eyes of an expertly developed, strong, team-forming lvl 36 paladin instead of a crappy lvl 10 warrior trying to solo it out in a high level zone, I've discovered the true beauty of world of warcraft and that all of my previous assumptions of the game were totally false. First off, this game is the best massively multiplayer game ever. Hands down. Better than Dark Ages of Camelot, Everquest, Planetside (ughh), City of Heroes, etc. It combines the addictive role playing of Everquest with the action of City of Heroes and ties it all together with wonderful production values and great graphics. I'd be sitting here writing all day about why this game is so damn fun. Basically, the entire cool factor of this game can be served in a single phrase: the HUMUNGOUS world. I was dazzled by grand theft auto: san andreas' game world; this blows it away. It literally can take days to walk across an entire continent, yet the quests are laid out so that you usually only have to travel across a zone or two to complete them. And this huge, huge world is filled with so many quests and things to do that it will amaze anyone who gets around to traveling across it. Not one section of the game world is uninhabited; you'll constantly find structures, elite monsters, bosses, and quest items and wonder "where can I find the quest to kill this or that boss or plunder these items." Almost every single enemy in the game has a quest associated with them. There must be thousands of quests for the alliance and thousands more for the horde. The true beauty of this game outs when horde and alliance quests overlap, and players of all different races will be passing each other and communicating with body language macros (since they speak different languages). The only gripe I have with the large world is that you can sometimes find yourself running from point A to point B for thirty or more minutes when the quests aren't as conveniently laid out as you would like them to be. The PvP isn't all that great, but blizzard is adding battleground instances in the future for guilds which want to slaughter one another in big army-like battles. For now, large groups can raid enemy cities, small groups can ambush patrols in enemy territories, and solo-ers can assassinate npcs in the thick at their own free will. Yet if someone doesn't want to pvp, they don't have to. You must get your pvp flag flipped on by an enemy npc before other players can attack you, and once they attack you their pvp flags are flipped on. So those who want to steer clear of a huge raid and go about their business doing quests and PvE can. The graphics, while not technically outstanding, are incredible artistically. Different regions of the game vary greatly in mood; there are lush, tropical jungles, lava-filled barrens, grassy plains, countryside, huge bustling cities, small and quaint villages, lakeside cottages, creepy forests, the list goes on and on. You can take days of playing to explore all of the areas in the game, let alone do all the quests for them. Everything is just so unique; every human emotion seems to be explored and uplifted by the game's graphics. It's just awesome. The sound is great too. There is wonderful music, clashing of swords and maces, funny voice-over emotes, awesome ambient noises, positional sound, and cool monster growls. There are some sound glitches, such as hitting and blocking sounds being cut off once and a while, but patches will fix these up sooner or later. This isn't halo-good, but its pretty close. Value, value, value... 15 if I could rate that high. I've been playing on my lvl 36 paladin for 96 hours in a period of five weeks and I'm still not getting bored. For fifteen dollars a month one hundred hours of quality game time is certainly a bargain, despite my initial thoughts of this game. This game grew on me. At first I hated it; now i LOVE it. My suggestion- buy world of warcraft and play it nonstop. Hang on to the game and cherish it. Once you've learned the ins and outs and you don't think your character is that good, start a new one and stick with this one. Don't make a third character, it will discourage you from playing. Keep going, even if you feel you are underpowered, because when you hit lvl 30, making one gold a second, doing 100 dps to monsters five levels higher than you, you won't regret being five copper short of a silver getting killed in westfall by buzzards when you were level ten.
I played WoW for much of a year and during that time I didn't do much else. After I emerged from the bottomless void, I realized that the engrossing nature of the game is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakn... Read Full Review
There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. So I won't say it again - however, WoW is a very overrated game. It's hailed as "innovative" and "revolutionary", but the only way in which it is... Read Full Review
