World Of Warcraft
Computer games seem to be a thing of the past these days, but yet there is still one game that has made its way into every computer and taken hold of everyone who plays. “World of Warcraft” is an online game and has become well known and has over millions of players on it. In World of Warcraft, you create your alter ego by choosing from a variety of colorful races and powerful classes, and then you begin exploring, questing, and battling in Azeroth, the fantasy setting featured in Blizzard’s Warcraft real-time strategy games.
World of Warcraft is superficially similar to numerous other games that came before it, and it clearly draws inspiration from some of them. The fundamentals are all here, such as fighting dangerous creatures (optionally including other players), exploring the countryside either alone or in the company of other players, undertaking various quests, gaining experience levels and new abilities, and acquiring powerful items.
World of Warcraft is painless to get into, all you need is a credit card or prepaid game card to create an account, as well as initially deciding on which sort of character to play, since so many of the options seem like they could be interesting. And it turns out they are. So why not try them all? The game lets you create multiple characters on the dozens of different available “realms,” each of which is a unique instance of the gameworld that is capable of hosting thousands of simultaneous players.
Some of the realms cater to role-playing fans that prefer to play in character the whole time, while other realms are custom-tailored for player-versus-player action. Regardless, World of Warcraft’s realms are nicely populated already, and the unfortunate issues with login and lag that plagued the game when it first launched were mostly taken care of in a matter of days. The game just has a solid feel to it that’s uncharacteristic of the genre, and for an online RPG, World of Warcraft is surprisingly responsive.
World of Warcraft will keep throwing variety at you, and the combat system at the heart of it features fast, visceral, action-packed battles that are fun and intense, whether you’re fighting alone or in a group. Furthermore, World of Warcraft finally achieves that long-sought-after goal of many massively multiplayer games, which is to make the player feel rewarded regardless of how much time he or she invests in a single sitting.
Much of World of Warcraft is structured around questing, so there’s always something to do or somewhere to go, even if you don’t have a lot of time. Whenever you enter a major new location for the first time, you’ll feel almost overwhelmed by the number of quests available, which you’ll be able to clearly spot since quest-giving characters helpfully stand there with a big, noticeable exclamation mark over their heads.
Luckily, the game’s more-than-a-thousand quests are made quite manageable by only being offered to you when you’re qualified to complete them, and you can have no more than 20 quests pending at a time. So you’ll eventually be forced to pick and choose, but this is for the best. The quests will always be there waiting for you until you accomplish them.
Though the world of the game is very large, you can still effectively travel on foot, taking in the often breathtaking sights of Azeroth in between key points (you even earn some experience just for setting foot in new territory for the first time). As you explore, you’ll also discover a variety of means of rapid transit. For instance, you’ll be able to quickly and conveniently cover large distances by flying on the backs of gryphons, wyverns, and more, which can ferry you from point to point for a small fee.
Of course, player death is inevitable in a game such as this, but it’s here where one of World of Warcraft’s most unlikely innovations rears its head: Death in this game really is nothing to get bent out of shape about, so when you get killed, don’t worry. Most games of this type have made it a point of penalizing the player upon death, such as by inflicting an increasingly steep experience point penalty, directly resulting in a sense of failure and wasted time.
More-recent online RPGs have doled out more-lenient penalties in the interest of appealing to more players, but World of Warcraft all but eliminates the sense of penalty altogether. Here, death mostly just puts you out of the action for a bit, which is undesirable enough as it is. You automatically respawn as a ghost at the nearest graveyard, and you can usually double back pretty quickly to where you fell; alternatively, a healer-type character can resurrect you, or you can choose to come back to life at the graveyard.
When you die, your items’ durability will also degrade slightly, though this isn’t permanent in the long run or harmful in the short run. You’ll simply need to pay to get them repaired by certain types of non-player characters before their durability ratings drop to zero and they’re rendered useless. In all, the game’s death penalty feels just right, in that it’s consequential without being frustrating.
Another of the game’s subtle but important design innovations is there to benefit those who can’t necessarily commit to making World of Warcraft a huge part of everyday life (as much as it can threaten to do so). The way it works is that whenever you’re not playing the game, your character is considered to be in a rest state. When you return to a well-rested character, you’ll temporarily accrue double the experience points you’d normally earn by defeating monsters, and the more time you spend between play sessions, the longer you’ll enjoy the experience bonus when you resume play.
The result isn’t a system that penalizes hardcore players because they are still going to advance much faster than those who can’t spare as much time. It mostly just gives everyone else a little incentive to keep coming back and to not feel bad about taking several days off from the game. You’ll get a nice tailwind as you try to catch up to your friends who kept playing during the time that you took off.