World Of Warcraft

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Continuing Blizzard's tradition of releasing outstanding games, World of Warcraft is their first attempt at entering the field of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), a new phenomenon in gaming. There won't be a second attempt - Blizzard has not just entered the field; they have completely dominated and revolutionized it. World of Warcraft is by far the most popular MMORPG ever, and one of the most popular games. Hundreds of thousands of players in America and millions across the world play this game. There are over 100 servers needed to support the huge population of World of Warcraft. Thousands of websites are dedicated to this game. For a game as revolutionary, popular, and outstanding, the only rating worthy of this game is a full ten out of ten.

Being an MMORPG, World of Warcraft provides you with a character, which can be chosen from a wide variety of combinations. Your character will progress through the game by killing monsters and completing quests for experience, causing him to grow more powerful and acquire better equipment, enabling him to progress to new areas of the game. However, you are doing this alongside thousands of other players; some of whom you will trade with, others who you will group with to defeat powerful monsters that you couldn't defeat alone, and others who will be your enemies and will engage you in battle. Although this unique concept for a game has obviously been done before World of Warcraft, it has never been done nearly as well. All of the common flaws of previous MMORPGs like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies have been drastically reduced or eliminated altogether.

The concept of World of Warcraft revolves around two warring factions: The Alliance and the Horde. The Alliance consists of Humans, Dwarves, Night Elves, and Gnomes. The Horde consists of Orcs, Trolls, Undead, and Tauren. Your character will belong to one of these factions. The players on your faction are your allies, and the players on the opposing faction are your enemies. You cannot talk or trade with players of the opposing faction, and there are many situations where you will fight them. Your faction controls certain areas of the world, where you can play without ever seeing a member of the opposing faction. However, as you grow more powerful, you will be sent into zones where you will come across enemy players. On certain servers, you are able to fight them, while on other servers conflict will be more avoidable. The two server types, player vs. environment (PvE) and player vs. player (PvP) is a great concept that allows players to choose whether to focus on combat with monsters or combat with enemy players. Regardless of what server you choose, you will still be able to participate in both PvE and PvP when you want to.

After you have chosen your faction, you will choose your race. All eight races look significantly different, have many different ways of customizing thier looks, and have unique abilities and passive bonuses that can give them an edge in combat. There are a total of nine "classes" to choose from, each of which use different techniques to defeat enemies, and will experience the game remarkably differently. For example, a Warrior will most often engage in melee combat, while a Mage will cast powerful spells from afar. Hunters will call deadly creatures that they have tamed to aid them in battle, while Rogues will sneak up on an enemy and stab him from behind. One great thing about World of Warcraft is that they have managed to achieve a very close balance between the classes - there are no dominant classes and no classes that are worthless. With proper skill any class can become a killing machine. The balance is still not perfect, but Blizzard has made a lot of progress since the game was first released and continues to even things up with every patch. 

After you have chosen your class, you customization options are not over. Starting at level 10 you will gain a talent point every level, which can be applied boosting one of your abilities, or sometimes to learning a new one. Your character will specialize in one or two aspects of your class. For example, Priests have the choice of boosting their ability to heal or boosting their damaging spells, while Shamans can specialize in casting magic or in melee combat. With talent points there are thousands of combinations for your class, meaning you can be very unique. At any rate, once your character has been created you will enter the world. You will immediately be sent on quests to defeat monsters, gather items, and explore new places. Your first few levels will be quick and uninterrupted; you should have no problem reaching level ten in a couple hours. You will learn the basics of the game very quickly, as they are not that complex. New skills and upgrades to previous skills will be available every two levels starting at level two, which makes the game feel less repetitive. Every so often, your character will learn a key ability, such as Dual Wield for Rogues, Ghost Wolf for Shamans, and so on, which is really exciting and encourages you to achieve those levels. At level 40 you can purchase a "mount" for a small fortune, which you can ride on, drastically increasing your speed. When you hit level 60, you will not be able to learn new skills and gain any more levels, but there is plenty of powerful gear to acquire by completing very difficult "instances" - areas where only you and your group can go, meaning they are free of other players. There is also a unique PvP "honor system" where by killing enemy players roughly equal to your level you will slowly gain ranks, giving you access to very elite gear. In short, the game always changes and never ends. Blizzard is constantly adding new instances to the game, with new monsters to kill and new gear to acquire, as well as new upgrades to PvP to make it even more fun.

Level 60 may sound a long way off, but in reality it doesn't take years, or even months to reach. In a solid month or two of fairly casual playing your character can reach level 60. Gaining the necessary experience to level up in this game is a lot different than other games. In most MMORPGs you simply must kill monsters over and over again for many hours to level up, known as "grinding," which deters many people from playing MMORPGs, as they find them boring. However, World of Warcraft has a system of quests, where NPCs give you quests that involve killing monsters, gathering items, delivering stuff, and sometimes killing a boss, and as a reward you gain significant experience and usually either some money or a good item. Especially during the first half of the game, completing quests is often faster than grinding, and you will acquire more money and better items than you could have by grinding. Quests take you throughout the world, often leading to new quests. There are thousands of quests to complete, so if there's a few that you don't want to do, you can simply skip them and attempt other quests. By doing quests, you should never get bored of this game like you may have with other MMORPGs.

When you don't want to work on making your character more powerful, you can work on improving your "professions" - skills that either involve collecting raw materials or using raw materials to produce equipment for your character. There are many different professions, and the good thing about them is that they are all relatively easy to improve and they are all useful. While in Star Wars Galaxies you would have to produce thousands of useless items to level up your professions on notch, in World of Warcraft you only have to produce one item of the right type to level it up, and every five levels you gain access to producing new and better items. In short, this is the first MMORPG where professions are both quick to level up and useful to your characters.

When you want to engage in PvP battles, you may choose to enter the "Battlegrounds," which are huge arenas where large PvP battles occur. Some battles involve simply killing enemy players, while others involve capturing a flag or defending key bases from enemies. Even if you lose, you will have still gained tons of points for all the players you have killed. Battlegrounds are open to players starting at level 20, and are set up in blocks, where all people level 20-29 will play together, 30-39 together, and so on. This way, you don't have to worry about getting completely decimated by a player who can kill you in one hit. Never before in MMORPGs has player vs. player combat been so accessible.

From everything I have said, World of Warcraft sounds like an awesome game and the best MMORPG by far. This is true; don't get me wrong. However, I would be deceiving you by not to mention the disadvantages. The first thing is the community. If you've played other Blizzard games online, you may have noticed that many of the people who play them are loud and immature. Unfortunately, many of the players in this game behave the same way. There's not much you can do about it, but if you join a mature guild you will always have plenty of well-behaved people to play with, so the community is never an obstacle for enjoyment in this game. Since this is a role-playing game, you may wish to actually "role-play" your characters - pretend you are your character. Blizzard has set up several official role-playing servers, so you can be with other players who like to role-play, and no one will make fun of you. In fact, if they do they will face punishment from Blizzard, which is remarkably fast about addressing any concerns you may have about the game.

Another small problem is the monthly fee. Yes, this game costs $15 a month to play besides the money you pay for the game. Depending on your age and your ability to acquire money, this may be a factor that stops you from playing this game. Blizzard is not trying to rip you off; this game requires tons of expensive servers to run, and they employ many people to take care of any possible concerns you have with the game. After playing this game for a month, you will definitely discover that it is worth the monthly fee. 

Switching to a new topic, the graphics and sounds of this game are nothing spectacular. If you are expecting beautiful looking character models and landscapes, you will be disappointed. However, the advantage to having a game with mediocre graphics is that you only need a mediocre computer to play it - you will most likely not have spend a dime upgrading any part of your computer to run this game. And if you do have a higher end system, this game does look very nice, but not nice enough that it slows down your framerate at all. There is a little bit of lag in this in the busy areas of the major cities, but that's it - you won't experience lag anywhere else. 

If you have ever played an MMORPG and didn't like it because it was too slow, too boring, or too complex, you obviously did not play World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has solved the problems of other MMORPGs. In a sense, it has brought this field a step closer to perfection. Just as Warcraft 1 revolutionized the field of Real Time Strategy games, World of Warcraft has revolutionized the field of MMORPGs, and has brought gaming to a whole new level. This game must be recognized by all as key step towards the evolution of gaming, and only a perfect rating is right for this outstanding game.

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NAME: WORLD OF WARCRAFT

SYSTEM: PC