Well I have to say I never thought I would be playing another MMORPG after spending nearly a year in EVE. For a while now a friend of mine was bugging me to play WOW and so I decided to at least look at some screen shots and videos of it and after doing so I decided to buy the game. I personally don’t like trying MMORPG’s because they require loads of time usually doing the same thing over and over to get money or XP and progress is usually very slow after all the game companies have to keep you paying that monthly fee.

There are a few issues with this game that I do not like. The first one being that I had to buy the game at $59.99 Canadian. A lot of the MMORPG”s now a days you can usually download the game for free and then just start paying the monthly fee witch is usually $14.99 a month U.S. I got over this issue though when I seen that the game was 5 CD’s long. Most of the games like EVE are only 1 CD so thats not to bad for a download however 5 CD’s would require enormous amounts of bandwidth.

The other Issue I didn’t like to see was that the game when you buy it comes with one month free of game time and despite this you cant even get the game on-line unless you enter a credit card number or have one of the pre-paid game cards. They should have made the game so that you get the month free and then at the end of that month you have the option to do the credit card or the pre-paid game card.

While I’m on the topic of paying for the game you can get pre-paid game cards for the game from pretty much any store that sells the game. This is good for people who don’t like to use credit cards or who maybe don’t have a credit card.

The other gripe I have about the game is the way it works with its servers. For example I know people who are in the U.K and I can not play with them because they do NOT have access to the same server pool that I do. For those wondering people both in Canada and the U.S log onto the same servers so thats not a issue for Canada and the U.S but it is a serious problem if you know and want to play with people from different countries.

This same server problem also shows its ugly head if your into just playing the game normally. You have to pick what server you want to play on and there are lots to pick from. The problem is the servers don’t talk to each other so if you have a friend who is in the U.S for example he has to be on the same game server as you or you can’t play with him. You could setup ahead of time as to what server you want to build characters such as I did with my friends.

Where this server issue gets really annoying is if you want to go fight with people in a PVP dungeon you can literally wait hours on end before your match is ready for you to join. The least amount of time I spent waiting for a PVP match was 45 minutes and the most time was over 3 hours and I at that point decided to not bother trying to get into a PVP match that day. I have to wonder how much time could be cut off that wait if all the game servers could talk to each other. Each server can handles thousands of players so if they were all interconnected the time you wait in line for a match would have to go down a great deal.

Before I get on to what I like about the game I have to say for those of you who have played these games before and don’t like what E-Bay does to a game like this will not be happy with WOW since you can buy loads of stuff from e-bay for the game. For example you can buy gold that you need in game to purchase in game gear. I should say that this is just not a e-bay only thing because I have seen a few web sites that are also selling gold for the game and are even offering services for leveling your character up if you have $345 dollars U.S that is.

Now for what I like about the game and that is the environment in witch your character plays in. I ’m one of these people where graphics in modern games don’t really impress me much anymore but this game is exceptional in this regard. Regardless of the screen shots you see of the game or even movies of the game nothing compares to playing this game and seeing the art work thats been put into this game.

What really gets me though is how massive this game is. It’s not the only game out there thats big EVE is a good example of a huge game but in EVE your in black space with the odd gas clouds and stars. In WOW your in a massive environment where it looks like no little detail was missed in terms of how the levels are laid out. One would think that with a game so huge you would have to see a lot of cookie cutter stuff in the game with a slight twist here and there and this my friends is not the case in WOW.

If the game was only as big as what I have seen so far I would say blizzard did one hell of a job on the game. The fact though that I’m level 32 in the game and haven’t even seen half the environments in the game tells you how huge the game truly is, the game has 60 XP levels for for those wondering.

Your first time playing the game you will get to pick between the two sides in the game for character creation. You have the Horde on one side and The Alliance on the other. Each side has several classes you can choose from and then with each class you have primary and secondary skills that you can set to train different things. From what I gather both sides come equally equipped and it comes down to how the user uses his/her character as to how well they do in combat.

In the screen shot above you will see the character creation screen that lets you customize how your character will look. You have a few options here but I would have liked to have seen more flexibility in how you can customize the character. Despite the fact you can customize your character you will see in game there are a whole lot of you who look almost the same. This goes for the low level characters all the way up to the level 60 characters.

In WOW the way to get your character up in terms of levels is to do one of two things, you either do Quests or you go and kill monsters over and over again aka GRINDING to get XP. These are the only two ways to get XP in the game. Most people from what I can tell do a little of both all thought myself I just kill the monsters because unlike quests with monsters you also get to pick up their loot when you kill them. This loot you pickup you can keep for your self for example a weapon or you can take it and sell it to the in game merchants or you can put it up for auction.

When you look at the game map you will see its a huge map but the way the game is setup is certain parts of the map are setup to handle you at certain levels in terms of XP. So for example you maybe in one section of the map and then cross over into another section of the map where the monsters are so power full they will destroy you in a single blow. This adds a lot of risk to exploring the map and if you die by the monsters you will also take damage on your armor witch at some point will have to be fixed and that cost silver or gold depending on what armor you have. One thing about exploring this game is nothing will get your attention more then a pissed off animal twice your size and all teeth chasing you down the road lol.

If you get on a PVP server you will really have some fun there. There is nothing like seeing a human enemy player when your out farming some animals and you walk over and kill him. Be prepared for the same to happened to you as well though. You never know when a person may come along and be on the other side and then the war is on. There are a lot of times though in the game where you will see someone from the other side and they wont bother with ya. The whole idea you may run into a higher level player while killing some monsters for XP is also something that keeps you constantly looking over your back. And yes you can be killed rather quickly when you encounter another human who is 20 levels higher then your self. What I should add here is if another enemy player does kill you there is no penalty for dieing, The person who killed you will get a honor point but he will not get any of your stuff you had on ya so you don’t lose anything.

The only pain in the ass to being killed by a player is the fact you may spawn a distance from where you were and it may take a few minutes to run back to where your body is. Note when I say run back in this game when you die you respawn as a ghost and the game environment is black and white and you can walk over water and whatnot to get back to your body so you can then be revised.

If you are into hard core PVP then there is a system where you can go into a instance and thats basically a special map that has no monsters just people and there one side will battle another and see who can get the other sides flag the most. If you become real good at this you will get a rank added to your name and the higher the rank goes the more elite stuff can be found like weapons and what not. To maintain the top rank witch is rank 14 you will pretty much have to play 24/7 for months and then keep playing to keep your rank up. If you take any time off say a week or two your rank will drop back down the rank list. I would imagine most people in the game never bother with this because it simply takes way to much time and you pretty much have to be a addict to the game to achieve this and keep the rank up.

The game ran fine on my machine here, my machine specs will be posted below. This game was giving me 50fps and did that on a regular basis. I have the game maxed out in terms of detail and my screen resolution was 1024 by 768. The only time I see some considerable lag is when you go into any of the big City’s in the game, the game will lag a bit in those.

In Conclusion the game like any game is not perfect but Blizzard has done one hell of job with this game and the game engine. I haven’t seen a game this well done in a long time. My only question is will the game keep me in it after I reach level 60. The only thing a level 60 has to do at that rank is do PVP witch is fine I just wonder if that will be enough to keep me interested in this game for the long term. One thing is for sure so far I have had a blast playing the game and I’m looking forward to seeing other areas in the game that I have not seen yet. So to this end I think the game is worth buying and maybe one day I will see you on the battle field in WOW.

If you would like more information on this game visit the Blizzard website.

This game was tested on the following machine.

AMD XP 2500
ASUS A7N8X MOTHERBOARD
2 GIGS OF PC 3200 RAM
ATI X800XL 256 MEG
2 MAXTOR 120 GIG 7200 RPM 8 MEG CACHE EIDE ATA 133 DRIVES
AUDIGY SOUND CARD

Below are some in game screen shots.

Here is a picture of wow box Front.

Here is a picture of wow box Back.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.

Here is a random in game screen shot.