World of Warcraft Preview

Yep, we managed to milk a bit of new media and info from the cats at Blizzard Entertainment; well Vivendi actually. So, basically we offer a refreshed first-look on the features regarding WoW general principals, details on the game's visual effects, gameplay-realted matters, and so on.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) set in the world of everybody's (well, mine at least, and as I am exceedingly self-centered, everybody's) favorite fantasy real-time-strategy, presenting it as an enormous, persistent game world which gives you a chance to form friendships, slay monsters, and engage in epic quests that can last for days or weeks.

A world of danger...

She said she'd meet me here. Where could she be?

OK, the first thing that comes to mind when we say Blizzard is perfectly balanced gameplay with immense replay value. The developers are designing this title so that it can offer a lot of fun even to the players who do not intend to spend a lot of time on-line, by setting the pace of the adventure according to the players' capabilities. This means that the game will keep adapting to the player. Gameplay will, further, focus on action, questing with story elements, dynamic events, and flexible reward systems. World of Warcraft will also put an emphasis on combat and tactics against multiple opponents. The developers are, in fact sufficiently self-assured that they claim that they will advance the entire genre with this game. From what we know, they just might be right.

The story in World of Warcraft continues four years after the events described in Warcraft III. It will take you through Azeroth and other familiar lands (and underwater terrains) from the Warcraft saga as well as some new ones; letting you meet and fight alongside legendary heroes and your friends. You will experience numerous changes in weather throughout the world thanks to the game's dynamic skies and clouds giving players the ability to actually see clouds begin to form and coalesce into stormy weather. Other effects include snow, rain, and fog. Pretty impressive for a MMORPG wouldn't you agree?

The three races the developers decided to reveal are Humans, Orcs, and Tauren. Blizzard announced that there will be more player races and that they will all be revealed in due time on the game's official web. Each of the races in the game will have specific properties, racial skills, abilities, and equipment. When it comes to in-game equipment and items, World of Warcraft has an interesting little trait. Apparently, your characters can create various useful items along their adventures, using their particular trade-skills. The variety of these trading skills was not revealed yet, but Blizzard has promised to give additional info throughout the course of development. On top of that, the game entails a straightforward bank system, thanks to which your uniquely-created items can be stockpiled. This also avoids the inappropriate creation of additional characters for the mere purpose of accumulating numerous items.

Another important thing worth mentioning is that gender will in no way influence the abilities of a character. Also, players will be able to customize the look of their character in details: they will be able to change hairstyle, hair color, skin color, and faces (you can even incorporate some mean-looking tattoos). The characters will never age, and they will never be required to eat or drink, but they will be able to show a large number of emotes (animated emotions). As for the character classes, Blizzard did not yet define all of them, but they are pretty sure that most classes will be based on the units found in the Warcraft series.

World of Warcraft is based on a mixture of a skill-based and a level-based system, as the developers strived to use the best out of both. In order to advance throughout the levels, you will have to fight many enemies and gain a lot of experience, but you should never expect to see Diablo-like action: each move will require careful tactical decision making and strategy elements. Players will be able to fight each other, but they will never be required to do so. In fact, any player who does not want to fight his peers, can simply state so, and will never be attacked by other players (we believe that this issue is closely tied to the inclusion of the customary PvP method of combat - which means that players can choose to engage in a duel or simply walking away). Besides, it's not like you won't have anything to do. Keeping the game exciting at all times, there's the freedom of exploration, collecting and creating items, mastering trading skills, etc. Also, high-level players will have special quests and even entire dungeons, especially adapted for their stats.

The Orcs can sometimes lie pretending they are dead - it is said.

I was right.

One of the few technical details about the game that has already been revealed is the fact that the game has a 1st and 3rd person camera, which can be controlled using the mouse wheel to choose the preferred angle.

The in-game areas will be vast and highly-detailed. Of course the unavoidable subject here is the transition between playable zones (or Realms in this case, because Blizzard revealed that the game won't be divided into those traditional MMOPRG zones). Some of these game-sections will include a brief load time, but otherwise players are not going to be bothered with any lengthy area switches. Practically, you get to go through many different realms, which all have their unique appearance and races that inhabit them. Other than that, the developers have decided on capping the number of players per Realm, seeing as there's always the possibility of overcrowding. They also wish to ensure that players can maintain a certain sense of community in these Realms. However, the precise number of allowed players in a single Realm is yet to be determined. Traveling through this huge World of Warcraft is hard and slow, but if you decide to use a portal, ship or zeppelin, it becomes much faster. You will be able to join coteries, clans and guilds, but specific rules and details concerning that will be released later.

Even once it gets published, the game will continue to grow thanks to Blizzard who plans to keep on introducing tons of new lands, monsters, unique items and quests, and in order to provide the genuine gameplay experience, Blizzard also plans to have live Game Masters who are members their customer support department run the game.

World of Warcraft will be available for purchase at software stores, on-line and directly from Blizzard Entertainment. However, in order to play, player will have to sign up for a monthly account. The good news is that you will be able to create more than one character per account.

The game will primarily be developed for the PC platform, but as the game won't appear any time soon, the current hardware requirements would probably seem monstrous. One encouraging piece of information is that the game will play on our mortal machines equipped only by a common modem. We have to keep in mind that the game is still under severe development and that we are still ages away from a mere beta version of the game. Blizzard also promised that World of Warcraft would support a wide array of different 3D accelerator cards.

I already said (several times probably) that we still know nothing of the release date and it would be quite ridiculous to try to guess a release date for a Blizzard game, as in spite of their brilliance, they are obviously unable to meet scheduled release dates. In the mean time, sit tight and keep checking that www.blizzard.com for information on applying for the beta-test.