World of Warcraft Review

The gameplay revolves around quests, that are assigned to you by various NPCs, which can involve any number of tasks - kill X bad guys, enter Y dungeon and retrieve item Z, or other such task, as your character grows into the role of hero. Plots of intrigue unfold through these quests, as your travels take you through the areas of the world, but your actions are by no means limited by the quests presented. Many can be ignored entirely, freeing the player to go where he pleases. Should an Alliance player cross paths with a member of the Horde, in many cases, there's no reason they can't hack away at each other mercilessly. On Normal servers, the opponent must have his/her PVP flag turned on for such melee to occur, but on PVP servers, everyone on the other side is fair game. Players can team up in groups of 5, but typically the only time that's really necessary is for the instance dungeons - soloing is very easy in this game, and can be done handily with any class. The game also has a special group mission system, where players can form massive groups called raiding parties, but this system recommends groups of 30 characters of decent level strength in order to survive.

Should a player end up on the business end of a sword and die, the game does not overly penalize a player by taking some of that hard-earned XP away. Instead, the player is turned into a ghost, and transported to the nearest cemetery. From there, he has two options: one, he can walk his ass back to where he died, where his spirit can reinhabit his body, or the local Spirit Healer can resurrect him there at the cemetery for a penalty. At lower levels, the penalty is monetary, but as you climb up the food chain, the player can suffer from resurrection sickness, which essentially puts him out of combat for a set period of time.

Once your character takes a break from fighting, he can work on his crafting skills. The game has incorporated a number of trade skills with which a character can build a number of items for use in the game - weapons, armor, potions, etc - for use by the player, or just for selling. Secondarily, a few of the professions have partner profession of sorts, which helps with the gathering of raw materials for the trade skills - Herbalism for Alchemy, Mining for Engineering, Skinning for Leatherworking, you get the drill. Since a player is allowed two professions per character, those that wish to specialize typically take the two professions complementary with one another in order to maximize their effectiveness. Lastly, the game offers three skills that are independent of these professions, Cooking, Fishing and First Aid. Personally, I find that First Aid comes in quite handy. The other two I could take or leave and be just as happy. I mean - you're already playing a game. Do you really need to stop swinging swords, busting skulls and chanting spells to go fishing? If you feel the answer is yes, then you're obviously a smarter man than I.

So now that I've hashed out the obvious, let's talk about the L-word. Lag. The chief complaint that I've heard about the game is that it lags worse than any MMORPG game of note in quite some time. Yes, the game lags. A lot. Why does the game lag? Is it that the game is poorly coded? Is it that Blizzard didn't do quite as good a job squashing bugs that we had hoped?

Folks, the answer to that is no.

The game lags because of two very important factors - inadequate hardware and underestimated server loads. The game's hardware requirements are high. Really. Take the Recommended settings, add 256MB of RAM and 500Mhz of CPU, and that's what I'd say is the Minimum hardware requirement for this game. You have to understand, there's a lot of detail in the world that is constantly being rendered in real-time, so if your rig isn't up to par, you're gonna get a lot of stuttering, especially if you find yourself entering a capital city. The other reason why the game lags heavily is that Blizzard grossly underestimated the popularity of the game prior to its release, and the sheer numbers of players pounded their servers into nice, smoking piles of silicon and plastic the first week of play. Blizzard was forced to double their server count in the first week, and add login queues to the existing servers in order to control the numbers of players in the world. One last reason that people are experiencing a heavy lag amount is that the glut of players are still at the lower to middle levels - no one's high enough to be in the 40 - 50 level zones. The greatest number of players is still in the 15 - 25 level range as yet. In about a month or so, the game should really even out and the lag will become much more manageable, but for a large number out there, it's a real problem. All we do know is that Blizzard is working to resolve the issue, and it's really only a matter of time. So while they're doing their job, time to save up for a new video card for Christmas.

The Blizzard Formula didn't work as well as they'd hoped this time around, but in all honesty, this game needs to be played. Pay the money. You know you want to. The next chapter in the WarCraft saga will be unveiled here, and what better seat would you want to have? When the Burning Legion comes stomping down the lane, where will you be? Wielding sword and shield, a spell dancing on your lips? Or will a few technical issues keep you away from what is the best MMO on the market this holiday season? As for me, I'll be in Azeroth, fighting the evil dead. Or with the evil dead, I haven't quite decided.