World of WarCraft

The Good
This game doesn't really need to be reviewed, its faults and success are visible for most people interested in playing an MMO to see. Yet, I still feel like I have something to say about the game.

I've played quite a few MMO's and this one was the best. Not the most fun, but it was the best. The game is the quickest to get into and has a very stable feel.

Another good thing about the game is how they are pretty delicate with character deaths. A lot of games totally punish you when a character dies in the game which I think is one of the reasons why this game is so easy to pick up.

The graphics and control are also very solid as well as the characters graphics and control. In some MMO's for some reason controlling the character is really awkward. In this game it's not the case. Everything just feels so standard and put together, which makes it easy to play the game.

World of Warcraft reminds me a lot of multiplayer Starcraft. Just like Starcraft the game has a very high learning curve that you may never achieve. And just like Starcraft the game is done to death that it doesn't feel like you're doing anything new, yet the game is so balanced that it still is the definitive experience for its Genre.

The Bad
Overview: The game falls into the problems that any other MMO falls into. It simply engrosses such a large amount of time and for what? A few bits of gear, etc. But, the thing is, that's just how MMO's are right now. And most people are fine with that.

The Bottom Line
The game deserves to be so popular, It really is a good game. However, its an MMO. And because the game is an MMO, it is a really time consuming game that has a huge learning curve at later levels.

What makes the game addicting is that you cannot just stop and pause the game. Many people are very competitive gamers and this game has no pause button. What this does is cause the game to demand giant scores of time. If you don't put in enough time as your peers you will literally fall behind. If you leave the game you're not pissing off some game characters you're pissing off real people. And secondly, the MMO has become so competitive that at the highest levels you must spend gargantuan amounts of time playing. All of this comes together to make a person, susceptible already to playing a game too much, spend an enormous amount of time on the game.

The Good
Two high points of WoW are the quest system and the overall game balance. I've been told that there is "nothing original" in WoW -- All the major play elements were first seen in other online games, and many are done "better" elsewhere -- but in WoW the sum is much greater than the parts. You can play in your own style -- slowly exploring the lands and quests, racing through levels to experience the level 60 "endgame", farming for game money and items, buying and selling at the auction house, adventuring solo, doing massive 40-player quests with a guild, or just sitting in a tavern role-playing. Hunters travel the world trying to tame exotic rare pets.

You can also spend your time fighting other players either in the regular adventuring areas or in specially-designated battlegrounds. You can choose whether to play on a "PvP" server where you can be attacked at any time or on a "PvE" or "RP" server where player-vs.-player combat only occurs in the battlegrounds.

I have been playing WoW for over a year now and have had to restrict my play so I can do other things (such as my work). Beyond that, your enjoyment will depend heavily on finding other players with whom you enjoy gaming. So far, I've found that pretty easy.

There are many other ways in which WoW is a truly great game -- the lush graphics, wonderful game music tailored to where you are and what you're doing, the variety of races, skills, and areas to explore, etc. Blizzard has once again succeeded in creating a game that makes it unnecessary to get any other game for a very long time.

The Bad
Sometimes play gets too repetitive, killing the same monsters over and over. This is especially true late in the game when you work on building up your "reputation" with various factions.

WoW is (probably inevitably) a serious resource hog. You will want a fast processor, at least 1GB of RAM, and a high-end graphics card to best enjoy the game. Even with all this, WoW is sometimes very laggy. In particular, there seem to be problems with the database systems that handle your inventory and in-game mail. Again, this might be inevitable in a game that now has over 5 million subscribers, but it detracts from an otherwise incredible game.

The Bottom Line
"The game I wish I'd written" works. :-) I think of WoW as playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of terrific gamemasters and with a game available at any time of day or night.

The Good
World of Warcraft's world is simply gigantic with many different areas. I personally think the game was at it's best before the expansion packs because all the areas feel so great, when I used to walk around in Elwynn Forest it felt so peaceful while the "Undercity" feels very chaotic and aggressive. This gives the world a nice balance, if you ever get sick of the destruction and death of the Badlands you can always go back to Loch Modan to rest for a while.

When you take the title of RPG, I think it's important to live up to the title "Role-playing game" and World of Warcraft does that very well. There are servers where you can make a character and you have to act like him or her. This means talking to people like you're having a real conversation and joining a guild that offers the kind of job you want your character to have. I decided to have my character join the Stormwind city-guard and I had a great time patrolling the city and following orders.

Fighting the monsters in instances and raids was really awesome and succeeding felt like a real achievement. I always loved it when we had a group of forty people and managed to take down a monster, it just made us look so organized and skilled. I did dislike it when the expansions decreased the number of player in a raid to twenty-five, but in the end I did agree that the raids were way too hard sometimes and keeping a total of forty people alive was nearly impossible.

World of Warcraft is full of wonderful experiences that I count among some of the best I have ever had in a video game. My days as a role-player are still very dear to me and stand-out between the rest, but there was also a guild called "The Brotherhood of Wisdom" which I created myself and which grew to become the biggest guild on the server. We had a lot of fun and some of the most stupid events ever (like a snowball-war or races). I still have contact with a few people that were in our guild and we love nothing better than to talk about "the days of the Brotherhood".

The music is very good and often even awesome. While most songs are not that great, there are a few that still manage to make me feel like the hero the game wants me to be. One of my favorite examples is the Stormwind theme which I swear has to be one of the best songs in video game history. The title screen music is also pretty nice and the music in the Night-Elf lands are pretty sweet as well (they mix nicely with the forest). It's too bad that they couldn't have every song be as awesome, but there is still not enough to complain about.

The story is amazing and that is mostly due to the army of RTS-games that preceded this game. The "Warcraft" series form the background for this game and some characters even make appearances (The Night Elf priest and Thrall for example). I have to give Blizzard credit for taking a very popular franchise and taking such a massive risk with it, in the end they created every Warcraft-fan's dream and I am sure a lot of people love Blizzard for this.

The game is very easy to control and gradually builds-up the difficulty. It's unlikely that you will die at the start of the game and there are barely any enemies that attack you on sight, but soon there will be more enemies that do and you will have to pay attention to your surroundings. The game also starts with a very limited library of spells and attacks, but nearing level thirty you already got a few pages full of them and you have to decide which ones you want to bind to to the keys.

The Bad
Like Vaelor pointed-out already: World of Warcraft has one of the worst communities ever. Take the Halo 3 community, multiply that by the youtube trolls and then multiply that by the people who make jokes about disasters and you're almost close. The worst thing is probably that Blizzard doesn't take any action whatsoever, there is literally an entire city where everybody acts like assholes on roleplay servers, but nobody ever even tried to ban people there. It would take five minutes! The worst memory is when my cat died and I told my guild about it and someone actually started making fun of me and laughing. Blizzard's advice?, just ignore him...

There isn't a lot of roleplay to be found on the servers that are made specifically for that kind of playing. Unless you join a guild or always check the forums for events, there is a good chance you won't ever find any roleplay. This makes it very hard for new people to join these servers and since the first city they run into is the earlier mentioned place where all the assholes hang-out... If the new people don't fall prey to that city, they mostly end up joining the huge army guilds which have as much soul as bricks, this always causes smaller guilds with more daring themes to die due to the lack of members.

The quests used to be a big grindfest, but now that has been partially fixed. There is still a gigantic barrel of grinding, but there are also other quests which require you to perform tasks that actually change the world around you. The quests that didn't get this treatment are as boring as ever and make you feel like a factory machine. The worst thing is that it's incredibly addictive and that is NOT a good thing, in fact it's terrible because the game charges you fifteen dollars a month for this. This is a problem I have with a lot of services, I bought the game, so why does it still charge me to play it. Xbox Live comes to mind, but at least you can offline for free, here you can only play offline and there is no 1-man option for dungeons.

The Bottom Line
World of Warcraft is a great game, but it has some terrible problems that are mostly the fault of Blizzard. The story is great, the game has a nice difficulty curve, you can have a lot of amazing experiences and the roleplaying in this game in unmatched, but Blizzard is just way too passive when it comes to helping the players.

The roleplay servers are overrun with douchebags who ruin it for everybody, a large part of the community is acting like the absolute lowest a human being can sink and they take massive advantage of people's addictions. After so many years and with so many active players, the least they could do is give the people more. If you buy the game you only get one free month which is barely enough to get you going. I would suggest asking five dollars a month or giving two months for the same fifteen dollars.