Terrific Neighborhood; Shame About The Neighbors

When it comes to refining gameplay, Blizzard is king. As a company, they don't do that much to innovate and create new play concepts. But if you need somebody to take an established genre and really make it sparkle, look no further. With World of WarCraft, Blizzard is taking on their biggest challenge yet: the savage world of the MMORPG. Have they learned from the mistakes of their predecessors yet again, and crafted the perfect game? Well, yes and no. While World of Warcraft's gameplay is without peer in its genre, the game itself is often undermined by the very community it is built around. Thoughtless, reckless, and plain old clueless players can often make the experience frustrating and tiresome. While this is hardly Blizzard's fault (they can't be expected to be surrogate babysitters for millions of players), it still effects their game, and hence, my final score.

While World of WarCraft bears the unique charm and personality you'd expect from a Blizzard game, it is very much a traditional fantasy-based MMORPG. Orcs, wizards, elves, paladins... you know the drill. Your two real major choices are whether to join the Horde or Alliance, and to decide which class to become. While your choice of faction is largely based on aesthetics (the Alliance are the clean-cut 'good guys' of sorts, while the Horde feature the rugged mugs of orcs and the living dead), each individual race has special traits that can be an asset in your World of WarCraft career. Since you'll be looking at your character for MANY hours, be sure it's someone you'll enjoy spending a lot of time with.

Your choice of class basically determines your role in the game, especially when you're in a group. Warriors are the damage-enduring 'tanks,' priests stay back and keep everyone healthy, and so on. As you get into higher-level areas and the other players get more dedicated, you'll often be chided for deviating from your specified purpose. Priests that 'waste' their magic points on attack spells, for example, tend to get an earful from their allies. Not surprisingly, players have really number-crunched World of WarCraft into oblivion over the years, and have calculated what the 'best' skills and talents are for each class in a group or solo setting. Hardcore players may criticize you if you use less-than-optimal attacks or powers, which can be a turn-off for those who just want to play the game the way they feel like. You might want to read up on your character class before you make your choice, although you can create plenty of multiple characters with one account, if you want to sample all of them.

As you might expect, there's no real singular goal in World of WarCraft. Reaching level 60 and doing the big-time raids is one route, although some people find those overly long and distasteful, and would rather spend their time battling other players. You can even sit in a tavern all day and chat with anyone who walks in. It's your call. Most likely, you'll spend your days out in the wild, battling monsters for experience and profit, or as part of a quest.

Questing is one of the nicest features of World of WarCraft, and is the heart of playing solo. Various characters in the game will give you missions to perform, and will reward you with goodies and experience for completing them. While the writing for these quests is hardly Shakespearean stuff, there's enough flavor there to make the missions seem more exciting than they would be normally. You can juggle up to 20 quests at once, and there's no penalty for dropping one, so you can go back and get it later if you want to. There's some serious satisfaction in returning to town after a hard day's questing, and getting the big pile of experience and treasure from 'cashing in' your completed missions.

As you gain levels, you can purchase more powerful skills from trainers. You also get a 'talent point' for every level from ten on up, which get placed into one of three talent trees that will instantly remind Blizzard fans of their past love, Diablo II. While the purchasable skills are the same for each player sharing a class, there's a finite number of talent points, allowing you to customize your character and make him/her a little more unique. You'll probably end up putting most of your talent points into one tree, making your character a 'specialist' of sorts. (Fire mages do more damage, for example, while frost mages can use the power of cold to slow or immobilize their enemies for safety's sake.) This is what gives World of WarCraft its addictive quality... the promise of new powers that are JUST around the corner, with which to destroy all local wildlife.

Still, sometimes those overworld monsters just aren't enough for you. You want to go into a dungeon (referred to as an 'instance' in World of WarCraft) and take on some elite baddies. The risk is higher, of course, but so is the reward. The trick here is that elite monsters, if they're at your level, are almost impossible to kill by yourself, especially when they come at you with friends. So you'll need to form a group, up to five players for the early instances, to get the job done. Groups, needless to say, involve other players, and here's where problems arise. Just finding four other players can be tough, and you often have to yak on the channels for quite a while, repeatedly asking for allies until you can round up enough people. Adding to the problem is that the two most crucial roles - the warrior and the priest - are in short supply. Everyone seems to want to DO damage, and not absorb or heal it away. This has led to a grotesque surplus of rogues, who can dish it out but can't take it all that well. In any case, Blizzard should explore ways to make warriors and priests a bit more glamorous, to help populate the realms. Half of the few warriors/priests I've met took those characters just to be more marketable for grouping, which seems a little sad. You shouldn't create a fantasy adventure character with market forces in mind. (For the record, being a priest is really rather exciting. Keeping your team alive and healing a wounded ally at the last minute is rather like being a medieval paramedic. I've never played a warrior, but hey, you get to wear shiny armor!)

With a lot of luck, you'll end up in a group of well-adjusted players who battle well, follow looting etiquette, and are fun to chat with. If this is the case, you'll be playing World of WarCraft at its best, and will have an absolute blast. You may even make some new friends, or reliable long-term allies.

Alas, this best-case scenario can often prove to be elusive. The failings of 'problem players' are legion, but let me tell you about some of my favorites. There's the true classic, Add-On Joe, who cluelessly wanders into a group of baddies and attracts extra monsters to an already-brutal fight, resulting in complete disaster for the party. Party wipe-outs (where everyone has to wander back to the instance from the graveyard) are very time-consuming, and crush the morale of the group. And who can forget Ninja Steve, who uses underhanded looting tactics to grab really special items and then ditches the group to escape their wrath. Really nasty business. Some players leave for legitimate real-life reasons, but having an instance group go up in smoke because your warrior's mother needs her computer back is still extremely annoying. (And actually a little embarrassing for everyone involved, especially those of us with houses and jobs and girlfriends, who are apparently sharing game time with 13 year-olds.) The stereotype of the typical MMORPG player - a social misfit who seems unaware of how regular adult humans function - is not far off in a lot of cases.

This is extremely evident if you choose to play in a PVP Realm - PVP, of course, meaning player versus player. In these realms, any area that is 'contested' (shared by both the Horde and the Alliance) is essentially lawless, and players of opposing sides can attack each other at will. And let me tell you, they will attack with vigor. This would be fine, if players respected each other and acted with even a shred of dignity, but that was apparently too much to ask. Players at Level 60 will hang around areas intended for low-end characters and slaughter them mercilessly, for absolutely no reason other than a juvenile need to feel tough. (Look, I get it: these nerds have no power anywhere else in their life, so they flex it in a computer game. But with me paying a monthly fee, I'd like to be able to play.) Since they can't loot the bodies and there's no challenge in one-shotting a helpless opponent, their attacks only serve one purpose: ruining the playing experience for someone else. This doesn't bother the 'gankers', as they're probably kids and their parents pay the game's monthly fee, but it's a major issue for adults who foot their own World of WarCraft bill. These brats often use rogues (of course) and after killing you once, they often stay in the area, wait for you to resurrect yourself, and then kill you again. (An activity known as corpse-camping.) Rogues can stay 'stealthed' to lower-level characters, making them invisible, so you can't ever be sure if they've finally left you alone. If you're really lucky, you'll be ganked by a true comedic genius who - prepare for hilarity - will kill you, and then do the 'fart' emote on your corpse. Yes, folks, thousands of years of technological evolution have led to a game where goobers kill you for no reason and then pass gas on you. This sort of stupidity has ruined PVP gaming for a lot of players, and probably caused many of them to abandon the game altogether. Your only hope is to use the defense channel and ask for help, but most high-level players have better things to do than hang out in low-level areas and police the gankers, so you're often on your own. If you're in a guild, you may have better luck finding back-up. Of course, the ganker may have guild support as well, to help protect their right to abuse low-level characters. It's a cruel world out there. (In a weird note, Blizzard is promoting a T-shirt with the joke term 'Original Ganksta' on it. Interesting, that a company apparently supports an activity that detracts heavily from their own software.) Even if a power player just kills you once and leaves you be, it's still pointless. He gains nothing, and you're forced to walk back to your corpse. Thanks for taking from my life and adding nothing to yours, Sparky.

Another major problem is the issue of role-playing. A small percentage of realms are 'RP' realms, where players are supposed to stay 'in character' and maintain an immersive fantasy environment. Sadly, almost none of them do. In fact, RP realms seem completely identical to 'normal' realms, with everyone using irritating chat room speak and using in-game slang terms and abbreviations. There is absolutely no shortage of normal realms, so I have no idea why players would go out of their way to play on a RP realm with no intention of actually role-playing. Insanity was the best I could come up with. It would certainly explain some of the character names.

Yes, Azeroth is a warped place. But still, it can be a very enjoyable one. Playing on a 'normal' server alleviates most of the community problems, since you can't be ganked, but you can still pick a fight with the other guys if you both agree to it. Some players will call you a 'carebear' or a wimp, but you can call yourself "the guy who isn't walking back to his body every three minutes because he's being gutted by a Level 57 rogue who's angry that nobody will go to the prom with him." With two huge continents packed with monsters, quests, towns, and tons of other adventurers, World of WarCraft can be an amazing spectacle. With all of the advances in gaming over the years, it's easy to forget that all of those guys in town with you are REAL people, sharing the same fantasy world. That's still pretty cool, even if many of them are goobers. (Or overly critical, like me.)

Graphically, World of WarCraft is quite a sight. When you consider the amount of nuttiness the game is processing all at once, it's hard not to be impressed at how nice Azeroth looks to boot. Best of all, variety is king: the colorful forests of the Night Elves contrast perfectly with the shattered halls of the Undead, for example. You'll trek through volcanic mountains, snowy fields, swamps, jungle... every terrain you can think of. Good stuff.

Musically, the game is pleasant, if not memorable. Most of the tracks are more about ambience as opposed to making really strong music. I did enjoy the Alliance inn music a lot, though, as well as the melodic theme in the Night Elf forests. Sound effects are about what you'd expect, with some high-quality grunting. Voice acting was surprisingly weak for a Blizzard game, but since it's always brief and fairly rare, it's not really a problem. (Still, it's never good to be giggling when a major bad guy is threatening you in an instance.)

World of WarCraft can be a really great game with the right people, but you'll need a lot of patience to find them. (Especially if you take a chance on a PVP realm.) Of course, you can do what I ended up doing, and rope in your girlfriend and a few buddies to play together a few nights a week. It's easy to trust an ally when he's the same guy who once rescued you from a rave gone bad at 4 A.M. in reality. Even if you don't, there ARE some functional people in Azeroth, and you'll find worthy allies eventually. With a wide variety of classes to enjoy and a big world to explore, odds are you'll squeeze at least a few months of fun out of World of WarCraft.