Game Reviews - World of Warcraft
-- Street-legal crack in a 5 disc set.

Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Platform: PC
Game Type: MMORPG

World of Warcraft is Blizzard's first and only MMORPG as of now, and is widely believed to be the best MMO game created. With a current 6 million active players, WoW has become the world's largest onlime game community. But that really dosen't make a game good does it? You have got to have the content to back it up, along with an interface that isn't over-complicated, and a whole bunch of other things that make the gaming experience what it should be.
Let's start off with graphics. Now, WoW has been out since late 2003, so it isn't as graphically pleasing as, say, Tabula Rasa will be. But overall things look suprisingly crisp when you have the settings up. In each zone (we'll get to that later), the unique terrain is extremely vivid. with somewhat detailed static plant life and large mountains/lakes to compliment the changing weather that each zone can produce. Since the game is real-time based, it has an accurate 24-hr sunrise/sunset and changing lighting and shadow effects. Buildings are textured well, and are unique as they aren't all the typical four sided rooms found in most games of that time. There is a unique fire animation in this game that I found most intriguing. The character models are just plain cool, and will be even cooler when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out, because the polygon count of the models will be raised to allow even more detail. But graphics aren't the only pleasing part of this game.
Unique audio is important too. Now, this game is particularly lacking in this category. Computer NPC characters get very repetetive, since every speech clip is repeated through every NPC of that race/gender. Also, many of the sound effects could use some variety too. But complaints aside, the quality of the audio is top-notch. And the music, the music is superb in my opinion. Each zone has semi-unique music for that type of location. I'm particularly fond of the Alliance's Night Elf forests. But aesthetics don't really matter as much in this game, it's the gameplay that really gets you going.
In World of Warcraft, it is almost essential that you party up with other people at one point or another. This way, using this necessary collaboration, you can work together with a group to accomplish a common goal, such as completing a quest or running through an instance or dungeon to get items. You can gather a group in many ways, such as communicating in the global "Looking for Group" or "LFG" channel. Although this way is somewhat effective, it has it's downfalls. First of all, ever since the LFG channel became global, it has been a center for spam. Many people ignore this channel for that reason. And then, you can't always be certain how good of a player that person is, or how trustworthy they are when it comes to looting items and the like. Which is precisely why guilds are a much more desireable means of collaboration. In a guild, you are one big clan or group of people, and you should be on good terms with the majority of them. Most are trustworthy enough to take with you on groups, and helpful enough to advance the group further towards your goal. It's a very effective system. But the main point of all this work is acheiving a higher level, and upon getting level 60 (soon to be 70), you work with a guild to get the highest armor and item sets possible. Your determination, combines with the game's unique social structure, makes World of Warcraft much more than just a game, it becomes a great pastime and in extreme cases, another life. All in all, it's just the best and most addictive MMORPG available.