Thursday, September 08, 2005

Games - World of Warcraft

It may very well have been a mistake. Buying and installing World of Warcraft on the first day of my leave, that is. Now I spend some 3-4 hours daily on the addictive beast. It's hard to stop!

In case you haven't heard, World of Warcraft is Blizzard's MMORPG take on it's famous RTS series, and it's one helluva good game. It looks excellent, the gameplay is terrific, people don't seem to be assholes, etc. The only real downside is that it's hard to stop playing!

Blizzard seems to have hit the sweet spot of the mythical RPG spiral: you always have that urge to go for one more creep, one more quest, one more level, and it repeats ad infinitum.

It's very hard to get bored with the game, especially if you're a true-blue follower of the Warcraft series. You get to immerse yourself in famous locations and meet characters and heroes from the RTS games. You get to do quests, literally dozens of quests throwing themselves on you. You get to customize your character. You get to wander off to gather obscure ingredients. You get to interact with other players, challenge them, fight alongside them, raid whole cities with them.

I've tried a few other MMOs before, and none really struck me so hard as WoW...other games get you hopelessly stuck in the levelling "grind", but WoW throws so much stuff to do at you that it's very easy to forget about that level bar.

I recommend the game to any serious gamer, even to those who primarily like single-player RPGs. Because honestly, you can play WoW just like a single-player RPG with a vast multitude of quests (except that you occasionally get some other characters helping you out randomly). I'll play again in a short while :p

3 comments:

btflpenguin said...

my MMORPG addiction is Guild Wars. graduated to that from ROSE Online. The game is similar to Ragnarok but the graphics are way more sophisticated. you may want to try it (that is if you want to spend more than your WoW 3-4 hours playing).

a said...

Nah, I'm good :D

I think the 3-4 hours per day may be underestimated though. Sometimes it's closer to 9-10. :p

btflpenguin said...

i know what you mean. i sometimes spend the whole saturdays playing, only stopping to nibble when i get faint of hunger. it's addicting to control your destiny. i think that's why i keep playing. you get more control over your life online as a character (and if you should f--k up, it only takes a few secs to respawn).