First Impressions
By Atari on 6/6/04

Article Discussion Forum

Overview

With MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, Lineage II, City of Heroes and Everquest II entering the market this year, competition for the MMO gamer will be fierce. Gamers have a finite amount of time they can allocate to their MMO gaming addiction, and they are going to have to make some hard decisions as to what they want to play.

Blizzard, well known for putting out high quality games such as Diablo and Warcraft, tries their hand at their first MMORPG. World of Warcraft (or WoW) certainly lives up to it’s abbreviation with its massive city layouts, intuitive questing design, and gorgeous game art.

The Cities

Blizzard must have an army of artists working on this game. Each city has their own unique look and feel and different sections of the city are styled in a complimentary fashion to other sections. The undead city looks like something straight out of Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare before Christmas” and the dwarf city has a definite “The Lord of the Rings” atmosphere to it. The human city is more of a standard fare English castle and the orc city has a somewhat barbaric design with large husk and animal skin decor. Additionally, these cities are so enormous that you can easily get lost in them the first few times. No other MMORPG that I have played to date even compares in city size to World of Warcraft. You practically need a map to get around. Luckily there are a number of well-placed street signs and a mini-map to help guide players to various sections of the city.

The Characters

There are two factions in this game, the Alliance and the Horde. The tauren, orc, undead and trolls (all of the uglier races) are members of the Horde. In contrast, the night elves, humans, dwarves and gnomes are part of the Alliance. To learn more about what races can play which classes, visit the World of Warcraft Town Hall.

The character creation screen has a respectable number of options to give your character a different look and feel and set yourself apart from other people in the game. You can change the hair, face, jewelry, and skin tone to fit your persona. Additionally, the female characters look strong, feminine and attractive (with the exception of the Horde races) providing nice options for the female gamer.

The Classes

For the first time in a while, I am truly torn on what character class I want to play. There are no straight support and damage classes. Even priests, the best healers in the game, can nuke for a respectable amount of damage and hold their own in solo combat. In fact, all classes can solo as well be useful in groups. Additionally, Blizzard has done a nice job of minimizing downtime by giving different classes’ different ways to regain health and mana more easily. For example, mages can conjure bread (used to regenerate health more quickly) and water (used for mana regeneration), warlocks can use lifetap to transfer their life to mana, and druids have a health regeneration spell. This translates into more fighting and less sitting on your butt waiting for your bars to go up (note: I have yet to get a character to the higher levels to know if this remains true).