World of Warcraft is a warm welcome in comparison to many of the other MMORPGs that are out there. WoW does not have a severe learning curve, nor does it force you to tediously trail along through quest after quest just to try and continue on with your game. While Questing is still a very big part of the game, there is so much more that is available at a very early time that you will not mind doing the quests, because at any point you can wander off and just play, something MMORPGs seem to have forgotten about.

It's mid-April, World of Warcraft has already been out for 4 months and is steadily approaching its half year mark. Although it had a launch that was unstable at best, World of Warcraft has been hailed as one of the greatest Massively Multiplayer Online Games ever created. This may be true, but World of Warcraft stills suffer from many of the same issues that plague the other games of this genre.

Ok at first I was kind of hesitant to play this game. Why you ask? Cause every MMORPG I've walked away from has left me with the feeling of never accomplishing much in the time I spent playing. I've also only played one Blizzard title so I didn't know much about the companies reputation for quality.

World of Warcraft is intended to be an MMORPG that gets rid of many critical flaws of other MMORPGS, but I find the game to be unplayable, much as I find any MMORPG. I played the game throughout the beta test and upon release.

Don't get me wrong. This is a great game- A great game indeed. I still play it. But, it was a few blunders on blizzard's part that made this game more frustrating than... Well- something really, really frustrating. And, yes, It could have been good, but this game is more like "World of repetition- repetition- repetition- repetition- ..." you get the picture.

When World of Warcraft first arrived in my household, I was skeptical. I myself was busy with Everquest II and Eve Online, but I was willing to give WoW a chance. Everyone was playing it; friends, family, heck, even strangers would come up to me and talk about it. Both those just mentioned and the media were hyping it to be either A) the best game ever, or B) the funnest MMO ever. So I was swept up into buying it.

Blizzard is one of the best developers, not only for PC games, but for all platforms in general. You might know Blizzard for games such as Warcraft II/III, Starcraft, and Diablo I/II. Blizzard has always been known to put out amazing games and to have amazing customer service. This trend continues with World of Warcraft. WoW is Blizzard's first attempt at a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Critics were wary of whether Blizzard could put out a game that could rival that of it's competitors such as Final Fantasy XI, Everquest, and Neverwinter Nights, to name a few. What happened was the greatest incarnation of MMORPGs to date not to mention the fact that WoW crushes it's competition in terms of sales. (My numbers may be a little off but WoW is at ~8 million subscribers right now where it's nearest competition, Everquest 2, has ~300, 000 subscribers.) With the expansion slated for release in January 2007, now is the best time to get into WoW.

There are TONS of quests in this game, which are a major way of earning EXP, money, item and reputation rewards and exploring new areas. The quests are actually really cool, too. In addition to the traditional "kill X monsters", "bring me Y item", and "deliver item to Z", there's stuff like assassination, escorts, stealth missions, raids, etc. The quests are nicely diversified as well, requiring you to do things like planting seeds in a burnt-down, desolate forest, massacring a camp of centaur in order to gain a higher reputation with the opposing centaur camp across the map, closing portals summoned by a demon band, etc. Most of them are really fun to complete. Try to complete higher-level quests solo for an added challenge - who says WoW isn't rewarding?

I don't have a lot of experience with Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS for short). In fact I have only ever played 1 seriously (tibia, see my review), and I thought that it was a good experience. I always wanted to play Everquest but my mom wouldn't allow me because she didn't want to use her credit card to pay a monthly subscription fee, (yet she uses that card to get my yearly subscriptions to "Tips N' Tricks, and Electronic Gaming Monthly", but this is about World of Warcraft, not my family problems). One of my friends bought the game on its release day, and he went on and on about how good the game is and how I should give it a shot, I then tried to explain to him that I only have a dialup connection, and that I wouldn't be allowed to use a credit card to play the game. That is when he made his winning arguments, that it ran just fine on a dialup connection (it really does), and that you can buy prepaid game cards (in cash) at your local video game stores. So he managed to drag me out to the closest Futureshop so that I can buy the game, and I have been on it nonstop.

When I first played World of Warcraft (WoW) I was simply amazed. The gameplay kept me hooked for days. Gameplay (10/10): WoW has the style of gameplay that is typical amongst MMORPGs. It has the action bar which allows for quick and easy use of various spells and/or abilities. The spell book. The quest log, character info, and all your other basic MMORPG functions. One thing I found pretty cool was the pet system. In most MMORPGs the player summons the pet with a spell. In WoW you have to tame a wild beast, and instead of just "unsummoning" the pet it stays with you forever (unless you don't take of it).