World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

WoW is an excellent and horribly addictive game.  You should buy it.

I started playing WoW the February after its release.  I've been around long enough to remember casinos, and Blizzard banning them en masse.  I remember a time when tauren didn't have mounts and merely ran around at greater speeds at level 40.  I remember when Molten Core was on par with Illidan and when rogues collected parts of the Shadowcraft set and thought it was amazing.  Because it was.

WoW and I have a long, long history.  I've been the least important blip, and on one server I was the village idiot; everyone knew who I was and my story.  Good times.

But why should you care that I've "been there?"  WoW is many things to many people.  One man plays WoW for an evening and comes back frustrated, unhappy, and wins no loot at all from his raid.  Another man plays WoW for an evening and comes back intensely satisfied and happy for one reason or another.  In a sense, nobody is playing the same game.  I'm not an MMO person, so I've got no frame of reference other than mostly console games and a handful of PC RTSes and RPGs, but considering that the game can be wildly different for so many people, if nothing else, speaks to Blizzard's unbelievable creative ability. 

I'll start as far back as I can.  I'd heard about Everquest, but I heard the gameplay wasn't that fun and when the game punished you, it punished you bad.  So I skipped it.  But, I love Blizzard and I heard a lot of good things about WoW, so I gave it a shot.  If you haven't played this game before, among the first things you'll notice (if you're unlucky) is that the death system is forgiving.  You lose durability on your equipment instead of experience.  Typically this won't break the bank (players with certain amounts of extremely nice equipment, however, may disagree) and life is but a walk back to your corpse and a click of a button.  Granded, these "corpseruns" can be long and you'll wonder why in the hell they put a graveyard there, but overall death is more of an inconvenience than a punishment.

WoW's quests are plentiful and interesting.  I don't think most of the stories are very good, but a handful are extremely interesting (Alliance players should keep an eye out for the Legend of Stalvan quest chain) and typically you can just skip to the quest description's last part, find out what you're looking for and where, complete the quest, and get the reward.  Some quests are frustrating, particularly because they were built with groups in mind and these days not many people below the maximum level run around in groups.  But these quests are skippable, and won't hinder your progress too much.

As you progress, you'll be introduced to a insanely complex world of talent points, crit chance, hit rating, damage and healing bonuses, intelligence, agility, stamina, etc., etc., etc..  Diablo 2 is a game that takes simple mechanics and makes them deep.  WoW is a game that takes moderately complicated mechanics and makes them rocket science.  Well--I'm exaggerating.  Anyone who picks up the game and is familiar with RPGs won't have a problem, but the game has so many peripheral (perhaps extraneous) mechanics and "hidden" aspects of certain spells and abilities that it's very easy to get bogged down in a wasteland of confusion and WTF if you're terribly concerned about these things, like yours truly.  But the everyman need not worry: while this game is extremely complex to those who want to do extremely well, it's also very accessible, despite that you'll be overwhelmed when you're finally dropped into the world for the first time.

Visually...well, you've got all of the Blizzard greats working on this, so from an artistic standpoint, all of the areas, people, places, things, look pretty cool.  However, in videogame years it's getting ugly.  Many of the texfures are ho-hum, or stretched so far across surfaces that they're reduced to pixelated messes.  The game has absolutely no physics engine, so grenades aren't thrown realistically, and when your foes die their animations are not that impressive.  How cool would it be to see a low-level enemy player ragdoll across the screen when you finish them off with a crit?  Delicious.  Another problem is that Blizzard will simply re-skin a lot of enemies instead of making totally new ones.  Videogame R&D can be expensive and difficult, however, and Blizzard, particularly with the Burning Crusade expansion, manages to re-skin certain things in a way that's satisfying enough for me to deal with.  Plus, as the game expands the expansions are displaying tighter textures and more interesting spell effects.  Overall, the game looks alright, but if you've been playing Crysis or anything else out there that looks very slick, WoW will definitely not impress. 

Well, that's the review.  I like the game, and I recommend playing it.  It's worth the monthly fee because Blizzard knows how to make good games and will continue for the foreseeable future.  For the Horde!