World of Warcraft Video Games

The game's beautifully rendered locations are filled with small details, such as flying birds and flowing water.

A History of Conflict
WoW takes place just four years after the real-time strategy Warcraft series, which chronicles a 25 year struggle between the Alliance (humans, dwarves, gnomes, and elves) and the Horde (orcs, tauren, trolls, and undead). Even though there's tons of accumulated story to the series, new players should not be daunted. The background is there for you to explore, but you don't have to tread a lot of Azeroth history to get into the action.

The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature.

The game looks magnificent. There's plenty of detail and variety to the landscapes and interiors, and the artwork has a refreshingly playful style. There's not a lot of variety in the character creation process, but with all the skills and proficiencies to combine in the game, WoW focuses its customization not on the appearance of your character but rather on the character of your character. The game lets you adopt any two trade skills, regardless of character race or class, and combine those skills in useful ways. If you choose skinning and leatherworking, for example, you can fashion bags from the carcasses of monsters you defeat, which will allow you to carry even more inventory items.

Expanded Commerce
You can sell the items you make, find, and loot through a variety of outlets. Like any role-playing game, WoW has merchants who will buy your cast-off items for fixed prices, but you can also sell to other players at your own price through in-game chat or by leaving it with one of the auction houses located across the map. This virtual free market is a game within the game, like Monopoly somehow inserted into the middle of Chess. Heck, you can even send items C.O.D. to other players via the game's mail system.

The game's Quest Log keeps track of up to 20 quests at a time.

In other online role-playing games, starting players have to invest dozens of hours whacking at small prey and doing other odd jobs one at a time to gradually "level up" to more interesting challenges. WoW lets players accept a variety of quests--up to 20 at a time without penalty for abandoning any of them before they're complete. The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature. Where some games only grant experience through battle, WoW grants experience for exploring and fulfilling quests too.

A Level Playing Field
There's also a built-in handicap for casual players where your character enters a rest state when you log off from the game. The longer you're logged off (up to a week), the bigger the experience bonus you'll get when you return to battle. An enemy tagging feature--the player who lands the first attack on an enemy claims the loot for himself or his party--prevents onlookers from swooping in and pilfering items from a monster that you brought down. That resolves a common complaint of other titles.

Icons and pop-ups help put complex controls easily within reach.

Most games severely penalize players when they die in-game, usually by shaving experience points, funds, or both. In WoW, death just relocates your ghost to the nearest graveyard, and the only penalty is the time it takes you to get back to resurrect your character's corpse.

All of this makes for a very complicated game, but the well-designed interface puts all the game's elements into icons either visible framing the action or within a simple keystroke. The enemy's artificial intelligence is quite strong too: Monsters will join nearby fights to aid their comrades, switch targets strategically midbattle, and ambush players. The map system fills in details on places you've visited, so you always know where you are and where you've been.

Overall, World of Warcraft is a game that's easy to learn, challenging to master, beautiful to watch, and tons of fun to play. --Porter B. Hall

PLATFORM:	Windows, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Macintosh
AGE GROUP:	12 years and up
CATEGORY:	Video Games
MANUFACTURER:	Blizzard Entertainment
ESRB RATING:	Teen
FEATURES:	CD-ROM, This game requires a monthly fee, and an internet connection to play, Create and customize your own hero from the unique races and classes of the Warcraft universe, Explore an expansive world with miles of forests, deserts, snow-blown mountains, and other exotic lands, Visit huge cities and delve through dozens of vast dungeons, Adventure together with thousands of other players in an enormous, persistent game world
MEDIA:	CD-ROM
MPN:	72212
ACCESSORIES:
UPC:	020626722124

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World of Warcraft reviews by customers

World of Warcraft
One of the most anticipated expansion in recent years this game was definitely worth the wait! If you need any further proof check out the in game currency prices [...] Before the expansion came out prices were pretty stable. Once the game came out everybody had to have it. Most thought it would hurt the economy in game but so far that has proven not only false, but exactly the opposite. Way to go Blizzard! Job well done.

Fun...but
This game is absolutely the best game I have ever played in my life. I had played this since the release, but I quit a couple of months back due to the fact that was so addictive that I couldn't stop playing. I lost my social life for about 6 months, staying in my computer room every night without getting a breath of fresh air. I really think that the game is great, but to put hourly timers on it for limits for yourselves.

The graphics are great, the gameplay is simple, yet challenging, and the majority of the community are friendly and great to "talk" to. Remember to only play this game in moderation... or you might find yourself in a place you don't want to be.

--Porter role-playing buy dicount information purchase

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