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ABSOLUTE MUST BUY!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: July 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As a beta tester myself I have been able to experience this game still in its unfinished state, phase 3 beta test. And this is further proof that blizzard simply makes the greatest games. This Game is amazing to say the least. It is somewhat a conglomeration of many blizzard titles. In World of Warcraft (WOW) you get the chance to collect items and level up and choose new skills, like in Diablo 2, you also get to experience the warcraft world first hand in an amazing 3d environment and choose from many warcraft III heroes and races, you can be Night Elf, Orc, Undead, Dwarf, and many other races all with unique sets of skills and spells. I know this game will be a hit; it is truly revolutionary in the way the game is able to pull so many online players together in one massive world. Once again I must say this is a must buy, I have preordered my copy and I suggest you do as well.

Blizzard's first attempt at a MMORPG is its finest work

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: February 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

WoW is the most fun MMORPG to date, no questions asked. City of Heroes is dying (yes, i have left CoH for WoW), EQ2 is nothing, WoW reigns supreme. Here are the pluses for WoW.

+Beautiful environements
+Excellent musical score
+Quests give a substantial amount of xp and give awesome rewards (loot)
+Huge starting cities offer mail boxes, auction houses and anything else you could think of.
+No xp grinding.
+Very populated world makes it a very fun world. Walking into an auction house with 50 people bidding on loot is always fun.
+Diablo related skill tree system.
+No lag(for me that is :P)

Now for the cons

-Limited character creation features (slightly better then EQ)
-Graphics could be better, however they do satisfy.
Hmmmm...I can't think of any other cons, can you?

For the people who are lagging I suggest upgrading your pc or getting a faster connection. I have an AMD 64 3200 and this game runs smoothe as butter. Haven't had lag since I've been playing. And for the parent below who didn't know you had to pay to play, look at the system specs on the box. It tells you that the first month is free but then you will be charged monthly to play.

I give this game a 9.5 out of 10. (-0.5 for lack of character creation features and graphics)

Best MMORPG for the casual gamer to date

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: September 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've tried a few MMORPG's over the last couple of years. Started with Star Wars Galaxies which almost killed me on the whole experience. I moved on to City of Heroes, which was an improvement in the "fun" category, but lacked any real depth and still suffered from endless grinding. Then Jump to Lightspeed came out for SWG, promising endless fun. Lies. I'd almost given up on MMORPG's altogether when I read a review of WoW. I was skeptical, but was intrigued by people's assertions that it was much more friendly to the casual gamer.

Being a 30 year old guy with a wife, child and full-time job, I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to devote to online gaming (or any gaming in fact). After giving WoW a shot, though I'm hooked. In fact, I've been hooked now for nearly a year--and it's just as much fun today as when I first started.

If you're new to the "Warcraft" universe, I'd advise picking up a copy of Warcraft 3 to get acquainted with the factions, proffessions, and major characters involved--it will only enrich your online experience. Players can choose from two factions, either Horde or Alliance. Horde consists of "monster" races: Orcs, Tauren (giant minotaurs), and Undead. Alliance is the standard Human, Dwarf and Elf combo. For my money, Horde players tend to be much nicer folks and much more mature, but that's just been my experience. You can then choose from several different proffessions including Warriors (tanks), Rogues (thiefs), and various assortments of magic users & "jack of all trades" classes.

Gameplay is simple, intuitive, and most of all very fun. Soloing (a priority for many casual gamers) is much more viable in this game than in most other MMORPGS, and if played smartly, a player can solo all the way to his or her level cap of 60. You do miss out on some good content if you choose not to group, since the game's crowning achievements are its beatifully rendered and well thought-out instanced dungeons. This also happens to be where the best loot and gear is, but they're generally impossible to solo. Happily, finding a group is usually very easy and you can usually log on and get through an instance in a couple of hours.

WoW strikes the perfect balance of accessibility, depth, and fun. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys online gaming, but wants to stay away from the time-sink that many MMORPG's entail.

Incredible game, terrible reliability - wait a month or two

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 31
Date: January 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Before anyone votes me "not helpful" bc they disagree with my review for whatever reason, let me say that I've been a diehard Blizzard fan since 1993 when Warcraft 1 started me down the computer path. So if there is bias here, it is in their favor. So on to the review.

This game is the best I think I have ever played. It is ... well massive, the graphics are great, there are hundreds of quests for each race/class combo (so some Tuaren/Elf/whatever, some warrior/priest/whatever), and the professions add a new dimension to the game. I think I had more fun mining and blacksmithing then questing for awhile. There is a profanity filter (on by default, easy to turn off), and auction house to sell things to others ... the list of amazing accomplishments goes on for miles.

But then you try to play.

Blizzard just posted news regarding a hardware "upgrade" that coincided with enough lag, disconnections, and game simply crashing to desktop (how server hardware accomplished that I don't know but it started happening at the same time - I changed nothing) to make the game simply unplayable. The server my main character is on had an 858-person queue last night (45+ minute wait), so I went to the server with my alternate character. Lockups, server rollbacks that make you redo portions of the game, disconnections, lag. Combine massive queues with game crashes and you get to sit there staring at your monitor trying not to scream. Tonight I was simply greeted with the "Authenticating" message for many long minutes before giving up (usually takes 5 seconds tops), and this is far from the first time. Before you think, "wow, what a winer. This will all be over in a week or so", just keep in mind that Blizzard opened up service to South Korea yesterday. South Korea = tens of thousands of power gamers.

So yes, the game is incredible in many ways, including how much fun it is. But it is a SUBSCRIPTION-based game. That means you pay to play online. Online games aren't much fun when you can't log in. Take my advice and WAIT. This game is only getting better and since you get a month free service and then pay (about 13 clams/month), you don't want to be sitting here paying for nothing like me.

Now I think I'm going to go play Warcraft 2 for awhile.

Parents beware!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 15 / 24
Date: January 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

After playing this game for about a year and a half, and then finally quitting, I am finally writing my review. My problem is not so much with the game itself...the game is fantastic, fun, HUGE, ambitious....my issues with the game were more of how it affects real life...When you play, you get sucked in and lose all concept of time. Before you know it, you've been playing for 5 hours straight, and haven't accomplished a single productive thing outside of the video game, yet you feel like you've played for maybe 30 minutes. At the beginning, the game was fun...it was fun to level you character, no pressure, you could do it at your own pace. Towards the higher levels, though, you suddenly have to devote so much time to complete quests and dungeons (instances) that it was becoming rediculous. 6 hours to get through one dungeon successfully with 40 people? who has time for that? oh wait, some guilds can take it down in 3 hours, but it's a catch-22 as these guilds require MANDATORY attendance of raiding 4-7 nights a week...

If I had written this review a year ago, I would have been praising the game. I thought it was the best game I had ever played. Now reflecting back, I was just drawn into its web as many others were. It's sad to see how people work hours upon hours just to see a few pixels on the screen that says they have "armor" or "weapons." In real life, it doesn't mean squat. I'm glad I'm out of that circle. Plus, most of the community is filled with immature jerks who do not understand what playing "for fun" is about.

Of course, Blizzard wants you to keep on playing...the monthly charge makes you play even more so that you are sure that you get your money's worth. Plus if you join a large group or guild, you don't have the freedom to log off anytime you want because you fear of the repercussions from other guildmates who frown upon "abandoning" mid-quest. In fact, I think that was what I hated most of all with the game...the feeling that you are obligated to play; not having the freedom to just say "I feel like going out now." If you do decide to get involved with this game, be prepared to sacrifice a large portion of your real life to it. if you type /played...it tells you how many days/ hours that you've been logged in since you started. It's very frightening when you start seeing 30days, 60 days, 100 days.... that's nearly 1/3 of a year!!! Most people playing now probably have at least that much.

Of course, this may be improved with the expansion, but I don't plan on reactivating my account.

So, is it a great game? yea...but too great for it's own good. And parents....NEVER buy this for your kids. They will never leave the computer and grades will be sure to drop. (not to mention that there are many low life strangers playing the game as well)

World of Warcraft

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 15 / 24
Date: June 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game starts out very impressive:
1. Immersive graphics. Not amazing or intense, but a big world, and decently rendered.
2. You can craft effective items nearly right away
3. Huge variety of nice-looking monsters and areas to explore
4. Similar plethora of quests, and you can be on 20 at a time.
5. You get a few points for exploring stuff
6. You can abandon quests. That may not seem like much, but after some of the City of Heroes Missions, you will really appreciate that feature. Big Plus!
7. There is little penalty for death, only some equipment damage. This helps limit frustration that would otherwise be felt by the intentional policy that the mobs are drawn especially to weak people.
8. You can level decently in this game. You don't have to spend a month at a level, or have high-level friends to get levels. This helps keep the game from being boring, gives you a sense of progress, and gives you time to experiment with other classes. This is the main reason why I still play this game rather than my last (City of Heroes), despite NCSoft clearly having a better understanding of balance, inter-character dynamics, and teaming enablement than Blizzard's dev team does.
9. They allow user-interface customizations by third party. Some of these help make the game more enjoyable, by getting you more of the information you need with less clicking for some of the deeper parts of the game. Some of the more significant add-on's, Blizzard has been good about working into the game.
10. The interface in general is pretty standard WSDF and mouse combo. Some games try to get all "innovative" and mess it up bad. I like WoW's Interface. It's comfortable, well thought out, and doesn't get in the way of the game.

However, I have a 58 priest and a few assorted 30+ chars, and some parts are so bad I am forced to pay $15/mo because I keep doing month to month with the idea I might not stay with it much longer.

Bad Parts
1. Support, in game and email is so poor as to be laughable. My petitions are consistently not answered; my emails are met with non-applicable form letters.
2. On days when Blizzard releases patches, my friend and I play City of Heroes, because we got tired of waiting 4 hours for their weak download servers to feed us a few KB. Sometimes the download just plain does not work for a couple of days, and you cannot play without the update. Blizzard seems kind of "Hey, that's too bad but it goes with MMORP territory; now hand us your money."
3. Their infrastructure is rather poor for a pay per month game. Every time they have a patch release or a busy spell, their "realms" are unusable, and their web pages, account support, boards, etc become basically unusable. Are they running in a basement?
4. When you do manage to get on a server, you can expect frequent "lag" delays, even on machines like mine, with 1.5 GB of memory, and 3.2 GHz HT, and Nvidia 6800. They have a lag-time display in game, that "always" shows low latency (Green), even when you are lagging so bad you get disconnected. That's very helpful.
(edited 7/6: This issue is still there, but not as bad. To their credit, they've been working on it)
5. Don't play this for challenging PvP action. My 58 priest is on a PvP server, so I know what I'm talking about. 95% of battles are ridiculously lopsided, with a level 55 / 60 team coming up behind a level 30, and killing them when they are almost dead in the middle of a fight with other monsters. There's no penalty for this. Needless to say, there's no sense of honor or challenge in any aspect of most of these battles. Don't expect to get much done on PvP servers some days, except fighting other players (if you want to call a 3 second 60 vs 40 gank a fight). The blessing is, you don't get experience for any of this PvP. That would make the problem even worse. I would stick with a PvE server, that's where I play 90% of the time now, despite being high level. The system's just not set up to encourge the "like-grouping" that would bring an exciting challenge.
[Edit: 2007-7-6 - To be fair, they have recently added Battleground Arena's to encourage people to do similar-level PvP. As I said, I don't play PvP any more, but I suspect this has helped a lot]
6. The variety of costumes in game is pretty weak, and the selections are typically a bit old-fashioned and 90% prudish. Most characters look pretty much the same as others of their race. If you want variety of costumes, then pick up City of Heroes.
7. Trade / Profession Skills are not good at high levels. I have a 267 enchanting (expensive) skill that's basically worthless. Their skill system was full of variety and excitement early, but as you advance through the levels, what you can make becomes increasingly weak comparatively and crazy expensive. Don't spend hours and hours on their crafting system like I did. It takes a ton of time to move up at high levels, and you will end up not using it once you get to max level. Who wants a +5 damage enchantment on a sword that does 200 damage, for 20 gold? Spend the money on a better sword. I would pick a skill like skinning animals or herb gathering, and focus on selling supplies to make money that you will desperately need. If you pick enchanting, use it only to dis-enchant items for components to sell; like the majority of the people with that skill in my last two guilds are now doing. Stick to quests (and PvP if you are the type of person that gets a thrill from killing people way below your level).
8. The monster re-population is offensive and unrealistic. Blizzard thinks nothing of having 10 orcs materialize around you suddenly, even if you are fighting another group at that location and almost dead. With lag, they pretty much start attacking instantly, despite what their documentation says. City of Heroes is a lot better in this respect. If they sense you are in aggro-range, they hold off on making the mobs appear out of thin air within sword distance. These sudden appearances are so unrealistic as to hurt the immersiveness of the game at times.
9. Every monster in the game is faster than you are. Unless you are a druid, or a level 40 with a horse, you will feel slower than you are rl, and not able to climb as steep of grades. That's their way of making the game challenging.
10. Priests and Druids draw aggro with heals and shields. I don't know of any other game that does this, when healers are already consistently weak. A pack of dogs, birds, dinosaurs, or kobolds knows to run past the fighter and attack the unarmored healer in the back as a group? Consequently, you will rarely be able to find enough priests and druids for groups. The ones you find have to limit their healing, to avoid this effect. I get multiple requests every day, to help people level 25-60 in dungeons. Too bad... I'm only one person. If you go priest, consider "Shadow", offensive path, and stick to small heals. One of the high-level priests in my guild pretty much refuses to heal, because you also don't get good "honor" (big joke) points for healing people, unlike for PvP kills. Would you want to draw monsters to you, die a lot, and not get credit for it? One of my MMO frequenter friends stopped playing this one after 3 weeks, claiming, "they don't understand classes and balance". I have to say, she has a point, and she is having more fun with her previous MMO than she had in this one. I go back there too, when this game drives me too crazy :)
11. Blizzard makes it hard to team with friends. Many of the quests are "chain" quests. If you are on part 3, then you cannot share that quest with your friend. A lot of times, you will not get quest xp if you join a group, unless you look for the members with a specific goal, and then split up after you complete that quest. Leveling fast is a big plus, but the lack of side-kick / examplar, mentor / apprentice means you can stick with a couple friends, and that's it. A level 55 and 45 traveling together don't get experience points for either of them. That's a shame, and they should look to dev groups like NCSoft to see how to tackle this effectively; but they don't. I've often asked myself what the point is of paying their $15 per month fee, if it's hard to team anyways? There are a lot of great single-player games out there, and you only have to pay for them once.
12. You can only have up to 5 people on a team. Larger than that requires raid groups. Raid groups are intentionally given significantly less XP. You can be joined with large groups of people, but the GUI on it is terrible. There is no little window to show the raid goal(s). As a healer, I can only easily see the status on 5 or less of the 40 people. The others require a click on them, to see if they are about to die. Needless to say, people die in droves on raids, and they tend to be very disorganized. I pretty much stick with groups of 5 or less. It may not be massively multi-player, but I don't sit there for more than an hour in one place trying to help everyone gather at the spot and figure out what to do. If you do raids, then Blizzard did do themselves a favor here. They allow an expansion called CT RAID (http://www.ctmod.net/) If you install that, it will go a long way towards correcting the UI deficiency.

That being said, I'm still playing so far, mostly on PvE (Player vs Environment, not player), because there is a lot to do and amazing depth. It's a big world, and it feels realistic at those times that a 6 foot beast doesn't suddenly appear standing on your shoes :)

It's so fun at the early levels that I would definitely recommend playing it for a while. Despite how irritating the bad parts are, it's an awesome game as a whole. Just keep the shortcomings in mind and don't expect a perfect game.

Other games have major issues too, like the crazy-nerfing that drove me away from City of Heroes (who wants to spend all their time and money redoing their characters to be most effective for their supergroup?). WoW is much better about keeping a balance between knee-jerk nerfing and consistent gameplay.

Great up until the last level; completely different after

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 29
Date: May 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is pushed as one that is open to all types of players. From 1-60 this is true. Fun game, interesting stories and quests, and crafting is different in that you can use the items you make right from the beginning.

Once you near the last level you start to see the real target audience for the game. Eventually they will add Battlegrounds where you can fight other players, but unless you have the good gear and a lot of time to play, you will be fodder for those who spend an enormous amount of time playing.

Really, this is not that big a deal. The problem I had with the game is that much of the end game content requires an enormous contribution of uninterrupted time. The dungeons and raids there can take many, many hours, and even then you aren't guaranteed the item you were looking for since you have to roll dice against other players for the item (that is if it even drops!).

So, at the end if you want some of the good gear in the game, expect to spend countless hours running the same instances over and over and over and over again (I am not exaggerating).

There is a great dungeon called Scarlet Monstary after which they should have modeled most of their dungeons. In the Monstary there are multiple sections to the overall dungeon, so you can complete one section then go to another, and that one section doesn't take more than an hour or so. The end game dungeons, however, can take an extremely long time to complete.

Now, let's look at crafting. I played Dark Age of Camelot for many years before Trials of Atlantis came out. With crafting you could always make an item that was nearly as good as the stuff you could find in dungeons. I'm talking pre-ToA here. So, you had options. You could spend the money to make a spellcrafted item, or you could raid a dungeon...your choice. Blizzard forces you to raid dungeons to get really good items. Even the high end crafted recipes are dropped in these same dungeons.

Blizzard's target audience is not the every day player but rather the player who has tons of uninterruptible time to devote to the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but just know what you are getting into. It'll be fun up until the high levels, but if you want to succeed there you'll have to devote a large chunk of time.

The same thing over and over again

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 20
Date: August 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is a typical mmorpg. It starts the player off with a character at level 1. The first goal is to get to level 60 at which point you realize your next goal is to get your armor and weapon set. Once that is attained, you have to get your next armor and weapon set. Then you have a new goal of... you guessed it, getting the next armor and weapon set. You get to kill the same monsters over and over again. But Blizzard is so clever that they make the more difficult monsters bigger. The quests are completely repetitive. Eventually, you can join a guild of other people whose goal is to help each other get better armor and weapons to help kill the same monsters over and over again to get better armor and weapons.

After spending 1/3 of a year, yes, 90+ full 24 hour days playing my character, I quit. It was the biggest waste of my life to date.

If you have a child that wants this game, do them the biggest favor of their life and say "no." Buy them a musical instrument or a book. Anything other than this "game." If you take the time to read the reviews, you will see that they all say the same thing. This game ate away at their life.

This game is a drug. But instead of getting the person high, it takes their life. Take it from me, I can't get my 90 days back...

-edward

Fun for 2-3 months, not much to do after lv60 unless you have 40hrs/week

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 18
Date: June 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I agree with the two of the previous reviewers. One gave it 5 stars because he's only about to reach lv22. The other gave similar comments as my title. They are both right but you really need to have reached lv60 and gone through some of the 40 man raid instances to see the complete picture.

If you are looking for a fun game to play for about 2-3 months, this may be the perfect game for you. However, if you are looking
for an online game that can be played for 1-2 years, this is not the one unless you have a lot of free time like 40 hours a week.

Although they claim to have 5 million subscribers, I am sure many of the accounts are already inactive or will be inactive soon.

That is said. From Lv1 to Lv60, I really had a lot of fun playing this game. Some of the quests are repetitive and boring, but you can choose to skip most of them. Most of the 5 men instances are very fun and unique compare to their peers. It is also relatively easy to get 5 people together to run an instance.
You will be leveling up at a reasonable pace and enjoying all the fun part of the game, new cool weapons, new monsters to fight, and many interesting new moves to kill the monsters or your pvp opponents. However, once you hit level 60, you only have 4 5-men instances and 1 10 men instance that you can farm over and over again to get your "class-specific" gears and some other cool gadgets. Once you've been through all of them several times, you will want to experience the "40 men raid instances" just out of curiousity. That's when you need a guild because those instances not only take a long time, but also require a specific game plan for each boss in them. If you play a hybrid class such as paladin, shamen, druid, you are forced to be doing healing all the time. Sounds boring? But raiding those instances is pretty much the only way to get better gears so that you can be better equipped to raid another, more difficult raid instance that they keep adding. In addition to that, you have to invest a huge amount of time every week if you want to get those "better gears", otherwise they will be given to the "raiders" who are able to commit longer hours. This makes it really difficult to people who have jobs and families to take care of. If playing a game becomes a burden that's heavier than a full-time job, why do you want to keep playing? Blizzard is adding new PvP rewards that are comparable to the gears from raid instances soon. However, you still have to invest similar amount of time every week in order to get those--you have to be top 3 ranked Pvper to get them.

Overall, this game does give you a lot of fun for a while. However the fun really lasts much shorter than what you get from another Blizzard product---Diablo 2.

Good Job Blizzard!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I started the Beta test for this game during the Friends and Family stage of the test. Right from the start this game didn't feel like a Beta. It felt like a finished product, with a few minor exceptions.

Blizzard has really outdone themselves on this one.

I've played alot of MMORPG's from EQ to DAoC to CoH to EQ2 and World of Warcraft has them all beat. The game is based on a questing system. Although it is optional, it is the best way to go to make cash, collect cool items, and get great experience. The world is huge and is actually fun to explore. The classes are well thought out and fun to play. The trade skills are fun and easy to learn. This is enhanced by a easy to use user interface.

During the Beta phase, I took time off to play games such as CoH (City of Heroes) and Everquest 2. CoH got to repetitive and Everquest 2, which I was really excited about until release, turned out to be a real let down.

Even if you have never played a Warcraft game before (I haven't) this game is still alot of fun. Blizzard keeps the casual player in mind, while also catering to the hard core players. The user interface is also very easy to learn and doesn't require you to spend alot of time reading instruction manuals to accustom yourself to it.

Blizzard is one of the top video game companies around and World of Warcraft will simply add to their excellent track record.

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