World of warcraft
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006As I have mentioned in a previous post I am a fairly serious gamer and one of the games I am playing a lot at the moment is Blizzards World of Warcraft. In this post I am going to review my experiences with the game.
I started playing on the 14th of December 2005 using a 14 day trial. I chose to play on the oceanic PVE (player versus environment) or “normal” server called Khaz’goroth. I chose to be a gnome warrior as I felt that gnomes were the most attractive characters and a warrior as I like to be in the action all of the time. Also warriors can use nearly all weapons and armor so that are the most versatile. My characters name is Bbg as my normal gamer tag etc is BrainBeat and I am a Gnome, it can also be any 2 ‘B’ adjectives gnome.
The game becomes very addictive as you aim to get your character to lvl 60 via the completion of quests and battling. I have been playing it for over six months and still want to keep playing it to get ranked higher in PVP and get better stuff. Blizzard is on about a monthly basis adding new content. There are currently 27 instances to do in either parties of upto 5 members or raids of up to 40 members. There are also 3 battle grounds in which you are able to battle the Hord players. The first one playable from level 10 is Warsong gulch which is played in a raid of 10 versus 10 in a capture the flag battle. The second one is available from level 20 is Athari basin played in a 15 man raid in a 5 point control. The last one is Alterac valley which is available from level 51, it is a 40 man raid. Alterac Vally is a very larg battle ground with multiple graveyards to capture, towers to destroy and bosses to kill while also hilling the Hord players. before the last few patches some Alterace valley battlegrounds would last for up to 18 hours or longer. The most frustrating thing about playing Battlegrounds as an alliance player is that the alliance only win about 10% of games. There are a few reasons for this.
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only about 10% of alliance seem to know how to play battlegrounds and their characters properly. One reason for this is that most people choose and alliance character to play as their first one.
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Most alliance healers do not heal people when all Hord healers do.
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The hord have Sharmen who are the best class in the game as the can heal, shape shift, use shields, where mail, and drop totems
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Most Hord who play in battlegrounds join in a pre-made group
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Alterac Valley is slightly hord bias in its layout as for example they are ably to jump into the top of the bunkers without climbing up the stairs.
The in game graphics are not bad and are certainly adequate but are starting to get a little dated compared to other games. That said if they did get any better in apearance most people would not be able to play it as there is alread heaps of lag from constant hard disk accessing. I regularly have my the frame rate drop below 10fps when going to a new area or in crowded places such as in front of the bank in Ironforge (the Dwarf and Gnome exiles home city). The character animation is where this game really shines with over fifty different emotes. For example each race and gender has their own dancing moves (the gnomes are the best dancers).
In terms of audio there are a few well produced pieces of music to set the mood but they get very repetitive after a few weeks of playing. The sound effects are of a high quality adding to the atmosphere of the game. The voice acting is good but very limited as there is only 1 or 2 voices per race and gender.
I would have to say that World of Warcraft is one of the best games i have ever played. But there are a few problems with the game especially when payed in Australia. All US servers are based in the US even the Oceanic ones which Khaz’goroth is one of them, this means that All australian players have at a minimum of 200 for their latentcy but i normally have one of 350+ this mean that if you are fighting someone in the US they have an advantage. Also the servers themselves get really laggy which some of the time is that the server computer and some that the server keeps on getting Denial of service attacks.
In future i will be posting a review of the new World of Warcraft website, WOW mods, WOW community website, and a review of the Burning Crusades expansion pack and any other interesting events, I may also write a post my journey to level 60.
