Loading times are as rare as they are brief. You can go from your desktop to being in-game in just seconds, and it's virtually just one great, big, seamless world. It's also important to point out that World of Warcraft runs fast and smooth.
The game's interface is so slick and easy to learn and understand, and the gameplay itself is so quickly intuitive, that there isn't even a tutorial to wade through there are just some helpful, optional pop-up tool tips, as well as an excellent printed reference manual that goes into specific detail about most of the various aspects of play.
World of Warcraft is a complex game whose complexity is carefully disguised by a simple, highly legible, uncluttered interface and an impressive 3D graphics engine, which delivers high performance on a wide range of systems while not skimping on pure flash. So the particulars of the game's design-along with its incredibly vast, beautiful, majestic world-translate into a one-of-a-kind experience that seems fresh and original in its own right.įortunately, the game is very approachable. In addition, the game's own subtle innovations turn out to have a dramatic impact on the flow of the action from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and beyond. The game clearly benefits from not being the first of its kind, as the design issues that plagued previous online role-playing games are handled extremely well in World of Warcraft. With all due respect to the other online role-playing games out there, World of Warcraft is in a league of its own.
However, directly comparing World of Warcraft with any of its predecessors would be almost like pitting a professional sports club against a school team. The fundamentals are all here, such as fighting dangerous creatures (optionally including other players), exploring the countryside either alone or in the company of other players, undertaking various quests, gaining experience levels and new abilities, and acquiring powerful items. World of Warcraft is superficially similar to numerous other games that came before it, and it clearly draws inspiration from some of them.
Meanwhile, fans of other online role-playing games will be impressed at the sheer breadth and volume of content on display in World of Warcraft, whose setting seamlessly connects a bunch of wildly different-looking types of places and somehow makes them appear as if they all belong as parts of a whole. Fans of those games (especially Warcraft III and its expansion pack) will spot tons of references here, and they will be impressed at how faithfully World of Warcraft translates so many of Warcraft's little details and even some of the finer points of its gameplay into such a seemingly different style of game. In World of Warcraft, you create your alter ego by choosing from a variety of colorful races and powerful classes, and then you begin exploring, questing, and battling in Azeroth, the fantasy setting featured in Blizzard's Warcraft real-time strategy games. Now Playing: World of Warcraft Video Review By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's