World of Warcraft - Highly Addictive!

World of Warcraft. It's the paramount MMORPG, swords and magic, outlandish races and classes, and of course the huge evolving world. First off, let me just say this game is like crack, except twenty times more addicting and (thankfully) completely legal. The world of Azeroth is huge. It starts with two huge continents to explore, quest, hunt, train, and level up in.

Yes, I said continents. Each starting continent has about 15 or more zones, with varying sizes. To the peaceful tranquillity of the small, Druid inhabited Moonglade; to the huge sprawling Horde controlled Barrens, there is always somewhere to go and something to do there. With the advent of the Burning Crusade (BC) and the Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK), two new higher-level continents have been added along with a higher level cap (70 for BC, 80 for WotLk), high end raids for guilds of coordinated players to attempt to conquer, and of course more and more quests for solo players and groups of players to enjoy together, it adds to the already huge world that we began with in an astounding and completely streamlined way.

Quests offer variety to the usual hack n' slash through hordes of monsters ditty that a lot of MMO's at the time sung along with. The quests seem to boil down to three different basic goals: Kill this here, take this there, and take this here to kill that there. Save for the starting quests, each quest seems to pull this off in an astounding way. How much more complex could killing ten monsters be? Blizzard seemed to have asked this question millions of times over, and each time they've come up with a new and exciting way to pull these three simple, basic "rules" off. for instance, a quest may tell you kill a large horde of demons, and instead of running in, blade, arrow, and spell flying wildly at your enemies; you might be given an armored gryphon, or in one case, the King of the Storm Giants, to aid you in your endeavour's against your enemies.

And speaking of instances, let's talk about the dungeons in the game, which are called "instances." In any game, there has to be a place where your developed character can shine, and where undeveloped characters can get a nice polish. Usually filled with powerful boss monsters and elite trained regular monsters, these dungeons or "Instances" offer new and exciting challenges for anyone, with corresponding rewards to flesh out your character and make him or her that much more powerful. It's a very nice twist on the common dungeon crawl, and it really makes you feel rewarded. For completing an Instance, you may receive one or several good items, along with the items you may receive for the quests involved with a particular instance.

This provides the player with a rewarding experience and offers replayability to the game. The instances scale up to meet your level, and there are higher level raid dungeons (for ten or more players) which once again, offers new and exciting scenarios which make the player feel like their character is actually getting stronger with each passing quest/instance/level. The instance landscapes are, along with every other landscape, varied, new, and always beautiful. From ancient decrepit castles, to lush underground caverns infested with dinosaurs, to huge Troll cities and ziggurats, each experience is exciting. The instances in the game is where Blizzards ability to take an old, well-worn concept of going through a dungeon, and getting better items to continue with the game and just completely innovate and add new and interesting concepts to old ideals. Are you starting to see a pattern here? If not, I'll explain later.
As with any online experience (I like that word), you'll run into a few people you may not like. Though, Blizzard has added a feature to ignore people, and in some cases, ignore and report them. All with the ease of a single click or slash command. Remember that pattern I mentioned? Well, the ignore feature is part of that pattern. Blizzard takes some old and well-worn and makes it new and/or easier and more enjoyable to use. That's the pattern with Blizzard. Their simple innovation of old MMO features combined with the new features and lore of Warcraft I-III combine in an epic experience (there it is again) that anyone can enjoy, time and time again.
To round it all off, slight technical issues (popping textures, slow loads, jerky animation, and low frame rate to name a few) mar the game somewhat to those with out-of-date or not as good computers, but the casual player or someone with a good machine can barely notice these flaws under the gleaming brilliant sheen of the positives.