Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Review of World of Warcraft, Second Time Through

2»

Comments

  • KotomaKotoma Member UncommonPosts: 20

    I do not play WoW anymore, but I have cancelled and resubbed three times.  The best part of the game is level 1 through level 40.  Create a character, level up to 40 or until you are bored, delete the character and start over.  The game just gets worse after 40.

  • BlazzBlazz Member Posts: 321

    I will give my own review on this "World of Warcraft", you speak of...

    A score is at the bottom of this post.

    Graphics

    As far as the graphics of WoW are concerned, they do the job. They are not fantastic, but they do look pretty at times, and can really take the breath away from the unsuspecting person walking, say, into the forest to the West of Thousand Needles.

    Character models remain somewhat clunky, and I would suggest that they *finally* get around to releasing a higher-end model set for those with better computers. Yes Blizzard, we know that you're just trying to appeal to every one of those 11.5 million players and are therefore just going with the bare minimum specification requirements as you can handle, but we'd like our hard earned characters to look nicer than the, oh, probably 600 polygon monsters they are right now.

    Along with higher resolution textures, this would really give the game a huge boost to it's already reasonably pretty atmosphere.

    Music/Sound

    Blizzard has been pretty well off as far as its musical side of things goes - it's not Nintendo (Zelda), but it got the job done. I have no complaints, except that I can't choose my login screen - I miss the original login music. It felt like I was entering a world of war and mystery, now it's just a big ol' blue dragon. We saw the cinematic, we don't need to be reminded that she's still there.

    Apart from that, grunts and clanks are realistic enough. A nice clonk with a blunt weapon, a shink with a sharp weapon. All is good in the world.

     

    Programming

    The programming of the game, as far as lag issues and such goes, seems to be good enough. But either new, or split servers between zones, should be considered. You have boasted, Blizzard, that you have a good 11.5 million players. Perhaps you should actually, I don't know, consider... EXPANDING, for that player base.

    Gameplay

    One can not simply talk about the gameplay of an MMO and say "good" or "bad". Here they are in broken down forms.

    -PvP

    Added in as an afterthought (surprisingly enough, since it IS called "world of WARcraft") one will often find themselves rather useless in any battleground situation unless they are levels 18, 28, 38, 48, 58, 68, or 78, in their respective tiers.

    Not only this, but actually accessing a Battleground is a fairly clunky process, with one having to run into a main city, right into the PvP area with stationed battlemasters, and queue up for a battleground through them.

    As such, many of the player base tend to completely ignore battlegrounds until they are at the level cap, so that they can just do so at their lesiure, while waiting for the raid group to come online, or something like that.



    Actual combat in PvP is in a constant flux due to Blizzard, having changed from the immovable mountain into, instead, a flimsy tree.

    The developers will constantly overfix something in an attempt to placate those who blew in their direction before, but as soon as they do, more people are blowing in the other direction, causing a constant maelstrom of nerfs and buffs to all classes and, shockingly, races, as of the new patch.



    In order to fix this problem, perhaps for anyone considering a future release of an MMO, you must remember not to bow down to anyone. Do not obey the mighty dollar (otherwise known to you as "the whinging player base") and do not give them treats. People are ravenous vultures, and the constant changes to classes over the last four years of WoW have seen many, many ability and game mechanic changes to all classes.



    In summary - the PvP battlegrounds are likeable, but mostly innaccessable, and require you do be at the top of your tier to do any good. And the class balance is constantly flying around, much like a roulette wheel to choose which class will be the "flavour of the month".

    -PvE

    What once was a large adventure of epic proportions, where one could not possibly succeed without a well planned group of Forty people, has dwindled down to Ten people, tanking and spanking with a few odd, if occaisionally cool, strategies.



    Once again, with the constant class changes (mostly due to Blizzard not making up their mind about whether this game is a PvE based, or PvP based one) classes are thrown out of and into raids at the whim of whatever Blizzard seems to feel like this month.



    Boss fights range from simple and stupid, all the way up to grand and epic, adventurous and magestic... but are for the most part lackluster nowadays, with the player base being young and greedy, honourless and devious, and most of all, lazy.



    When one argues "A raid should not need forty people!" you should be arguing "that is how we have designed it, it is a large battle of epic scale, and concentration and actual skill will be required to defeat this particularly strong boss of ancient lore", not "ok, we'll cut it down to ten and make them all weaker."



    The grinding is boring and repetative, and is only glanced at once you have reached level 60, where the game gets a little fun, and is once again looked at well at level 70, where the most recent expansion has managed to get many who had left before hooked, once again.



    In summary - the PvE is alright, for those who just want to sit back and press a few buttons with little effort, but the skill and organisation and management of players and classes has very much disipated with time and laziness. The gear acquired from PvE is less than spectacular, and loot ninjas are still rampant, very often making one question what they just spent the last four hours doing.

    Class Variety

    The classes range from melee dps, ranged physical dps, ranged spell dps, melee spell dps, damage over time spell dps, pets, tanks, healers, and of course, hybrids. There are now four hybrids - that is, four healers, who can DPS if need be.

    Class variety is decent, if not great. There is still a distinct monk-type class missing, but with nine* classes in the game, along with three distinct talent trees with each class, the choices are out there and are pleasantly viable (except when the class has fallen victim to recent nerfs).

    Customisation

    Blizzard has fallen far from the tree here, with games such as Runescape having done so for years, Blizzard has finally sucked it up, and allowed hair changes, among other things.

    I say "Took 'em long enough..." angrily here, as it should not have been a hard thing to do, and should not have taken four years to implement. Along with generally awkward looking Tier sets for players to cookie cut themselves into, the gear and look of people's characters is far from what I would call customisable.



    But, looking at it from the very beginning, yes, you can choose any class with any appropriate race for your faction, along with hair, face and skin colour, but for such a prestigous and well known game, surely they could have done better by now.

    A simple scaling for height would have been appreciated by many, I'm sure.

    Crafting/Professions

    Crafting is around, and, while leveling up your character, is a good way of acquiring some decent rare gear, if you're so lazy that you can't get a five man group together to do an instance.

    But apart from the "for the grinding part" factor, much of the gear gained through crafting is fairly useless at endgame.

    Leatherworking is mostly used for the ability to add little enchantments to armour pieces (especially to lower level Twinks) that range from 8 armour, up to 40 agility and 30 stamina type bonuses.

    Blacksmithing gives the player a nice arsenal of armour and weapons for the mail/plate wearing classes.

    Cooking really came out of nowhere in The Burning Crusade and gave it a viable use for Raids and PvP, and is now considered probably one of the more important and useful professions, even though it is secondary, and fishing, well, as long as there are Deviate Fish, there will always be fishermen out there.

    The other crafting skills, engineering, tailoring, alchemy etc. all have their usefulness, whether it's making potions, bombs, bags or food with great buffs.



    It's probably one of the better crafting systems I've seen in a game, and works quite well, even if it is a bit bland and lack-luster end-game for the most part.

     

    Adventure

    If one takes a moment from killing things repetatively and mind numbingly and looks around themselves, they will find a vast, beautiful world. I spent a lot of time in my level 40's just wandering, having fun with my explorations of the world. I was saddened to find that if I tried to swim out to sea, I would just hit an invisible wall at some point and be "fatigued" after a short while... I would have even prefered the wierd sea creature from Spore eating me alive, than that subtle way of telling me that I "should probably just take a zeppelin".



    The World of Warcraft zone of Azeroth, holding Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms and, just recently, Northrend, and the zone of Outland, are beautiful places to just walk or fly through. Unfortunately, far too few see this as they rush to level 60, 70, and then 80 in a desperate attempt to play "the game", at 80.



    Adventure is its' own reward in this game.

     

    Player Base

    11.5 million people. What's the problem here? People are inherently good, right?

    Well, let's just say that, oh, one in five people are jerks.

    There are over 2 million jerks in World of Warcraft.

    And there are far, FAR more idiotic, or young players... thank you Game Time cards.

    Griefers, ninja looters, and groups of high level characters destroying flight masters and such are all too common, and take every little thing they can get their hands on.

    To be fair, you can nearly always find a group of people to level with, or do some PvP in a battleground with etc., unlike some other good, if unpopulated games... but you can not be assured that they will not be idiots or jerks, and I personally have been ninja'd, argued with, and badly tanked/healed too many times to count. So many terrible players play this game, and they ruin it. If you find yourself a guild with some decent people in it that know how to spell, consider yourself lucky and be proud of your achievement.

     

     

    Overall, if I were to dumb this down into terms of numbers, well, I'd give it numbers like this.

    Graphics - 8/10 - good, if dated.

    Sound - 8/10 - gets the job done, but not inspiring

    Code/Servers - 7/10 - works, but often lags, disconnects people, and has an easy-to-reach player limit.

    Gameplay - 6/10. It is one boring grind after another, with so many changes being made that, what you're playing today, might be completely different tomorrow. And after four years of development, one would think that it would be somewhat stable but... throwing in the Death Knight class has once again completely screwed any semblence of balance that dwindled in the winds of the past.

    Overall score - 73/100.

    I am playing EVE and it's alright... level V skills are a bit much.

    You all need to learn to spell.

  • nickelpatnickelpat Member Posts: 661

    I never used LOTRO as an example of a good PvP game. Fishing is near useless, you pick tons of food anyways, why waste time fishing?

    @Floppyface: Whoopdy-Do, I didn't use the perfectly correct terms for things.

    @Krewel: As for class balance, I mean if you did have a party, one of each class. They would compliment each other, no one would really overpower the other by much. Nor did I say it was great. I actually said it was the only part of the game that I could stand.

    @Illsion: Next time please don't quote the whole review, we've all already read it. Secondly, yes I know they have employees. I'm pretty sure the World of Warcraft dev team can pay their employees with 375 million dollars and manage to get the engines fixed.

    Multi-Core processors are already strong in gaming, it's hard to find that has come out in the last three months that doesn't support it. I know you'll find a few, the majority will support dual-core and/or quad-core machines.

    @Gameloading: This already went from the original purpose of myself to get critique to being bashed and flamed (which really couldn't care less about), and now to you trying to say WoW is better than LOTRO? Yes, I know 11 million people play WoW, but look at other games. You don't think there's 11 million people who DON'T play WoW and share my opinion throughout all the other MMOs? Maybe even some who don't play MMOs anymore?

    LOTROs combat is a bit faster, based more on skills even at an early level.

    I didn't say WoW didn't have diverse geographical areas, rather the tileset from area to area variates little.

    LOTRO has a lot more lore inside the game than WoW. Like I said, there's a storyline throughout the game, that's all lore. Way more than WoW.

    Again, I don't care if you have numbers. This was never a post saying "WoW SUCKS!", it was my review. Take out of it what would you like. Just please stop attempting to discredit it with others opinions. There's no need for that.

    What Blizzard did with WoW was obviously a 'marketing ploy'. They based it on two very popular games, their own Warcraft and EverQuest. Then simplified it a bit to make it easier to access for children. Which is more a ploy to get a lot of subscribers rather than something like Darkfall (no, I'm not a fanboi, I don't even plan on playing) which tries to make a new game.

    Yes, I have played the game. My subscription is still active actually. Yes, I has passed level 20.

    Thank You,



    - Eric

     

    By the way, nice review. I have to agree with the fact that raids and even dungeons are fun. Except for the fact everyone has a level 60 or 70 (Even an 80) running then through all of the instances now.

    ____________________________
    Telthalion Rohircil - Guardian - Elemandir - Lord of The Rings Online
    ---
    == RIP == Torey - Commando - Orion - Tabula Rasa == RIP ==
    ---
    Jordaniel Torey - Navy Megathron, Active Armor Tank - Tranquility - EVE Online
    ---
    Torey Scott - Rifleman - Fallen Earth
    ____________________________

    "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

  • GameloadingGameloading Member UncommonPosts: 14,182
    Originally posted by nickelpat


    I@Gameloading: This already went from the original purpose of myself to get critique to being bashed and flamed (which really couldn't care less about), and now to you trying to say WoW is better than LOTRO? Yes, I know 11 million people play WoW, but look at other games. You don't think there's 11 million people who DON'T play WoW and share my opinion throughout all the other MMOs? Maybe even some who don't play MMOs anymore?



    Ofcourse there are other people who don't like WoW, and that's perfectly fine, you don't have to like it. But you need to understand there is a difference between a bad game and game that is simply not for you. I don't like Guild Wars, but i'm not going around saying it is a bad game, making reviews and giving it a 3.5/10 score, because I KNOW it's a good game, just not what I'm looking for.
    LOTROs combat is a bit faster, based more on skills even at an early level.
    that totally depends on what class you pick as I have already stated. If you rolled a Paladin for instance, ofcourse you get a more hands off experience than when you play a Rogue. Lotro's pace is the same as WoW and just like WoW it depends on what class you play as.
    I didn't say WoW didn't have diverse geographical areas, rather the tileset from area to area variates little.



    Each zone is constructed with a certain theme in mind, Lotro and Everquest do this as well. I don't see your point here.
    LOTRO has a lot more lore inside the game than WoW. Like I said, there's a storyline throughout the game, that's all lore. Way more than WoW.



    actually there is a storyline inside WoW, in fact, there are also many side storylines involved in WoW. The thing is unlike Lotro, WoW doesn't enforce it on you and if you're not paying attention to it you'll miss it entirely. 
    Again, I don't care if you have numbers. This was never a post saying "WoW SUCKS!", it was my review. Take out of it what would you like. Just please stop attempting to discredit it with others opinions. There's no need for that.



    Ofcourse you don't care about numbers,they are way to confronting to you. Those numbers prove that YOU are wrong, it's that simple. It's pretty sad that instead of letting that encourage you to actually look for the things that set WoW above other games, you just continue this flawed opinion that WoW must be a bad game.
    What Blizzard did with WoW was obviously a 'marketing ploy'. They based it on two very popular games, their own Warcraft and EverQuest. Then simplified it a bit to make it easier to access for children. Which is more a ploy to get a lot of subscribers rather than something like Darkfall (no, I'm not a fanboi, I don't even plan on playing) which tries to make a new game.



    WoW isn't as much simplified as it worked on the frustrtions of the original Everquest. Lotro does this as well.
    Yes, I have played the game. My subscription is still active actually. Yes, I has passed level 20.
    Thank You,


    - Eric
     
    By the way, nice review. I have to agree with the fact that raids and even dungeons are fun. Except for the fact everyone has a level 60 or 70 (Even an 80) running then through all of the instances now.



     

Sign In or Register to comment.