The female of the species dances like Britney Spears. On the one hand, the Horde (one of the two player factions in the game), gets the new race of Blood Elves. World of Warcraft almost never makes that mistake.īut whats more interesting are the huge differences in tone and feel between the two new races, and why they are so pronounced. If a game frustrates you in the first 15 minutes you will probably put it away and never go back to it. Massively-multiplayer games can be extremely complex, but one of the top reasons WOW has been so popular is that it doles out that complexity veryĬarefully. I started some brand-new level 1 characters using the two new races and new starting areas in Burning Crusade.įrom a gameplay perspective, the new zones and new races work well for introducing new players to the game. So this weekend I went to see how the other half lives. And most of them dont see all of that fancy high-level stuff for months or even years. Now there are more than 8 million WOW players around the globe, which means there continue to be a lot of brand-new WOW players. But when I hit the original level cap two years ago the game still had fewer than a million subscribers. High-end content is fun, and its what I spend most of my time on because Ive played the game since its introduction in late 2004. Over the two weeks since World of Warcrafts Burning Crusade expansion arrived Ive written a lot about the most advanced things in the game, like rushing to level 70 and top-level dungeons. Just yesterday, some of original designers of EverQuest, the biggest online game before WOW, launched their new project, called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.įor now, though, World of Warcraft will continue to dominate the multi-billion dollar online gaming market, and will deserve to. There are other big online games out there and more are coming. (One big difference, of course, is that $15 a month gets you unlimited WOW playtime but barely a seat and a soda for a two-hour film.) For millions of people it isĬompeting against other mass entertainment media like television and movies. WOW isnt competing against other games at this point. Thats really the best way to think about it, rather than as a game. WOW is the first product to truly deliver a mass-market online entertainment experience.
#World of warcraft burning crusade software#
That means art direction, world design, voice acting, storytelling and software that just works and almost never crashes. Its the word that rival game developers use to describe Blizzard games and its the word that best captures the high sheen The one word that best sums up why more than 8 million people around the world subscribe to World of Warcraft is polish. Their game time on those things and I barely even touch them.
Ive written about a lot of different aspects of the game but have barely even touched on things like tradeskills (manufacturing items for other people) and player versus player combat. Even if you play every waking hour, there is always going to be someone ahead of you in some way. You dont, there is simply always more to do another skill to learn, another quest to complete, another tier of luxury goods to revel in.Ĭonversely, if you get too caught up in a game like WOW it can sometimes seem that whenever youre not playing you are falling behind. Once you have some friends in the game, and in some cases even if World of Warcraft is so compellingly designed and so finely measured that it has been unnervingly easy to lose myself in completely. My family and (offline) friends will be happy to know that this is the final installment of this Gaming 16, including sleeping, in the online fantasy universe Blizzard Entertainment has created.
That means I have spent more than half my life since Jan.
Over the two weeks since the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft was released, I have racked up 186 hours or almost eight days of playing time. A party of adventurers in the Shadow Labyrinth.