Hoho's Log

World of Warcraft

Blizzard's World of Warcraft is coming on November 23, 2004. Why am I excited? I got a chance to play WoW during Blizzard's open beta phase for about 2 weeks, and I was surprised at how much fun I had.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or MMORPG. Meaning there are literally thousands of other players playing the game along with you. It is also a persistent world, meaning that things happen even when you aren't online playing.

Even more than when I was still playing Ultima Online on the PC. I would have wanted to play UO again, but sadly, UO is not available on the Mac platform. Blizzard on the other hand, made the Mac client available the same day as the PC/Windows client.

The User Interface is pretty easy to use, moving around consists of using the 'W', 'S', 'A', and 'D' buttons for moving forward, backward, turning left and right (you can also use the arrow keys for this, just in case you're a lefty), combining this with mouse movements, similar to playing Quake or Doom. There are more keyboard shortcuts to cast spells, open bags, books and such.

Graphics is pretty good, but slightly laggy when I run in full-screen mode, but that's fine with me, since I usually run in windowed mode anyway.

On the last day of the Open Beta, the major cities were suddenly invaded with countless monsters and demons. Of course, there were the whiners who complained about how they weren't strong enough to defeat the monsters, and the rest of us who just had fun.

Below is a screenshot I took of one of the monsters that was plaguing Stormwind City. I don't have more screenshots, simply because I had more fun playing that last day to bother with more screenshots.

Can't wait until this hits retail stores on November 23, 2004!