If posting on my part slows a bit around here it’s because our copies of World of Warcraft arrived on Monday and Anne, Courtney and I are off pretending to be Night Elves thanks to the generosity of Zak. Both Anne and I got to play around in the beta as well and we’re already hopelessly hooked on the game because it’s that much fun. The folks over at GameSpot appear to agree having awarded it with a 9.5 Superb rating. The opening paragraph pretty much says it all:
Though massively multiplayer online role-playing games have been around for years, it has taken this long for the genre’s breakthrough hit to finally emerge. Here is the online role-playing game you should play, no matter who you are. This is because World of Warcraft brings out all the best aspects of this style of gaming, if not many of the best aspects of gaming in general. It also features many of the specific characteristics that have made Blizzard Entertainment’s previous games so entertaining, memorable, long-lasting, and successful. Of course, the company’s past track record did not guarantee that World of Warcraft could have turned out this well. Such high quality simply cannot be expected, nor should it be missed.
At the risk of turning this into a review of my own (which I plan to write later) I’ll just say that I’ve played most of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) that have been released in the past and have never taken a character in any of them to the maximum possible level in the game because they could not hold my interest for various reasons. Yet with WoW I fully expect not only to max out a character, but probably several of them because so far this game has managed to correct every issue I’ve ever had with any other MMORPG that has come before. Enough said for now.
Update: And in anticipation of this question being asked repeatedly, we’re playing on the Durotan server in the Eastern Time Zone. If I’m playing as a family with Anne and Courtney then my character is a male Night Elf Hunter named Sanctus (currently level 6). If I’m playing with Anne and JethricOne then I’m a male Dwarven Hunter named Balfour (currently level 9).


















I’m playing on Stormrage, a Dwarven Hunter - Oxe.
Somehow I managed to play for almost 12 hours yesterday. Absurd.