World of Warcraft

Other products by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• This game requires a monthly fee, and an internet connection to play
• Create and customize your own hero from the unique races and classes of the Warcraft universe
• Explore an expansive world with miles of forests, deserts, snow-blown mountains, and other exotic lands
• Visit huge cities and delve through dozens of vast dungeons
• Adventure together with thousands of other players in an enormous, persistent game world

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000067FDW
• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: November 23, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (862 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #531 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

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  #2 in	Video Games > Mac Games > Online
  #2 in	Video Games > PC Games > Online
  #6 in	Video Games > Mac Games > Role-Playing

Product Description

Edition: Full Standard

From Amazon.com
World of Warcraft didn't invent the online role-playing genre, but it certainly benefits from the missteps of other titles that have come before. A mind-boggling array of improvements in graphics, gameplay, networking, and interface--really every category--makes this game the crown prince of the genre, a great starting place for newbies, and a challenge to any other MMORPG currently in the works.

The game's beautifully rendered locations are filled with small details, such as flying birds and flowing water.

A History of Conflict
WoW takes place just four years after the real-time strategy Warcraft series, which chronicles a 25 year struggle between the Alliance (humans, dwarves, gnomes, and elves) and the Horde (orcs, tauren, trolls, and undead). Even though there's tons of accumulated story to the series, new players should not be daunted. The background is there for you to explore, but you don't have to tread a lot of Azeroth history to get into the action.

The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature.

The game looks magnificent. There's plenty of detail and variety to the landscapes and interiors, and the artwork has a refreshingly playful style. There's not a lot of variety in the character creation process, but with all the skills and proficiencies to combine in the game, WoW focuses its customization not on the appearance of your character but rather on the character of your character. The game lets you adopt any two trade skills, regardless of character race or class, and combine those skills in useful ways. If you choose skinning and leatherworking, for example, you can fashion bags from the carcasses of monsters you defeat, which will allow you to carry even more inventory items.

Expanded Commerce
You can sell the items you make, find, and loot through a variety of outlets. Like any role-playing game, WoW has merchants who will buy your cast-off items for fixed prices, but you can also sell to other players at your own price through in-game chat or by leaving it with one of the auction houses located across the map. This virtual free market is a game within the game, like Monopoly somehow inserted into the middle of Chess. Heck, you can even send items C.O.D. to other players via the game's mail system.

The game's Quest Log keeps track of up to 20 quests at a time.

In other online role-playing games, starting players have to invest dozens of hours whacking at small prey and doing other odd jobs one at a time to gradually "level up" to more interesting challenges. WoW lets players accept a variety of quests--up to 20 at a time without penalty for abandoning any of them before they're complete. The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature. Where some games only grant experience through battle, WoW grants experience for exploring and fulfilling quests too.

A Level Playing Field
There's also a built-in handicap for casual players where your character enters a rest state when you log off from the game. The longer you're logged off (up to a week), the bigger the experience bonus you'll get when you return to battle. An enemy tagging feature--the player who lands the first attack on an enemy claims the loot for himself or his party--prevents onlookers from swooping in and pilfering items from a monster that you brought down. That resolves a common complaint of other titles.

Icons and pop-ups help put complex controls easily within reach.

Most games severely penalize players when they die in-game, usually by shaving experience points, funds, or both. In WoW, death just relocates your ghost to the nearest graveyard, and the only penalty is the time it takes you to get back to resurrect your character's corpse.

All of this makes for a very complicated game, but the well-designed interface puts all the game's elements into icons either visible framing the action or within a simple keystroke. The enemy's artificial intelligence is quite strong too: Monsters will join nearby fights to aid their comrades, switch targets strategically midbattle, and ambush players. The map system fills in details on places you've visited, so you always know where you are and where you've been.

Overall, World of Warcraft is a game that's easy to learn, challenging to master, beautiful to watch, and tons of fun to play. --Porter B. Hall

System Requirements
	Minimum	Recommended
Operating System	PC: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista (with latest Service Packs) Mac: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer
CPU	PC: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlong XP 1500+ Mac: PowerPC G5 1.6 GHz or Intel Core Duo processor	PC: Dual-core processor, such as Intel Pentium D or AmD Athlong 64 X2 Mac: Intel 1.8 GHz processor or better
Graphics Hardware	PC: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transfor and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce2 class card or better Mac: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 64 MB VRAM, such as ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600 class card or better	PC: 3D Graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capabilities with 128 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better Mac: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM, such as ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA 7600 class card or better.
Memory	PC: 512 MB (1 GB for Vista) Mac: 1 GB	PC: 1 GB (2 GB for Vista) Mac: 2 GB
Hard Drive Space	15 GB of free space
All Platform Requirements	Keyboard and mouse, required for controls. Other input devices not supported. Active broadband Internet connection required to play.

Product Description
World Of Warcraft lets players experience the lands of Azeroth from a newer, in-depth perspective. They'll discover new lands and take on epic quests and challenges in massive online multiplayer action. Adventure together with thousands of other players simultaneously A monthly subsription fee is required to play online

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

517 of 581 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Game, Even For Older Players, September 15, 2004

By	Walter Milford (Vancouver, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This game is, quite simply, the best Fantasy MMORPG I have ever encountered. Having played during the entire 11 day Stress Test, I can honestly say it will probably be around even longer than EverQuest. This work of art has all the magic of EQ, without the many frustrations that finally caused me to give up on EQ (such as extreme grind, a very punitive death penalty, and being forced to group at high levels).

The graphics in WoW are awesome. Some people complain about the "cartoonish" colors, etc. I find these graphics to be very pleasing to the eye, and extremely well detailed and arranged. Guess this just shows that it isn't possible to please everyone, particularly those who go out of their way to find a flaw in other people's creations. To me, it is just right.

I won't elaborate on the basics of the game, such as the 8 races and 9 classes. Others have already covered them. Rather, I will focus on some other areas that are important to older players (I will soon be 60 years old, and no longer have the lightning-fast hand to eye coordination and sharp vision I once enjoyed).

There appeared to be no need for extremely quick reflexes in this game, but instead a player needs to use strategy and planning to avoid getting in over one's head. The wonderful hotkey bar across the entire bottom of the screen was very helpful and well thought out. Kudos to Blizzard for making such a great interface. The screen is not all cluttered up like it is in most games.

The game runs on a 24-hour clock, so it is dark nearly half the time. Blizzard wisely chose to not make the game black as night in most locations. It is possible to play effectively in caves and other usually extremely dark areas, without benefit of an external light. I thought this was a very wise decision and really enjoyed playing in those locations for the first time ever in an MMORPG. Some players complain that it is too bright. I would say to them: Turn down your Gamma control in the game if you like. Many of us do not have your young night-vision, and we are paying customers too. I think that Blizzard got this part just right.

The quest system in this game is better than I have ever seen. I actually liked doing quests, something I haven't previously enjoyed. Also, quests give lots of experience, and since they can usually be done on a casual basis, they don't require the same level of one-track focus that they do in other games I have played.

During this "way too short" Stress Test, I decided to try a variety of different characters and locations, so played the following characters: Night Elf Druid, lvl 12; Tauren Hunter, lvl 13; Human Mage, lvl 8; Human Warlock, lvl 6; Gnome Warlock, lvl 6; Troll Shaman, lvl 6. Unfortunately, I have a full-time job and could only devote about 40 hours a week to the game. The initial leveling rate is quite quick, with it slowing down a lot at about level 12. Just about right, IMO.

The game is bug-free, for the most part. It is way more bug-free than SWG is even today. I would be willing to pay a subscription now, if it would "get me my game back!". There are only two problems I see with this game:

1. Even though the Stress Test ended at 6pm Sunday evening, three days later I am still going through withdrawal and still have no desire to play on my two City of Heroes and three SWG accounts.

2. World of Warcraft is still not out, so my pre-ordered copy hasn't arrived, nor do I know when that will happen. The sooner, the better, IMO. There is no doubt in my mind that this game will be way more popular that EQ2, which I also plan to try. Hopefully WoW will arrive first.

I for one really appreciate these Reviews that Amazon has. I find them very helpful. The only problem I see with them is that there are only FIVE stars in the rating system. This is a shame, for World of Warcraft certainly deserves a TEN.

631 of 714 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WoW is more than it's cracked up to be, September 14, 2004

By	Seth Mclagan "Bullroar" (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

I just spent the last week playing the World of Warcraft Stress Test Beta, and I can tell you that it was better than I expected. Even though the game wasn't finished, it still has many features that make it head and shoulders above every other MMORPG I've played.
Now, I, like many others, have been waiting in ancicipation for this game to come out, and when I had the chance to play the stress test, I was elated. Considering the majority of my MMOG experience is in EverQuest, I will list a few of the improvements (at least what I see as improvements) over the MMORPG "norm."

1) Experience from completing quests is noticable, and the rewards from completing them are worthwhile. I was always frustrated with EverQuest's quest structure, and the only reason to do a quest was for the item quested for, not for the experience gain. In WoW, it is possible to gain more experience from completing a quest than from killing a monster.

2) Experience progress is anything but vague. Every time a character kills a monster or completes a quest, the experience points are clearly given, and a meter with the character's progress within a level is clearly marked with numbers. So it's impossible not to tell how much experience killing a monster was worth. No more questionable meters with random values.

3) The world is easy to get around in. And it doesn't take an hour to get where you need to be, if you know where you're going. This was one of my biggest problems with EverQuest, because, as a semi-casual player, sometimes I don't have the time to run for an hour to complete a quest, or, in some cases, die, then have to make a corpse run and take twice as long as it originally was supposed to take. Which leads me to my next point.

4) Death is reasonable. If your character dies, its ghost spawns at the NEAREST graveyard, so there is no need to manually bind your character somewhere. Also, there is no XP loss if you choose to run your character over to its corpse. In my opinion, the death system is one of the best, as you can choose to lose XP by ressurecting right at the graveyard, or just run to your character's corpse and revive there with no experience loss. And before you can ressurect your character in a graveyard, it will let you know exactly how much XP will be lost. This replaces the 3 hours of grinding time needed to replace the lost XP.

5) An XP grind is perfectly possible, but not necessary. It is very possible to level up consistently without having to play for 5-7 hours a day. Between XP from killing monsters and the great quest completion XP, I was able to level a character to 17 in 3 days of semi-casual play. Now granted, those were the first 17 and the easiest, but it's also possible to gain a level a day, almost unheard of in EverQuest.

To make a long story short, this will be a great game, but there is still a lot of work needed to make it release-ready. Since there is no official word yet on its release, I wouldn't hold my breath, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

-Bullroar

85 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars not for the casual gamer anymore, January 31, 2006

By	m r s - See all my reviews

Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars 

In 2004, this game was advertised as 'being for the casual gamer' but also having content in which the 'hardcore gamer' could strive for. Anyone who did not have 14 hours a day to sit and play video games could have a lot of fun with this game in both PvE (player versus environment - you against the computer's monsters) or PvP (player versus player - players going head to head against one another). Originally the content was meant to be such that 'casual gamers could experience the full richness of the game and hardcore gamers would get a little bit extra out of the game, but the differences would be small.' On levels 1 - 59, this remains the case. However, upon reaching level 60 (which doesn't take anywhere near as long as other games, but is still a lengthy journey), the story completely changes. Hardcore gamers are rewarded with items which allow them to kill another player with just 1 swing / magic spell / shot, and armor that makes them so powerful that fighting them becomes like 'fighting a tank with a toothpick.' The developers of this game have effectively stopped releasing content for the "casual gamers" one year ago - and now spend the majority of their time catering to the "hardcore" players - which by the way, accounts for approximately 8% of their player base.

Levels 1 - 59 can go solo or fight in 5 man groups fighting quests or doing instances (dungeons in which only members of their party can enter) to get items or to level up. At level 60, to get the "hardcore" items which allow superior status, one must join 40 person "raids" (a raid is a combined coordinated collection of 2 or more groups, in this case, 8 groups) to fight the "hardcore" instances - which can take 6 - 14 hours ... or more.

World of Warcraft is a game that brought the masses in by its appeal from casual gamers and the differences that set it apart from EverQuest, whose end-game content also required very long "raids".

A recent New York Times article author recently described "casual" (generally non-raiding) gamers as being 'lazy, having no skill and not having partying (grouping) skill', to which the lead designer of the content of World of Warcraft effectively agreed.

Be warned about this "raid or die" mentality before you make the purchase of World of Warcraft.

Next - don't think that if you purchase the game that you will be able to play with your friends or family members. Blizzard's success with World of Warcraft has brought them far more subscribers than they bargained for, leaving them with game servers that have filled up to the max, leaving players with large amounts of lag and *long* waits to even log into the game. Blizzard's "queue" system sets a maximum number of players on each server, so if you try to log on at peak times when the server has reached its maximum number of players, you may have to wait - up to 2 hours - to play. To attempt to solve this problem, they have instituted a ban on all new character creations on certain servers for people who do not already have a character on that certain server (so if you don't already have a character on say, server "Dalaran", then you can't make a new character, you have to pick another server). If all of your friends or family are already playing on one of those servers, then you are out of luck. You will be playing all alone on a server in which you know nobody while the people you wanted to group with are on another server. Blizzard has been tightlipped about as to whether or not this new 'character creation ban' will be temporary or permanent. Thousands of people have bought this game since mid-December of 2005 and have been extremely irate by this issue. If someone bought this game under the assumption that he or she would be able to play online with friends and that person can't - that person ned not expect a refund from Blizzard. Their reply to this - "Working as intended. Cancel your account if you don't like it."

Combine this horrible customer service with the fact that almost all the servers have queue lines, many of them even during non-peak hours. Servers with huge loads of players experience unreasonable amounts of lag which hinders even basic movement throughout the game, much less talking to quest givers, getting loot from dead monsters and any other trivial task attempted to be undertaken. One thing that will really make any gamer mad is to be running through the forest, be lagged so badly as that it appears nothing around you is moving, then for the game to catch up 3 minutes later and you find yourself dead from monsters you couldn't see. This customer service has left many fans and players of World of Warcraft with their heads spinning, wondering where their $15 monthly subsciption fee goes.

This game was absolutely wonderful a year ago, and the content from levels 1 - 59, and the first few hours of level 60 is marvelous. The casual gamer can have lots of fun getting up to level 60, but once level 60 is attained, very little content exists for the "casual" gamer. This game is beautiful, has wonderful sounds / music, fun action and even requires thinking on the most basic "hack and slash" warrior by using abilities which must be planned and strategized versus just using one or two buttons for every fight. However, word has it that all the initial designers have long since left, leaving new designers which have changed the direction of the game.

My rating for World of Warcraft would be 5 for fun and 5 overall were it not for the terrible customer service, horrible server structure, new character creation ban and complete lack of end game 'non-raiding' content (it feels really bad to put many many hours of online play into a character only to have to abandon it simply because there is nothing else to do if you aren't a hardcore raider gamer). However, there is no fun at all when you have to wait 1 to 2 hours looking at a computer screen that says "Position in queue: 952. Estimated wait time: 1 hour 43 minutes" only to come back 10 minutes later to see the "Estimated wait time" at "1 hour 44 minutes." Some queues have even gotten up into the 1500s.

Please consider this before buying this product or referring this to a friend. Please go to the World of Warcraft website and look at their "general" forums. Then make a decision.

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