World of Warcraft, if you’ve somehow missed hearing about it, is Blizzard Entertainment’s foray into the realm of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs). I’ll admit right away that this isn’t completely my genre. I’ve played a lot of role-playing games, but after MUDs severely dinged up my college career, I’ve stayed away from MMORPGs for a while, and so I know nothing of games like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. So while I can talk about World of Warcraft and give my impressions of how the beta testing is going, if you’re looking for how well it stacks up against the competition, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Since World of Warcraft is a role-playing game, obviously its focus will be on killing things. But it’s not going to be a 3D version of Diablo II set in the Warcraft universe. Among other things, you’ll have to work together in groups of up to five characters to get stuff done (although you can solo, too, if you really want), and your main focus will be on solving quests (rather than on just randomly killing creatures). From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like the equipment is going to be as fun in World of Wacraft, and character development seems like it will be more straightforward, but the group dynamic and the huge number of things to do should be enough to keep World of Warcraft right up there with the best of them in the Addictive Games Hall of Fame.

Scenes from the human lands, including a fight in the stockades and a gryphon flight.

You see, there are six sets of starting lands. The humans and night elves get their own lands, the dwarves and gnomes share a set of lands, and I assume something similar happens with the Horde races. Each set of lands contains several “zones.” The zone where you first appear has easy quests to help get you started, and then the other zones gradually ramp up the difficulty. I’m most familiar with the human lands, where I’ve spent a lot of time in places like Redridge, which is infested with orcs and gnolls, and Duskwood, where the undead hang out. Eventually, it looks like there will be around 40 zones in the game, with each zone triggering a couple dozen quests and providing a week’s worth of playing time to get through. Races will be able to travel to all zones, and so if you find you’re playing a dwarf but don’t like the dwarf lands (or perhaps just don’t like the main dwarf city of Ironforge) you can take a gryphon ride to the human lands and try your luck there instead.

The dwarves find themselves in the mountains a lot.

Besides having a class, characters can also learn “trade skills.” These involve things like mining, leatherworking, engineering, and alchemy. Each time you level up, you earn a skill point, and then you can use the points to learn a new skill or improve on an existing skill. The way it’s set up now, with the level cap set at 30 (eventually the cap will go up to level 60), you can completely learn two or three trade skills. For example, rogues can only wear leather and cloth equipment, and so they might learn skinning, which allows them to skin animals for leathers and hides, and leathercraft, which allows them to convert the leathers and hides into useful equipment. Depending on your ability with a trade skill, you can use different “recipes” for your craft. However, these aren’t anything like the Horadric Cube recipes from Diablo II. The recipes you buy (and find) will appear in a list, and then those are the only things you’ll be able to make. And so if you see a really cool recipe being offered by a “trainer,” then that might motivate you to practice your skill so you can buy and use the recipe.

The night elf lands feature a lot of blues and purples.

Another potential problem in World of Warcraft is crowding. Every so often there are quests where you need to kill a creature, and lots of other people need to kill the creature as well, and so it’s just difficult to find. As soon as the creature “spawns” somebody kills it, and so it might take a lot of sitting around and waiting to complete some quests. To offset the crowding problem a little, some dungeons create “instances.” When your party enters the dungeon, the game creates a copy just for you, and so you don’t have to compete with anybody else to kill the things inside. So far in the beta testing, I’ve seen over 1000 people in the game a few times, and things have worked out well enough (especially since people can only play Alliance races right now), but I just wonder how things will go when World of Warcraft hits store shelves and masses of people start playing it. I bet the first couple of weeks will be a nightmare.