To be honest, at this stage there doesn’t really seem a lot of point reviewing World of Warcraft. It’s all been said, by everyone and often. That just leaves me with self-indulgent subjective ramblings – my own personal World of Warcraft. Still, I’m fine with that if you are.
Having said that, I am actually quite glad to have been so late in getting on the Deeprun Tram of Popular Gaming for a change. Almost without exception, any MMO in which I’ve in the first landing craft onto the beach, has not been pretty, so turning up this late, I can be reasonably sure that all the wrinkles have been ironed out. In this case it turned out to be an MMO that was so massively popular that its own server infrastructure was unable to cope, causing a large deal of player resentment through no real fault of Blizzard’s own. It is a bit alarming to see that even now they still haven’t quite nailed it:
AFK Gamer: Questioning Blizzard’s Priorities
Having joined one of the later added European servers, I’ve seen the occasional lag-out, or disconnect, but nothing game-breaking, and certainly nothing as apocalyptic as the early queuing to play.
No, I do have a problem with World of Warcraft, but it’s a curious one; very psychological, and very subjective. I miss the sun! WoW, in my experience, is practically unique in that the world of Azeroth has a rotational period of 24 Earth Hours. In other words, if it’s night outside the window, it’s night in-game. That’s a nice touch, I thought, when I first noticed it, and didn’t think anything more of it.
‘Night time’ in WoW is almost as well lit as ‘daytime’, and it’s mostly just a change in light colour from yellow to blue, and the skybox changes from blue to stars. It doesn’t hamper gameplay in the slightest. I remember trying Barbarians and Humans in Everquest – as races without magical vision enhancement, when night fell, adventuring stopped. Visibility got so bad it became difficult to see anything at all without a great deal of buggering about with the gamma and brightness settings. i.e. Cheating.
It’s nothing like that bad in World of Warcraft, as the moon is always up, and nearly as bright as the sun, and all in all, that’s just as well, because over the course of a week or so, I began to notice that it seemed to be night all the time. I’m a late-night gamer; I have a day-job, and a fair commute to get there and back, and by the time I’ve got in, had some dinner, sat with my head in my hands and sobbed uncontrollably for no good reason for a bit and finally gotten round to firing up the PC, it’s starting to get dark.
This isn’t something I really think about outside; I have electric lights, and curtains. But having a day-night cycle in a game that matches the real one is quite disconcerting. There are whole lands in that game that I’ve never seen in sunlight, and probably never will unless I make a special effort during a weekend. My general experience of WoW though, is one of mostly night, and it’s turning out to be a lot more profound than you’d think.
I can see why it's Night Elves now...Day Elves would never work...