Mini-Review: A Brief Return to Azeroth

Last week I discovered that Blizzard was handing out 7 days of free time for past WoW subscribers. Being the cheap, curious bastard that I am, I took advantage of the offer to both play for free and to check out the most recent patch. WoW recently underwent a major overhaul in preparation for the Mists of Pandaria expansion which goes live on September 25th.

A profound feeling of "holy crap there's nothing to do" pervades WoW right now, and as a result I didn't really spend a lot of time actively playing. I spent a few hours dueling other players and PvPing in battlegrounds; I also did a little bit of brushing up on my classes via Elitist Jerks and Arena Junkies since I haven't played in months.

System Requirements and Performance

World of Warcraft was originally released in 2004. This is obviously not a super-demanding game by today's standards. Still, Blizzard has continued to make subtle tweaks to the game engine to keep things looking pretty. You've gotta admit, WoW is probably the best-looking eight-year-old-game around. I wasn't able to find a specific list of performance tweaks and visual improvements, but I did find this "blue post" from a Blizzard employee:

There are actually quite a lot of graphic engine improvements in Mists of Pandaria, however for the most part they are subtle. For example, improved shadowing, blending and enhancements to the fog effect.

Amongst the large list of information we hope to share with you is included a list of the new graphic engine improvements with some before and after screenshots to highlight what each one brings to the game.

Each one might be subtle but as a whole they bring an improved visual appearance to the game. :)
(source)

WoW on the Cheap

Blizzard is currently offering World of Warcraft, the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm for 75% off through next Monday the 27th.

I talked about my experiences with WoW in a three part feature a couple of weeks ago. While I'm no longer a subscriber, I think WoW is still the best MMO on the market right now. The sheer amount of content available is pretty ridiculous, even if some of it sits unused 90% of the time. Twenty bucks gets you 85 levels of content and (don't quote me on this) should include a free month since you're buying an original copy of the game.

Mists of Pandaria launches September 25th. With the arrival of the expansion the game's focus is going to shift to level 90, so if you're planning on snagging this deal be aware that the Cataclysm areas will be a ghost town in a month. Regardless, this is probably the lowest buy-in cost we'll see for a while. If you're still on the fence, check out the WoW trial - the game is free to play on a limited account up to level 20.

Gamescom 2012: Days 2 and 3

It seems like most of the action at Gamescom happened on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Not much has caught my eye over the past couple of days, but there were a couple of highlights.

• Verge/Polygon: Stolen Gamescom Divinity PCs
  This is why we can't have nice things.
• Verge/Polygon: Anno Online screenshots
  As I said earlier in the week, I've never played any of the Anno games, but I'm always a fan of simulation and city-building games.
• PCGB: GTX 660 Ti Review Roundup
  Nvidia unleashed the 660 Ti yesterday, and I threw together a post after reading some reviews.
• PCGB: WoW MoP Cinematic
  Blizzard unveiled the Mists of Pandaria cinematic yesterday. I may not play WoW any more, but they do a damn good job with these things.
• PCGB: Ubisoft Dollar Game Deals
  Ubisoft released their Steam-clone Uplay platform yesterday and are trying to pimp it out by practically giving away games. HAWX 2, From Dust, Silent Hunter 5, and Driver: San Francisco are a buck apiece til Sunday with a different game on sale daily.
• Verge/Polygon: Dead Space 3 screenshots
  I still need to plow through my Steam backlog to get to Dead Space 1 and 2, so it might be 2014 until I get to this one.

WoW Mists of Pandaria Cinematic

Blizzard released the Mists of Pandaria opening cinematic today at Gamescom. While I don't play WoW any more, I've got to admit that the guys at Blizzard know what they're doing when it comes to cinematics.

Mists of Pandaria will be released on September 25th.

WoW the Third: Thrilling Conclusion

This is the last part of my World of Warcraft discussion. For the initial post, a description of my four years spent playing WoW, click here. Part two, what I believe to be some of the game's current flaws, can be found here.

Looking back at my two previous posts, it's easy to see that World of Warcraft can quickly become a second job. The game has both depth and breadth of content and allows players to experience each part of the game at their own pace. I took the progression of my character pretty seriously and ended up spending a significant amount of time improving said character over the course of four years. My WoW resumé was and still is pretty solid, but in the end, where did that get me?

This was probably half of my play time.

Tallying up both the time and money I spent on WoW was pretty sobering. I accumulated over 325 days of play time and spent over 900 bucks on WoW over the course of 4 and a half years. That's basically 20% of my time; factor in 8 hours of sleep every day (which I'll admit is generous) and I spent almost 30% of my waking hours logged into WoW during a 4-year span. Sure, some of that time was spent AFK or using the game as a glorified chat room, but the large majority of that was active gameplay. I guess you could say I got my money's worth and then some.

World of Warcraft Loses 1.1 million Subscribers

Just saw this on MMO Champion and wanted to post a quick note. WoW saw a drop of 1.1 million subscribers in the last quarter and is down to 9.1 million total. They were at 11.1 million last June, and I believe the peak was somewhere around 12 million, but don't quote me on that.

You can read MMO Champion's full post here. Despite the drop in WoW numbers Blizzard managed to sell 10 million copies of D3, so at least they've got that going for them.

WoW Continued: The Flaws of Blizzard's Billion-dollar Amusement Park

Here's a continuation of my thoughts on World of Warcraft, Blizzard's multi-zillion-dollar MMO success. For Part I of the series, a not-so-brief review of my time in WoW, click here.

untitled (Tim Ove Bjånesøy) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

I cancelled my WoW subscription at the end of 2009. I jumped on a couple of free "please come back to the game" trial offers since then, but I've basically been WoW-free for the last couple of years. If you manage to keep your head down while playing the game and keep handing $15 checks to Blizzard month after month, you'll find that there's an ever-increasing range of stuff to do in the game. If you take a step back and look at your subscription history, you realize that you've paid hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars over the years to basically do the same thing over and over.

World of Warcraft is an amusement park with a $15 admission fee. Once you buy a ticket you can ride everything as many times as you want, all month long. Every few years they throw a new coat of paint on everything and open up another couple of roller coasters, but when you've been lining up for the same rides every week for the past four years the thrills aren't quite the same. Every new ride seems like a pieced-together version of previous attractions with a few less loops and a lowered height requirement.

SWTOR: Another One Bites the Dust

Yesterday, Kotaku published an article saying that Star Wars: The Old Republic would be going free-to-play this fall. EA put out a press release yesterday with some of the details, and they also added a page to the SWTOR website here that professes the benefits of paying for a subscription versus playing for free.

It looks like you'll be able to experience a lot of SWTOR's content with the free option. As of right now the game's level cap is 50, meaning you'll be able to hit max level and experience the full storyline of the game for free. There will be weekly limits on the number of "warzones" (battlegrounds) and "flashpoints" (dungeons) that you can enter, and access to the "galactic trade network" (auction house) will obviously be extremely limited to limit potential economy exploits from free accounts.

I participated in the closed beta of SWTOR last year before the game's release. After playing a Bounty Hunter to the max level of 50, I ultimately made the decision not to pick up the game. The storyline quests and voice acting are very well done and the leveling process is probably the best I've seen in an MMO - definitely expected from Bioware. With that being said, the game is more or less a WoW clone with lightsabers instead of swords and speeders instead of horses. SWTOR is a solid all-around experience, but unless you're new to the MMO genre you won't find anything you haven't seen before.

EA and Bioware reportedly spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million on The Old Republic. It'll be interesting to see how exactly they structure the for-pay aspects of the game considering the budget and the fact that the game will be adding a subscription-free option less than a year after launch. The press release also announced that the full retail game would be available for $15 starting next Tuesday, August 7th, and that it still includes the free month of gameplay.

SWTOR is definitely worth a playthrough for the storytelling aspects of the game - hey, the price is right - but it remains to be see whether the F2P move can help reinvigorate the generic WoW-clone MMO.

History of the World (of Warcraft): Part I

In deciding which game to write about for my first game-focused post, I figured I should start with the title that I've played more than any other game in the past 10 years or so. Heck, it's probably my most-played game ever.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 during my freshman year of college. I had played a little bit of Warcraft II and heard one of my friends talk about Warcraft III, but to be honest I wasn't that interested in WoW. I remember sitting in a Multivariable Calculus recitation one day, looking around the room while the TA went over a homework problem. 5 or 6 kids in the room were playing WoW and paying little attention to what was going on around them - the university required everyone to have a pretty beefy laptop coming into their freshman year, so basically everyone on campus had a portable WoW-capable machine. I wondered why anyone would want to pay $15 a month to play a game.

Fast-forward to 2005. One of my online friends with whom I had fragged with for 3 or 4 years finally convinced me to give the game a try. I managed to pick up the game for around 30 bucks, so I remember thinking to myself, "If I play out my free month and then pay for a couple more I'll be on the hook for $60," basically the cost of any other game out there.

Four years later I finally cancelled my subscription.