Australian Gamer Feature :: World of Warcraft Neverending Review

World of Warcraft Neverending Review

Introduction : PART 1 ( Page 1 : Page 2 : Page 3 : Page 4 ) PART 2 ( Page 1 : Page 2 : Page 3 : Page 4 )�

view profile

The first thing to do in World of Warcraft (after you give your credit card details, which I'm always a little uneasy doing), is choose your race and class.

As well as this, you must take into consideration that the races are divided into the good guys (Alliance) and the bad guys (horde). As the Alliance, you can be a Human, Night Elf, Dwarf or Gnome. As the horde you can choose to be an Orc, Tauren, Undead or Troll.

After careful consideration, I decided to play as a Night Elf. I was tempted to play as the horde (I love playing the anti-hero usually), but I already knew a few people playing as the Alliance and I figured if I'm going to be investing all my time and money into this game, I may as well be a good guy. A human is too boring, and the dwarves and gnomes are too ... well ... short. Plus I always played as the Night Elves in Warcraft 3, so it made sense to me.

Then comes time to choose your class. You can be a Rogue, Warrior, Priest, Hunter, Druid, Mage, Paladin, Shaman or Warlock. I'd already chosen to be a Night Elf, so I could only choose one of the first 5 of those classes. Rogues I'd heard had good skills if you wanted to go solo a lot, but because of that weren't as appreciated at later levels when you have large groups. Warrior was a bit too hack and slash, and I wanted to be able to do at least a bit of magic. Not as much as the Priest though, who I'm sure just ends up healing everyone all the time and complaining about a lack of armour. Hunters seemed cool, but I wanted to deck out my character, not rely on another animal. Last option was the Druid, who seemed to have a good all round capability to do a bit of magic, and a bit of fighting. Plus you could learn to morph into different creatures. I'm sold. Shame about the dress.

So now I'd created my character and had to log into the server. There are LOTS of servers. I wasn't aware that I had to choose one, and more importantly, I had no idea the difference between any of them. I went with the one Blizzard 'recommended', which was Greymane.

I'd read the manual, so I thought I had some idea of what to expect when I got into the game. I'd heard it was very user friendly, and that people in World of Warcraft are genuinely helpful. Well, it sort of was. What I found was that I was in an area surrounded by other people who were also just trying to figure things out. Most conversations involved me saying "hi" to people, then that person breaking out into dance with me. You see, there are a many number of 'emotes' that you can type which will make your character mime out that action. Everything from /joke (tell a joke), /flirt (flirt with someone) to others like /dance (bust out some moves) and /train (pump your fist in the air while going 'woo woo'). They are funny the first time, but kinda annoying when people ONLY seem to talk in emotes.

So I kept to myself for most of the first 5 levels or so, going through the motions of talking to Non-player Characters (NPC) to get quests to do. They were mainly 'go kill this many creatures' or 'go find this item'. Which is fine. I was just fairly happy admiring the level design, which was both epic and detailed. The opening area, Shadowglen, really gives a great feeling of magic and promise for what the rest of the game will be like, and made me REALLY look forward to seeing some of the later levels.

After a few quests and running about, I finally discovered 2 important things. First off, 'NumLock' makes you run automatically. I can't stress how excited I was to find that out at the time, and how scared I am now at what the game would be like without it. Secondly, I figured out how to chat in the 'general' chat room for that area. The manual doesn't really make any sense in regards to general chatting until after you have figured it out in the game by yourself. Basically, each level area you are in has a 'general' chat channel where everyone in that area can type something and everyone can see and respond to it. By typing /1 in the chat box first, it will change to the 'general channel'. I'm sure I looked crazy while trying to get it right and failing, because if you just say something normally, a speech bubble will appear over your head with what you have said. At one point, I believe I said "chat 1/general hello for #$%^&* sake can anyone #$%^&* see what im #$%^&* saying???" much to the surprise of the level 2 newbies standing around me.