World of Warcraft Review
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Another slight problem is the economy. Some people have been playing World of Warcraft for years, and so they've accumulated a ton of gold. That's a problem because it means that items are priced for how much a rich player might pay for them, and so life can be tough when you first start the game. You won't be able to afford anything in the auction houses, and you'll have a terrible time trying to save enough money for your mounts. But eventually you'll find some things that rich people want, and you'll be able to take advantage of the economy, and it will work out. It'll just take some time. What's New
Last week Blizzard released the 3.0.2 patch, which laid a lot of the groundwork for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack. The interesting thing about the patch is that it included some of the content that I expected to be a part of the expansion pack. For example, the patch unlocked the new inscription profession, which allows players to create glyphs, which can be attached to spellbooks to change how some spells work. One glyph cuts the mana cost for the (power word: fortitude) spell in half, and other glyphs remove the need for spell components, increase the amount of spell damage dealt, or increase the duration of spell effects.
The patch also unlocked the new achievements system. There are now 750 achievements that players can try to complete, and they range from things like exploring zones to completing quests to killing certain enemies. There are even some weird achievements, like using the (love) emote on a variety of forest creatures, including squirrels and prairie dogs. The achievements are nice, because just like professions they give players something extra to think about. Since the patch came out, I've tried knocking out a few achievements every day, but I still have well over 600 to complete.
Finally, the patch made some other changes, like introducing barbershops (where players can change their appearance) and calendars (to show when events and festivals are occurring), and re-balancing the races and classes in preparation for characters being able to advance to level 80. But the big changes, the Death Knight class and the new Northrend continent, will require the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack, which is set to hit store shelves on November 13.
Conclusion
I generally enjoy casual games as well as more sophisticated titles, and so World of Warcraft has worked out pretty well for me. Going from level 1 to level 50 is pretty casual, and people are happy just to mess around and get stuff done, but then as you approach level 70 things get more serious, and you're more likely to run into people who will only want to deal with you if you know the dungeons by heart and have the best equipment available. The nice thing about World of Warcraft is that you can stay in either circle. If you want to keep things casual, then you can create new characters and explore all of the regular lands. If you want to be more hardcore, then you can build up a character to level 70 and then plug away until you can go into all of the heroic dungeons.
I spent about three months playing World of Warcraft, and that was enough time to get my priest to level 70 plus play a couple of minor characters to around level 20. Even so, there is still a lot of content I haven't seen yet, especially in the way of dungeons, and I'm looking forward to sneaking into them someday, plus exploring the new lands from Wrath of the Lich King when they become available. Since World of Warcraft caters to everybody, has lots of content to see, looks nice and is well run, it's an easy game to recommend, even four years after its debut.
