Yes, my Macintosh friends, Blizzard has come through for us again. (Any Mac-user who lost months of real life activities to Diablo 2 knows what I'm talking about.)
But, in case you haven't read any other reviews, I'll briefly give you my take on the game. I figured the most difficult thing about writing this review would be that it would take me away from playing. So, since I can't log on at the moment, I'll write about a few things.
That's one of the downsides. WoW is down a lot. They have weekly updates that cause hours of downtime. This upsets the community; however, the game is such fun that the community returns quickly when the servers come back up.
To be fair, those update downtimes probably add up to the same amount of loading zone times that other games have. Did I mention hardly any zone waiting in WoW? And, when you do get a zone wait, you can measure it in seconds, not minutes.
Gameplay? Well, Blizzard has incorporated most of the good things about online games and eliminated a lot of the bad. To name just a few...
The Professions...or crafting ...is simple and easy to learn online. No need to pour over long stat files (unless you want to...Blizzard has a great WoW website). Items for recipes or patterns are relatively easy to find without being so easy that it upsets the server economy. AND...the stuff you make is actually useful!
Leveling a character is fun. The grind of going somewhere like a dungeon and spending hours killing spawn after spawn is replaced in WoW with many, many quests. Some of the quests are to rid the landscape of "X" number of mobs or gather "X" number of items from the dead corpses of a certain mob; however, there are quite a few delivery quests that take you to all parts of the area. (One little piece of advice...load up on all the quests you can in a town or village. That way you can be gathering bits off the trail of dead corpses you leave on the way to delivering whatever.)
They have a server email system along with a stable chat system! You can send messages and items to any other faction character on that server. By faction I mean that if you are in the Hoard, you can't send letter bombs to Alliance characters or vice versa. The downside to this system is that you can go a long time without actually seeing what your other guildmates look like.
Get lost in the big city? No problem. Just find a guard and ask for directions. The guard will write out some directions for you and put a map tack on your in-game map. Either go by the written directions or refer to your map.
So, did you notice the first screenshot of my character riding a gryphon? Gryphon air travel is FANTASTIC! You soar over pretty areas and areas that aren't so pretty. You may wish to say a little prayer to the air gods to keep that gryphon flying over some of the nastier parts. Gryphon travel is very addictive, so make sure you save up extra coins to pay for your habit.
The best feature is that you can play the game for 10 minutes or 5 hours. You quickly log on and can get busy right away. If you need to log off after a few minutes, it's not a pain to remember where you left off. You can even use your Hearthstone to return to your designated Inn to rest if you don't want to log off in the middle of a nasty area.
There's a lot more to World of Warcraft, Mac amigos! Get the game and give it a try. It's the most stable Mac online game out there. Hey! The servers just came back up...gotta go!
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