Call me a fool. Please.

As you might have guessed I fell utterly, deeply in love with the World of Warcraft. Any time not spent researching (generally in the wee hours of the morning) was spent exploring and leveling in the amazing world that the guys at Blizzard have created.

Everything about this game is phenomenal: the quests, raids, the scenery (early in the game other players routinely said things like, “Wow, this game is beautiful”), the interface, and even the music. Sometimes I would go into a building owned by the Alliance merely to admire a certain theme in World of Warcraft.

I even made good friends: I found people both from my own area and the Chicago area who were in to the game of WOW. We’ve exchanged e-mails so we can meet up. I’m also interested in keeping up relations with my readers (and thus people who are interested in the same things that I am).

The other day while playing WOW, everyone decided to abandon the normal leveling quests and start huge raids on enemy lands. The sad thing is that the servers went down a couple of time for maintenance, talk about bad timing.

In my own raid group, we had got together two raiding parties amounting to almost 80 players, intending to storm Kalimdor as we had done earlier in the week. The first time, we made it to the very heart of Durotar (one of the main enemy areas) before being slaughtered by high-level NPC guards.

Unfortunately, just as the massive army that we had made today arrived at the gates of the Barrens, the World of Warcraft server shutdown message came on!

Everyone cried out “Apocalypse NOW” and “At least we’ll die together” and all kinds of other silly things. It was great. But that was not the end. A few hours later, the server was back up, and this time the guys at Blizzard had tossed some impossibly difficult enemies at the gates of Stormwind (capital of the humans) and everyone tried to take them out. Unfortunately, I don’t think that even with all of our combined efforts that a single one of those guys were destroyed..

Get the World of Warcraft game.

The hype is justified.

Update: I’ve been playing this online game for what feels like years now and the World of Warcraft update Wrath of the Lich King that came out late last year (January 2009 now) took the game to new heights. When the other addon The Burning Crusade that gave us the Outlands was released we leveled our level 60 characters to level 70 to open new raids culminating in the Black Temple, the same was true with the Wrath of the Lich King we had to level to 80 fast if we wanted to be the firstto complete the new 25 man raids!

When the Burning Crusade was released a friend I’d met through WOW let me use a leveling ebook from Zygor Gaming Guides, it made leveling to level 70 so much easier so I bought a copy as well. I have many online WOW friends who play a similar amount of time as me that are still leveling their first level 80 character while I’ve got 3!

Highly recommended you buy the ebook for fast leveling to level 80.

Cya in game.

Perhaps, an even better question, is if gamers prefer gameplay or graphics in their games? I believe there have been several releases that have allowed gamers to provide an answer to this very question. My analysis of Half-Life 2 and also an outsider’s impression of World of Warcraft (WoW) are below.

Let’s start with Half-Life 2

Here, we have a game that has been in development for a very long time and followed by a long release delay. Even though, it has nice features and one of the best single-player stories I’ve seen in a long time, the engine and it’s features have become quite dated now. Even if it did release last year, FarCry’s graphics and other features put it to shame.

Regardless, if I were to pick between FarCry or Half-Life 2, I would have to go with Half-Life 2 for sure. Why? Because the gameplay and story was just more fun to play. I really felt like I was a character in a movie, which had a decent story and held on to it. One of the worst things we see many games do, is that they start out with a nice story and then they take it off on some other mutant or psycho tangent.

So, score one for gameplay. FarCry had better graphics, but Half-Life 2’s gameplay will bring me back.

Now, let’s look at World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2

Both MMORPG games released close together. I had the chance to really play EverQuest 2 and learn it’s gameplay and graphics, but I denied a chance to play WoW after a failed attempt to get into the open beta (thanks GameSpy for the lame exclusives you had on World of Warcraft). Most of my arguments against WoW is really with it’s low-poly graphics engine. Although, there are many out there that would argue against me in order to defend WoW, they end up admitting the same conclusion in the end.

With EverQuest 2, my biggest complaint was with the gameplay. It just wouldn’t cut it at all as a single player and fails even more as an MMO, IMO anyway. It did have some nice graphics, which didn’t look low-poly, no matter how small the creatures were. But, it lacked the feeling of being a unique character and the missions and combat system within the stagnant environment really drags the gameplay down to a waste of money.

So, if I was really interested in playing one of these, I would most likely get my money and enjoyment out of World of Warcraft, over the waste of time in EverQuest 2. I think the middle-road MMORPG that offers a blend of both, will be the upcoming Guild Wars. But, more on this in the future.

To summarize then, for me, I would go for gameplay over graphics. But, there is a point where I draw the line with graphics. Since, I only have limited time to play (with work and family requiring time), I can be pretty selective. But, there are many others out there in the same boat.

This means that game developers really should take a break and analyze what gamers are really looking for in a game. As the next generation games are now a here generation, it’s time to look forward to another evolution to where game developers get with it, and start providing the right mix of features and deliver what gamers really want. Hopefully, in the process, we’ll see a shakeout in the industry where the copy-cats and wannabes fade off, leaving the real game developers that have the gamer in mind, rather than profits. Somewhere in the future, a game is coming to where we don’t have to make a choice between gameplay or graphics.

Until then, I’ll keep my eye out for the first game to satisfy all of the categories that would make a great game.

BTW, what would you choose?
Gameplay or Graphics?

Tuesday is the most popular day. What’s up with that?

8AM is the busiest hour of the day – almost twice as busy as any other time.

People from at least 11 different countries read this blog.

Almost 20% of people spend over 30 minutes on the site at a time.

A surprisingly high percentage of people who found this site via a search engine searched for “pepsi holiday spice”.

Including that last statement in this entry will probably increase that percentage.

A flatteringly high percentage of you have added this site to your ‘favorites.’

Thank you

I really like it. It combines some of the best features of Safari with the stability and rendering accuracy of the Mozilla engine. Plus, like Safari, it’s fast and incorporates tabbed browsing. It has some nice features of it’s own, which I’m still learning. Right now I’m loving the really cool real-time “find” feature. Oh, and Firefox is free free.

I’ll probably still use Safari for most things at home, if for no other reason than I’m comfortable with it and it’s so nicely incorporated into OS X, but at work I’m switching to Firefox. In fact, I’m using Firefox to post this right now.

Yet another reason to abandon Explorer. As if you needed another.

There’s a FireFox link on the right menu, for anyone wanting to try it.