back again

What better to do on a rainy October day, then catch up on some over due blogging. Much of my blogging "vacation" was due to short-lived infatuation with world of warcraft which seems to be at end. Now things are in high gear preparing for our wedding in November. I've also stopped working on SOT (my mud in planning) to work on a new multimedia project (potentially lucrative mind you).

I have very few if any legitimate complaints about World of Warcraft. Contrary to my initial concerns, the game was not all graphic hype with poor gameplay. It was evident Blizzard paid a lot of attention to Game Balance and the leveling which while many believe was accomplished too easily, I found to fit my busy schedule just right. Two aspects of the game that really won me over were the mindblowing universe and interaction with other players. WoW is huge. So large that you can't fairly compare to other non MMORPG's. Just running between two of the large human cities Ironforge and Storwind could take you well over an hour. Its hard not to fall in love with home cities of main races. Although I experienced heavy lag in the main cities until I upgraded to 1GB ram, the architecture and and immense size of these areas are indescribable unless you play the game. WoW uses the idea of instances to allow multiple players to group together to enter a dungeon and do battle with more difficult NPC's. These instances derive their name due to the fact they are created uniquely for each group that enters them allowing multiple copies of the instance to be entered at the same time without one party having to wait until another party is through. Here is where player interaction really shines. The large expansive world suddenly shrinks allowing for more of group based intimate experience. I get a similar feeling like I got when we I used to play multiplayer Gauntlet for Gamecube. Even better is when you can get the rest of your party to use application such as Teamspeak which allow everyone to use their pc microphone to talk over the internet.