Originally, I intended to review World of Warcraft as a whole. Unfortunately, that's a bit difficult. The game is so large and has so many facets that I would have to get back into it and play for hours upon hours to do a fair review of the entire World of Warcraft experience. Instead, I'm going to focus on the character creation.
As is so often the case, I owe you a bit of background before I start spewing forth my opinions. I was pretty hard into Wow a few years ago. With a group of friends, mostly met online, I ran a raiding guild. My husband started out as the primary raid leader. As time went on, we increased our officer core, and they took on more and more of the load. Frankly, we played enough that it was like having a second job. At first, we loved it. As time went on, the shine wore off. Eventually, we stopped playing. Every once in a while, we would log in again, say hello to old friends, then wander away.
When they offered Diablo III for free when you signed up for a year of Wow, we both went ahead and did so. It wasn't really worth it for me, as I have only logged onto Wow a few times and played a total of twenty minutes in Diablo III. It seems we may start getting more use out of our accounts, though, as I have a new laptop, and Mark is the proud owner of a new desktop.*
Together, we got on our new computers and logged into Wow.** When you create a new character in Wow, you have a series of decisions to make. First you choose which faction: Horde or Alliance. I've played both, but my first toon was an ally. She's Horde now, due to a server and faction change, but I look fondly upon my time in the Alliance.
For our new characters, we decided to roll Alliance. There are descriptions throughout the creation process to aid you in your choices. This is a good thing, as your next choice is race. I'm not going to list them all here because I'm lazy. Most of you already know the races, and if you don't, the creation screens will brief you on them. We had decided to play space goats, better known as Draenei.
Once you've chosen your race, you can choose gender, which is pretty self explanatory. Now, it's time to choose your class. Once again, I'm not going to list them all.*** You can easily discover the basics of each class, such as their approach to battle. I remember reading them all when I first started. Now, the descriptions may have changed, but at the time, they did a good job of preparing me.
I realize you're on the edge of your seat, wondering if you get to tweak the appearance of your character. Let me assure you that you do! The cosmetic changes you can make are pretty basic and not too varied, but you do have some freedom. It would be nice to someday have customization as varied as Mass Effect or Skyrim, but it may not be feasible with this type of game. Not being able to grasp the vast amounts of information flowing around stifles my ability to understand if this is something that could change. If I had never seen greater customization, I would have been content. That being said, I'm still pretty happy.
The most difficult part of character creation, for some people, is choosing a name. When Mark and I specifically sit down and create characters together, we like the names to somehow be related. They end up reflecting something we find interesting at the time. It took us over an hour to come up with two names that we both liked that weren't taken that related to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Over. An. Hour. That's pretty sad, but it was also very fun. We jumped around as to what we wanted them to reflect, but in the end Starpony and Twinkleshine won out.
World of Warcraft does a lot of things right. Character creation is definitely one of those things. They've made it easy for someone who has not played a lot of these types of games to make a character and join in the fun. Everything is simply explained and pretty intuitive. If you haven't played WoW yet, you may want to try it. It's a neat experience, and the initial outlay can be pretty cheap now.
*He's been without one for a year. After a gentle nudge, I convinced him that he should get one.
**Of course, it wasn't that easy. Mark had to install it on both of our computers, get it all up to date, and set up any add-ons we needed. I refused to take part in that process.
***Google is your friend.
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