Ten Years Later, World Of Warcraft (WOW)
Ten Years Later, World Of Warcraft (WOW)
It is always nice to launch a product that becomes a social phenomenon which leaves people saying WOW! In the case of the World of Warcraft games, the WoW is literal, an abbreviation of the game’s name. But it is also a wowing experience to play indeed.
The Warcraft series was first launched in 1994 by Blizzard Entertainment. It went on to release two more parts, the last of which was The Frozen World, the third instalment of Warcraft. Then, to mark the game’s 10th anniversary, Blizzard Entertainment announced they would release the World of Warcraft. The fourth instalment of the game was released in 2004 and picks up from the story line that the game had maintained in the previous part.
World of Warcraft is a brilliant ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game’ (MMPRPG) game. Which is why perhaps it does not come as a surprise that within three years of the game’s release, and 13 years since Warcraft was first introduced, there are nine million online gamers of World of Warcraft. China alone has almost three and half million gamers online, with American gamers coming in as the second largest group with about two and a half million members, while all of Europe has about a million gamers online so far.
But the game has come under some criticism too, mainly because of how addictive it has proved to be to the millions of players world wide. In Europe, gamers who downloaded a free trial version of the game also soon started experiencing an unprecedented volume of spam mails sent to them, all related to the virtual world of WoW.
The World of Warcraft franchise has grown exponentially too. Already there are board games and trading cards available based on the game. Not only that, Legendary Pictures has tied with Blizzard Entertainment to make a full feature film based on the universe of World of Warcraft. The film makers promise it will stay as true as possible to the original game. The game’s designers, Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton, are all expected to work closely with the project’s development.
The game is compatible with both Windows as well as Mac’s OX system. And in either case it requires at least a free space of 6 GB on the hard drive and a 512 RAM or higher in the computer. The game also requires a 32MB video ram and a video card for windows/PCs and an ATI or NVIDIA for Macs and the game can be played using either the keyboard or the mouse. The internet speed isn’t very demanding either, since you can play it online with an internet connection at a speed of at least 56 kilobytes per second or higher. The game is available in both a CD pack, with 4 CDs for regular and 5 discs for special editions, and a DVD version with 1 disc.
Computer games evolve rapidly and World of Warcract has taken Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game to a new level. If you want an amazing experience of exploring, battling and surviving in an alternate virtual universe, World of Warcraft is where you want to start.