2008 Woodie Awards
Take a look inside online world games
Heather Newman
Issue date: 1/29/07 Section: Entertainment
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Heather Newman
Detroit Free Press (MCT)
The "World of Warcraft" PC game is so good it should come with a warning label: Danger! Product inside is habit-forming. Do not take without strictly monitoring the progress of your life in the real, non-virtual world!
The recently released "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade" is the extra stream of honey that makes that addictive shot go down smooth.
But what is an online world game?
Games like "World of Warcraft" start by having you create a character, a person who will be your representative in game. You can choose which side of the game's epic battles you want to be on: Alliance (humans, dwarves, night elves, gnomes) or Horde (orcs, trolls, bull-like tauren and undead).
You make some basic selections for what your character will look like and you choose what class the character will belong to. Then you hop into a fantasy world online, where there are missions to complete alone and with other people, dungeons to explore, items to acquire and crafting skills to perfect.
Some of the monsters and people you see on-screen are controlled by the online servers the game runs on, but each of the other characters you see running around the landscape is actually another person.
Players generally divide their time among several activities: questing, crafting, player-versus-player competitions and so-called running instances, which involve exploring the game's dungeons either in small groups or in 40-person mobs called raids.
The genre is technically called a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MORPG, or MMO for short).
Detroit Free Press (MCT)
The "World of Warcraft" PC game is so good it should come with a warning label: Danger! Product inside is habit-forming. Do not take without strictly monitoring the progress of your life in the real, non-virtual world!
The recently released "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade" is the extra stream of honey that makes that addictive shot go down smooth.
But what is an online world game?
Games like "World of Warcraft" start by having you create a character, a person who will be your representative in game. You can choose which side of the game's epic battles you want to be on: Alliance (humans, dwarves, night elves, gnomes) or Horde (orcs, trolls, bull-like tauren and undead).
You make some basic selections for what your character will look like and you choose what class the character will belong to. Then you hop into a fantasy world online, where there are missions to complete alone and with other people, dungeons to explore, items to acquire and crafting skills to perfect.
Some of the monsters and people you see on-screen are controlled by the online servers the game runs on, but each of the other characters you see running around the landscape is actually another person.
Players generally divide their time among several activities: questing, crafting, player-versus-player competitions and so-called running instances, which involve exploring the game's dungeons either in small groups or in 40-person mobs called raids.
The genre is technically called a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MORPG, or MMO for short).
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