Pretty on the outside, but World of Warcraft's beauty is only skin-deep.
Cons: Fast and accessible comes at the cost of a distinct lack of depth; repetitive quests; differences are cosmetic between races; pay-to-play.
World of Warcraft is a game that, as it's six-million-plus subscribers will attest, has nearly limitless appeal. Or appears to, anyway. Nearly anyone will love World of Warcraft from the first moment they pick up the game. But, as you continue to play throughout your first month, thankfully provided free, you begin to see a distinct pattern emerge in WoW that ultimately renders it too repetitive to deserve the vast awards and money that it has accrued.
WoW will stun you at first, once you install it, patch it, and log in, you're into the world and able to create your character. There are two factions in the game (as there are in the strategy series that WoW is based off of), the Alliance and the Horde, and each faction has four races each. Each race has th e pick of a certain number of classes out of the pool of 10. Some classes are available to nearly all races. The more limited ones are only available to two races. Anyway, once you pick your race and your class, you'll spawn into your starting location, and then the game will start.
The main difference between the races, other than the Faction that they belong to, is the starting location of the race. While any race is free to traverse the lands of other races of the Faction during the game, and can enter the areas of the opposing Faction at their own risk, each race has a separate starting point (except for Trolls and Gnomes, who share with other races), which are visually radically different from each other. The Dwarves and Gnomes, for example, start in a mountainous area blanketed with snow. Tauren start out in a grassy plains type of region with teepees and wells. Each race is also cosmetically different as well, the Tauren are slightly reminsicent of massive walking cows, Dwarves are short and stocky, etc.
One problem with WoW, though, is that ultimately the differences between the races are nearly never fundamental, but always esthetic. The only real thing to differentiate the races other than their looks are one or two largely inconsequential racial abilities and perhaps a slightly boosted propensity for a certain type of profession or skill. While this makes it so that you can play as any race without feeliing hampered, and they're all pretty much balanced, it also lends a sense of dilution to the game once you spend extended time with it: you can't really get a very different experience by making a different character with a different race.
One reason that WoW is so popular is that it's intuitive and extremely accessible. You don't have a tutorial, but even the more computer-illiterate people would find that unnecessary, all you have to help you are the occasional pop-up tool-tips and your own smarts. However, that's all you really need to play WoW. Click to move. Right-click on a monster to attack it. Click or use the number on the bar to use the spell on the monster, or yourself. And click on the guy with the big, prominent green exclamation mark over his/her head to receive a quest.
Quests. Questing will be your main consideration when it comes to how you invest your time in WoW. Questing is a smooth and enjoyable experience from the start. You get a quest, do what it tells you, come back, and get a nice, substantial experience bonus, and often an item on the side. However, since questing is really the meat of the game, you have to wonder why Blizzard didn't bother to put a little more variety into it. Quests are identical nearly invariably. You're either killing monsters or doing a delivery. And while each quest is surrounded by a nice window dressing that serves to immerse you more in the game and perhaps lends a bit of context to your actions, it really doesn't help the fact that you'll find yourself ultimately engaging in the same type of thing over, and over, and over. So while quests will be amazingly fun for your first couple weeks since one of the strengths of WoW is that you DO advance quickly and get tangible, meaningful rewards; you'll start to tire of it.
The fact that the quests are so repetitive isn't helped that the actual bare-bones gameplay of WoW tends to lead to repetition itself. In WoW, to engage in combat, which is often necessary, you right-click on your enemy. Then you use your skills, or spells, to damage the monster further or augment your person in some way. Spells will drain a certain amount of energy or mana or whatever it's called, depending on your class, from your pool, which will recharge. The main point of combat is how to manage your spells to defeat your enemy while not dying, since after your initial click, your character will continue to attack automatically. The number of spells you have will be determined by your level, as when you reach a certain level you can buy new spells from a trainer of your type of class. What you'll realize happening, though, is that whenever you combat a monster, you'll start to invariably use a certain combination of spells in a certain order to defeat monsters. And once you level, when you grab new spells? Well, if they're good enough, incorporate them into your order or try them out, and if they work or don't work, then you devise your new running order and stick with it until you get new spells in another couple levels. Exciting, isn't it? This only adds to the monotonous feeling already created by the similar quests.
There are a couple of other things available for you to do in WoW, although for the most part they are more diversions than true alternatives for questing.
The first one that is still in the PvE (Player-versus-Environment - no combat against fellow humans) portion of the game is the professions system. Each character has the ability to have any two professions. Most professions are either a raw materials profession, in which you gather materials from the wild outdoors as you go around, or of the producing variety, in which you manufacture materials to produce some kind of useful item, clothing, weapons, etc. While you can pick two unrelated choices, to be a self-sufficient character, you'll want to pick two professions that match up so that you can gather your raw materials and then use it to produce something. Professions are great, because the stuff you get is actually USEFUL and you can actually do stuff with it without a huge investment of time or hours of working it up. That said, they aren't really a viable alternative to going out questing to take up a bunch of your time. This is because professions are more something you do all the time while you quest. You're not going to find any more materials out looking for them than if you're just questing around and gather them as you see them. And actually producing the stuff takes mere seconds.
The other major distraction for some people is Player-versus-Player action, or PvP. The context for PvP is mostly set using the Factions. Players can't really attack other players of the same faction even on PvP 'realms', or servers, except in friendly non-fatal and impromptu duels that you can challenge a fellow adventurer to at any time and takes very little time. The real stage for PvP action, and an added in portion of the game that wasn't available at launch, is the Battlegrounds. Battlegrounds are exactly what they sound like, big, instanced battles between several players of the two different factions that play Capture the Flag or something of the sort. There are a few Battlegrounds, although the top two do have level requirements, and are comparatively more epic in scope. Battlegrounds are great fun, very fast-paced, and extremely hectic, and are addictive and a nice change of pace from the PvE fighting against monsters. However, PvP Battlegrounds do have a couple drawbacks. First off, teams don't really coordinate very well at all, besides the perfunctory forming of raids (really big groups) and the occasional frantically typed sighting of a flag-bearer, and there's no voice support out of the box, which, as in any team-focused type of game, would be a big help. Also, since Battlegrounds obviously can't happen between unbalanced teams, you have to wait until there are enough people on both sides to start one, essentially joining a queue. While in the queue, you can go around and do whatever you want, however, when you play the Battlegrounds, you're warped back out to the major city, no matter where you were before, essentially making it so that you can't do any questing during the potentially long queue-time or long travel since you'll have to waste a bunch of time. Plus, the Battlegrounds really aren't that long, at least the lowest level one or so, and it's annoying to have to wait in queues that are potentially as long as the battle you're about to play. There's no real way that I can propose to solve this problem, but it's an annoying one anyway, and Battlegrounds really take too much down-time so that you'll eventually come back to Questing.
There's one other arena for PvP gameplay, on certain realms. As has been implied, there are different types of realms in WoW. The majority of these are either PvE (Player versus Environment) or PvP (Player versus Player). There's only one real difference here. In PvE, even against players in other factions, you can't attack unprovoked except in the Battlegrounds. In PvP, any character can attack any other character of the other Faction at any other time. While PvE is less consistent with the game world, PvP is detrimental to the gameplay, as PvP servers are littered with high-level jerks who apparently have nothing better to do than kill low-level players of the opposing factions. This interrupts totally harmless low-level players who are doing questing, and although death really holds rather harmless consequences at first, it does constitute a distinct annoyance and death penalties get worse if they're in quick succession. Basically, it's an almighty pain, so I suggest you just play on PvE if you want to do questing.
One thing that can't be complained about WoW is the visuals. Which isn't to say that WoW is cutting-edge technology, or even was at time of release in late 2004. In fact, it's positively low-poly. Nevertheless, this is still considered an extremely pretty game, because it features positively astounding art direction. While all the starting points, as previously mentioned, are radically different, and the zones that you don't start out are also varied as well, there is still a sense of tremendous cohesion in the world thanks to a raw cartoonish style. Azeroth is littered with awe-inspiring sights as well (some distinctly Tolkien-ish), making the process of exploring the world - which takes up a lot of time, since you can't travel fast anywhere without going there first - enjoyable and quite pretty.
Sound is not a sticking point either. Spells have appropriate, and suitably powerful effects that fit the gameplay very well. The clincher, though, is the score, which is made up of beautifully orchestral music that is varied. The only real complaint is that the music repeats often, but it's good enough that you won't mind.
The replay value of WoW is a point of criticism for many of WoW's detractors. However, since launch, WoW has continued to improve, and to bolster the end-game they have released many multi-man and complex raids with uber-loot for level 60 players with nothing to do. This appeals a lot to hard-core players, and silenced most of the criticisms, but for people less attracted to the prospect of loot and playing with super-nerds all the time, they don't really have all that much to do at level 60. Nevertheless, I think that if you like the game enough to take a character to level 60, you won't have any problem simply creating another character of different class and/or race and enjoying it all the way to level 60, and that alone will net you another few hundred hours of play-time, plenty if you're not a hard-core player that lives and breathes WoW. The only other thing about replay value is that, beyond the first month of play, there is a monthly fee required to play this game as is standard for the genre.
I can't really pretend that I'm not in the minority with my opinion about WoW. Most people love WoW's accessibility and would absolutely abhor my complaints about lack of depth and repetitiveness. I can't really say that the average gamer wouldn't like it, because I know I'm wrong. Nevertheless, WoW is NOT as good as it should be with all the hype. There are better games out there to play, although if you want to investigate the genre of MMORPG there's probably no better game for you to play.