World Of Warcraft
The latest part in the Warcraft saga is World of Warcraft The official announcement was on the ECTS 2001 in London on September 2. Read here about the game in all it's forms.
The online game
World of Warcraf is a MMORPG, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. This means that you, the player, will wander across the Warcraft world together with thousands of other human players. The amount of other players isn't revealed yet, it depends on the size of the server on which the game is based, the bandwith of the players and the size of the online world, but a Blizzard developer said that there will be enough people in the world to make you believe it's a real one. Something between 10 players and 6 billion, I guess...
Like most online games, the player will have to pay an amount of money each month to play. This will be about $10 a month, like the most online games ask.
As said it's an online game, which has the consequence that it isn't playable off-line.
Also, the size of the world is too big to load it in your computer memory in one time, so the world is split up in different zones. You load the zone in which you are in your computer, and when you leave your zone and go to another, you'll have to load the new zone. In the press conference demo the loading went quite smooth, but it is not sure if it goes the same way on your home computer with an analog modem, while tons of other players are in the same world.
The gameplay
You can just go sit in a chair in World of Warcraft and stay there, but that isn't the goal of the game. You'll receive quests that you can solve, you can trade goods, or fight your co-players. You can see this all from different camera angles, including 1st and 3rd person, in full 3d. There is a menu bar on the lowest part of the screen, a portrait of you and your health and mana bar on the upper left and a map on the upper right. But this isn't seen in all screenshots, which may mean that they can be clicked away so you have a full screen view, like in Baldur's Gate II. The fighting will take place with the mouse and keyboard shortcuts and will be very simple.
More to come.....