Product Description

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft didn't invent the online role-playing genre, but it certainly benefits from the missteps of other titles that have come before. A mind-boggling array of improvements in graphics, gameplay, networking, and interface -- really every category -- makes this game the crown prince of the genre, a great starting place for newbies, and a challenge to any other MMORPG currently in the works.

The game's beautifully rendered locations are filled with small details, such as flying birds and flowing water.

A History of Conflict
World of Warcraft takes place just four years after the real-time strategy Warcraft series, which chronicles a 25 year struggle between the Alliance (humans, dwarves, gnomes, and elves) and the Horde (orcs, tauren, trolls, and undead). Even though there's tons of accumulated story to the series, new players should not be daunted. The background is there for you to explore, but you don't have to tread a lot of Azeroth history to get into the action.

The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature.

The game looks magnificent. There's plenty of detail and variety to the landscapes and interiors, and the artwork has a refreshingly playful style. There's not a lot of variety in the character creation process, but with all the skills and proficiencies to combine in the game, World of Warcraft focuses its customisation not on the appearance of your character but rather on the character of your character. The game lets you adopt any two trade skills, regardless of character race or class, and combine those skills in useful ways. If you choose skinning and leatherworking, for example, you can fashion bags from the carcasses of monsters you defeat, which will allow you to carry even more inventory items.

Expanded Commerce
You can sell the items you make, find, and loot through a variety of outlets. Like any role-playing game, World of Warcraft has merchants who will buy your cast-off items for fixed prices, but you can also sell to other players at your own price through in-game chat or by leaving it with one of the auction houses located across the map. This virtual free market is a game within the game, like Monopoly somehow inserted into the middle of Chess. You can even send items C.O.D. to other players via the game's mail system.

The game's Quest Log keeps track of up to 20 quests at a time.

In other online role-playing games, starting players have to invest dozens of hours whacking at small prey and doing other odd jobs one at a time to gradually "level up" to more interesting challenges. World of Warcraft lets players accept a variety of quests -- up to 20 at a time without penalty for abandoning any of them before they're complete. The makers boast 2,000 existing quests with more being added, many of them noncombat in nature. Where some games only grant experience through battle, World of Warcraft grants experience for exploring and fulfilling quests too.

A Level Playing Field
There's also a built-in handicap for casual players where your character enters a rest state when you log off from the game. The longer you're logged off (up to a week), the bigger the experience bonus you'll get when you return to battle. An enemy tagging feature -- the player who lands the first attack on an enemy claims the loot for himself or his party -- prevents onlookers from swooping in and pilfering items from a monster that you brought down. That resolves a common complaint of other titles.

Icons and pop-ups help put complex controls easily within reach.

Most games severely penalise players when they die in-game, usually by shaving experience points, funds, or both. In World of Warcraft, death just relocates your ghost to the nearest graveyard, and the only penalty is the time it takes you to get back to resurrect your character's corpse.

All of this makes for a very complicated game, but the well-designed interface puts all the game's elements into icons either visible framing the action or within a simple keystroke. The enemy's artificial intelligence is quite strong too: Monsters will join nearby fights to aid their comrades, switch targets strategically mid-battle, and ambush players. The map system fills in details on places you've visited, so you always know where you are and where you've been.

Overall, World of Warcraft is a game that's easy to learn, challenging to master, beautiful to watch, and tons of fun to play. --Porter B. Hall

System Requirements
	Minimum	Recommended
Operating System	PC: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista (with latest Service Packs) Mac: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer
CPU	PC: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+ Mac: PowerPC G5 1.6 GHz or Intel Core Duo processor	PC: Dual-core processor, such as Intel Pentium D or AmD Athlon 64 X2 Mac: Intel 1.8 GHz processor or better
Graphics Hardware	PC: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transfor and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce2 class card or better Mac: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 64 MB VRAM, such as ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600 class card or better	PC: 3D Graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capabilities with 128 MB VRAM, such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better Mac: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM, such as ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA 7600 class card or better.
Memory	PC: 512 MB (1 GB for Vista) Mac: 1 GB	PC: 1 GB (2 GB for Vista) Mac: 2 GB
Hard Drive Space	15 GB of free space
All Platform Requirements	Keyboard and mouse, required for controls. Other input devices not supported. Active broadband Internet connection required to play.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1118 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: ACTIVISION
• Released on: 2007-10-19
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platforms: Windows XP, Mac OS X
• Dimensions: 2.26 pounds

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Awesome... although incredibly time-consuming!
Where to start? How about the the original Warcraft game and how awesome it was. It was an innovative Strategy game that was launched back in the 90's, with a great storyline and awesome missions. You even had the option of choosing the human (alliance) or the orcs (horde) races. The second edition "Tides of Darkness" had enhanced graphics and gameplay, and came out during the same decade. It and was a blast. The 21st century version of the game came out as Warcraft III, followed by an expansion. The most incredible features of Warcraft III included awesome 3D graphics, new races (dwarves, undead, elves...), "neutral" armies/enemies, online play, and most importantly, as you should know, the usage of heroes - which I believed sparked the idea of creating an online RPG (Role Playing Game) with just heroes... --> which is WOW!

World of Warcraft is enormous... in fact it could almost be considered too big. I remember reading a review where someone mentioned the size of the world of WOW territories put together amasses to the size of Switzerland. Just give it a thought for a moment. Switzerland - the whole country!! Whoever embarks on this RPG adventure should be aware that this is not a game that can be finished. That is the whole point of online RPG's (MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). There is no set "objective" in this game, other than enjoying it, and that depends on what sort of gamer/person you are. This means you might find different ways of enjoying this game compared to other people, but rest assured there is an infinite variety of options in WOW to achieve that.

What I enjoy most is exploring every single corner of the land in order to reveal what the map looks like. In doing this, you will encounter roads and paths full of different creatures and monsters leading to a variety of caves, mountains, wells, villages, cities, watch posts, houses, and an ongoing etcetera. Eventually, you will come across NPC's (Non Player Characters) who sell goods and give quests. Upon completing quests, you will gain experience, and upon gaining experience you will become stronger. Quests can be anything from a humble task of carrying goods form one place to the other, to killing a specific number monsters. This is a rewarding experience as you will get money and/or items (weapons, armor, etc) that evolve your character in skills and performance. Ultimately, you will interact with other players and will eventually form a virtual friendship with them, help each other in quests and trading items.

This is all too good though. The problem for most users who are "in love" with the game is that they spend too much time on it, literally. Some people I know have spent so much time on it because they could not get unhooked, that they ended up losing touch of friends and living an unhealthy lifestyle: they slept very little and in wrong patterns because they'd stay up all night, they'd eat very badly (mostly microwaveable meals or take-aways because they could not be bothered to spend time cooking) and they did not exercise whatsoever. I've even heard of some people ending their relationships over this game.

When I started, I had the 14-day trial on the original edition of WOW, and on the 8th day I quit. I saw it was becoming too addictive for me as I wanted to improve my character as much as I could and would try to do every single quest. I found it hard to stop playing as there is always something to do right in front of you, like killing that one last raptor which will finish a quest, or mine that copper vein over there... you don't realise bit everything in WOW leads to something else, and by the time you realise you'll have played for 2 hours and not even done something you wanted to do in the first place.

I have rejoined because 5 of my best friends are playing it and have invited me to experience playing this game with friends, which is supposedly more fun as you know the people you are playing with (and there is no trust issue).

I think the trick in WOW is to enjoy every bit of land and every moment you play. If you just aim at becoming level 70 you will not enjoy the game and by doing this you will have missed the whole purpose of any game. Do not hurry towards achieving higher levels by boring yourself with quests and actions you would not do normally. Do not belong to a group/clan that uses you or does not give you game satisfaction. Do not forget you are in front of a computer!

Cutting a long story short: have fun, enjoy the game in your own way, do not play too much otherwise you'll end up boring and stressing yourself out of it and end up angry. Do not worry about your level as there will always be someone better than you and there is nothing you can do about that - just comfort yourself in the knowledge that, probably unlike them, you've got a life!


Regarding this battlechest, i think it is incredibly good value! it comes with two awesome and really helpful fun-to-read strategy guides too!

WoW indeed!
World of Warcraft has become famous, and in some circles infamous, for being a highly addictive game. This pack contains both the original game and the first expansion, giving you full access to the game. Also included are Strategy Guides for both games, which is a very welcome addition.

Amazon currently sells the base game and the expansion for £9.98 each, making this pack cheaper to buy, plus you get the guides throw in effectively for free making it a very worthwhile buy.

If you've never played WoW before then I suggest heading to their website, where they offer a 10 day trial. Make the most of those 10 days to get a feel for the different races and classes, then buy this pack to continue playing for the best price.

Apparently, WoW has over 7 million registered users. That many people can't be wrong, so give it a go and see if you don't enjoy it yourself.

Great game - out of date books?
WoW is the world's most popular online RPG. If you're wondering whether to try it, I say 'go for it'. Read the rave reviews on the product pages for the game and the Burning Crusade, and believe the hype. It is as rich and varied as people say it is.

I would hesitate to recommend buying this pack though. Although it seems like a bargain price, the game, the expansion, and guides to both, for around £25, I am suspicious of the inclusion of the books.

UNLESS both have been extensively revised in recent months, and I have not heard anything to this effect, they will both be largely irrelevant.

I bought the guide to the Burning Crusade expansion pack a few days after its release. Because of the constant 'tuning' process inherent in MMO's, and introduction of new content to keep the game fresh, the book was largely irrelevant within a few months. I can only imagine how much the guide to WoW itself must be dated by now.

A lot of the basic information will still be accurate - guides to geography and lore for example. But anything with numbers involved, i.e. spells and abilities, loot attributes, has most likely been changed several times since the books were published. There is also a huge amount of new content in the worlds of Azeroth and Outland that will not be in the books.

So, not to say they are totally useless, but you might find yourself scratching your head a few times wondering why the descriptions given in the guides do not match what you are seeing on your screens.

My advice - buy WoW and the Burning Crusade separately, you can get them for less than £20 in the shops nowadays, and get your information on quests and so on from tha intawebz. Most of this stuff tends to get put through the tubes pretty quickly so save yourself a bit of cash.