Overall score on pook's 100-point system (TM): 95 rounded to 100. A great ambitious game that'll have you clearing out your gaming time for a long while.
Graphics (30/30, judged by era)- 2 years on at the time of play, WoW still holds its own against all comers. While it doesn't have the flashies effects anymore or the most detailed models, what it lacks in finesse it makes up in pure content overload. The game is simply huge, and if you haven't played an MMORPG yet, it's larger than you can imagine. This huge world is populated with all manner of nasties, towns and other locations and other players-tons and tons of other players, particularly in cities. I think it's this aspect that causes the game to be conservative on the poly count, since you never know when your area might be populated with 30 other players, you have to keep the level of detail prepared for when you get a large group of players around otherwise your system will chug. Beyond that, there is a nice visual style to make up for pure realism, with very bright colors and attractive color palettes, and generally good animations. There are lots of graphical surprises, whether it's suddenly seeing a giant sentinel cross your path or coming upon a tucked away but very pretty location.
Sound- FX/Voice (10/10) Blizzard has long had high sound production values and this game is no different, with lots of great fx, ambient noise and sound indicators.
Sound- Music (8/10) It's difficult to judge the soundtrack here. While there are certain tracks that are fantastic, from the LoTR-inspired theme to other location-specific tracks that sport an impressive choir, there are also lots of ambient tracks that barely make themselves known, which is bad. However, the music is written well enough that it never gets old, which is an impressive feat in a game this long.
Gameplay- Length/Lastability/Replay (15/15) I have generally had a beef with pay-for-play games, but I probably underestimated their length. Given that I have a dollar-per-hour expectation, WoW exceeds this ratio probably more than any other game. I've clocked well over a hundred hours already and the game continues to be compelling.
Gameplay- Story (5/5) I'm not so sure what the overarching story of the game is, if any. Certainly there's no end-game. However, within each race/faction, there is a decent amount of story spread out and doled out in the nearly infinite number of quests, many of which are multi-part and reveal the backstory of the game and its current conflicts. Whether any of it sticks in your mind as narrative is another issue, but its compelling enough at the time to get you doing quests, yet you can ignore much of it by simply skipping the text and going for the quest goals.
Gameplay- Game Design (27/30)-Again, this is about content-overload. The game would probably have been better titled World of Diablo, since it shares much more with Diablo than it does the Warcraft franchise, and it's a little puzzling to think about why they didn't do just that (although there was more IP to work with in the Warcraft world, I suppose). From character creation, management and skills to visual customization and the quest structure-all of this comes from Diablo. Like most RPGs, the quests vary within a limited range of fetch and kill quests, but with enough variety to make them by-and-large entertaining, although sometimes you need to kill way more creatures than would be logically necessary to get the required items. For instance, every Ogre has knucklebones, but you might need to kill 4 Ogres to get one. That sort of thing. There's also the always fun find-an-item-on-a-spider-corpse.
Getting a character to Level 60 (max in the base game) is your main end-game and it'll take hundreds of hours to do so. The game breaks this into 3 basic stages where at levels 20 and 40 you suddenly get access to important upgrades that keep you shooting for these smaller goals, and of course there are smaller upgrades along the way. The game is so huge that it's unlikely you'll explore it all with one character, and exploring the opposing factions areas is difficult. So, it's entirely conceivable that you will happily play one character for each faction, or more, before you feel you've exhausted the game's content to a sufficient degree.
Social elements factor in heavily, and even if you favor soloing like I do, you're likely to enjoy community aspects, including grouping for quests.
Negatives that keep this from a 30 include incredibly slow travel from place to place: even with flight and boat transport, you often spend long periods of time running from place to place, or even flying. This is the primary downside of the game. As well, I think leveling could be a little faster and not hurt the length of the game since if you could hit 60 sooner, you're more likely to want to start again with multiple characters as I thought I might. As it stands, 2 will probably be all I can handle (but recall, that's hundreds of hours of play).
FINAL THOUGHTS: As someone who went in not liking the pay-for-play system and who doesn't generally like playing with strangers, that the game overcame these prejudices to rank among my highest scores says a lot.
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