I know what you’re thinking. Why now? Well to answer that question I have to mainly put the blame on my wife. I have always been interested in World of Warcraft from afar. All of the lore and the community it built was something I was always interested in. A majority of my gaming experience has mainly been on a console or handheld device. So I was never into playing games on my PC. My wife is a huge fan of Diablo 3. We are anticipating the release of the fourth installment, and let me tell you, she can’t wait. But until then she keeps playing Diablo 3 and just doing the seasonal stuff, which has grown tiresome for me. But one day I joked around about playing WoW and she immediately jumped on board. We both have Macs, so I was a little skeptical of it running properly and whatnot but here we are: questing our butts off and approaching level fifty. Starting WoW this late in the game has been an interesting ride so far.
All the Stuff
One good thing about starting WoW so late is that most of the DLC is already in the base game. So we have access to a ton of content, which is great because she loves doing all the quests. Our subscription gets us all the way to level 110 which covers a good amount of the content already released. It’s nice that we don’t have to worry about purchasing any additional content (at least not yet). Our initial download will keep us busy for a while.
Any Question Answered
Another great thing about jumping into WoW in 2019 is that any possible question we have about a certain quest has been answered a hundred times over. We have turned to Google multiple times already in search of certain quest situations, tips on how to play our characters and much more. It’s nice to know there is a plethora of information out there from people that have played for years.
It’s Still Fun
At the end of the day, it’s still questing. Talking to NPCs, going to retrieve that item and to bring it back to them. I’ve done it before so it’s nothing new to me but the world of Azeroth is a rich one and the stories inside of it can be compelling. A good amount of the quests just seem to be simple help this person then go here and help this person, but some quests are very interesting and grab my attention with their fun stories and gameplay. We try to read the dialogue sometimes but mostly we just want to keep trucking on to the next quest.
The combat is fine and we have done a lot of it. I am a warrior and she is a mage. We have started getting into the groove of how we approach harder fights and she is really getting the hang of controlling her character. We did our first dungeon the other day and let me tell you, it was a treat. I have a general understanding of how MMO dungeons go. Everyone has their role, and you stick to it to make sure the team succeeds. My wife had not done a dungeon before in an MMO so she was a little lost but quickly started to understand what was going on. She really liked how each boss was a little different in terms of mechanics and how the way the battles play out. So it’s fun to play through all these situations and experience it all for the first time together.
Old Look New Experience
For us, WoW is a new experience in its entirety. It’s a fresh change of pace from just running Rifts in Diablo 3 until our arms fall off. But one thing that is kind of hard to get past are the visuals, which is kind of on our end too. We are both playing on Macs (not super beefy ones either) so the world around us looked kind of dated. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t ruin the experience but I can’t help but feel like if we had better graphics that we could be even more immersed in the experience. Textures are pretty rough looking and pretty much every model in the game is super simple. Which we expected. It’s interesting coming from games like Anthem and Destiny where the visuals were simply breathtaking at times. I always tell myself that I don’t really care about the graphics that much and I guess I really don’t. I’m playing a game from 2004 and am still really enjoying it.
Overall the experience has been good. I honestly didn’t know how it would go with the wife. Most games are hit and miss with her but she seems to still really enjoy WoW. We will continue our journey and see how far it takes us.
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