World of Warcraft review
We're going to need a bigger Internet.
If there's a downside to this, it's that WOW's social side can these days seem a little businesslike, a touch mechanical. Almost everyone is polite and capable, almost everyone knows the game inside out, and almost everyone seems engaged in a ruthlessly efficient race to the finish line. The riotous, chaotic amazement of the game's first year, when the world discovered WOW and ran amok, has abated. And, just as it ever was, this slight chill is at its sharpest when you reach maximum level.
Blizzard has bent over backwards to offer more options to level 70s than were available to 60s in the original game: fresh dungeon challenges for teams of 5, 10 and 25 players, the "heroic" difficulty setting, the Arena system for player-versus-player combat, and most notably the new, repeatable daily quests, which mean that even diehard solo players always have something to do.
The balance of power among the highest echelons of players seems to have swung from large raiding guilds to small arena teams. This bodes well for WOW's forthcoming move into eSports, but you can argue all night as to whether it actually makes the endgame more or less accessible (the organisational demands are lower, but the subculture is arguably even more intimidating).
But despite this tremendous effort on Blizzard's part, the silent majority of players will still find that WOW's dynamism inevitably ebbs away when that sweet, sweet levelling stops. It's an inescapable product of the game's greatest strength: World of Warcraft is all about the journey.
It's about exploring what must surely be the greatest gameworld ever created, an impossibly rich, vibrant, varied universe stuffed with beauty, soul, high drama and low humour. It's about drinking in the spectacle and the detail - although technically undemanding, WOW is still one of the best-looking games on PC and far more visually exciting than most other MMOs (thanks to the Blizzard's world-beating art staff, who could imbue four polygons with more personality than the entirety of some lesser online worlds).
It's about discovering the myriad idiosyncrasies of your chosen class or classes: the gradual dawning that even the most basic archetypes, from healer to warrior, have been embellished with countless opportunities for hybridisation, flexibility and subtle interplay with other classes. And it's about doing all this unimpeded by the game's interface and presentation, which are as slick and accessible as you could wish.
WOW doesn't just dominate the MMO landscape because it's the proverbial goose's golden egg. WOW dominates because, in pure quality terms, it's in a class of its own. Blizzard is constantly working to keep it that way, to improve not just on its weaknesses (the grind, the endgame) but its strengths (the interface, the world-building). It's made huge leaps forward on all those fronts in the last few months alone, and as a result, WOW is an even more inviting prospect for new or returning players than it ever was. It is, in short, a masterpiece.