WoW Starter Edition

Matthew and I have been playing the World of Warcraft Starter Edition for the last several days. We created a warrior whose tale began in a town under siege by a vast horde of werewolves. Our hero defeated countless monsters, worked to unite rival factions within the city, helped rescue and evacuate civilians, and even got to operate a gigantic cannon during a frenzied werewolf assault on the townspeople's last bastion of defense. Along the way, he was bitten by a werewolf and, at the worst possible moment, he transformed into a monster and turned against his fellow townspeople.

Cool story, right? If this were a paper-and-pencil campaign, I'd be counting the minutes between game sessions. Unfortunately, in WoW, the game play doesn't live up to the epic scope of the narrative. For the most part, it follows this sort of pattern: You talk to an NPC leader and receive a quest to kill a certain number of a particular type of monster. You wander around the area, kill the specified monsters, and return to the leader for a small reward. Then you're assigned to kill a different number of a different type of creature, and so on and so forth. If it gets this repetitive after just a few days -- and since I have zero interest in player-vs.-player combat -- I can't see paying for a subscription.

Still, the free version is a very enjoyable game experience and I highly recommend giving it a try. I don't see an expiration date on my Starter Edition account, so I intend to keep playing for a while. I've also created a human paladin, and the setting and story for his initial adventure are completely different from what we experienced with the werewolf warrior. I suspect I'll create a character of each race just to see what all the initial adventures are like. The character classes also play quite differently; there's a steep learning curve, but my friend Kyle, a WoW veteran of many years, has tagged along with both the werewolf and the paladin, and his advice has been very helpful in getting up to speed on how the game works.

Amusing side-note: WoW is full of respawning monsters, so there's never a lack of beasties to slay. However, Matthew had never seen a game in which fresh foes just appeared out of nowhere, so he assumed that they had been there the whole time, but had just been invisible until attacking us and thereby revealing themselves. With no small amount of exasperation, he said: "There sure are a lot of invisible monsters in this world!"