I recently received a gift of two copies of World of Warcraft. I had been trying to stay away from MMORPG games because once I start playing a game I tend to get sucked into it until I beat it. Since a MMORPG has no ending, you can see how this would be a bad situation.

Of course, I have played demos of some of them anyway, but I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the gameplay in most of them. It tends to be extremely repetitious. Unfortunately, World of Warcraft doesn’t fall into that category. The game is extremely entertaining. Combined with the fact that I got 2 copies — and therefore, I’ve been playing with my wife too — this is definately something that’s a fun way to pass the time. A lot of time. In fact, any extra time that you might have available, and then some.

World of Warcraft is so far the best MMORPG I’ve tried. I won’t go into too much detail as there are already a plethora of reviews on the Internet. It seems to have enough built-in quests to keep you busy even if you played it by yourself as if it were a single-player role-playing game. There are literally two continents worth of areas to explore in the game, so you won’t be running out of things to do there in any reasonable time frame.The multiplayer is well thought-out, and definitely fun. The only thing that is missing (now that I’ve spent a lot of time playing on Xbox Live) is that you can’t actually talk to other players using a microphone. This seems a significant shortcoming in a game that is centered around socialization and human interaction.

Currently, my character is only on level 6, which constitutes about 4 hours of play so far. Once I’ve spent more time with the game, I’ll follow up with some more long-term impressions.