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Well, because of a last minute change of holiday plans, I was forced to travel and pick up my copy of World of Warcraft yesterday. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Far from it. I was finally able to get back into the game last night and level my primary character up to level 7 in a few hours.

This game is incredible. I've been hooked ever since I was fortunate enough to get into the open beta a few weeks ago. If I were to sum the game up, I'd have to say that it's very much like Everquest, except with all of the major flaws fixed. Leveling up doesn't take ages, which is incredibly nice for players like myself who don't have time to spend eight hours a day in-game. I can play for a few hours and still feel satisfied that I've accomplished something. The quest system is incredible, because it gives you something to do aside from hacking and slashing monsters. Many of the quests may be trite, and considered "gopher" quests, but they add a lot of value in terms of gameplay simply because it breaks the monotony of killing things for experience. I also love that there is no experience loss on death! This has driven me insane in other games because I'd log on to play for an hour or two, end up dying, and then be worse off than I was before! Bravo, Blizzard, for not forcing me to waste hours upon hours of my life for getting my character killed. And that's another thing, dying in WoW is actually somewhat entertaining because you get to become a ghost in order to retrieve your corpse. The screen even goes grayscale and your character takes on a ghostly appearance.

I got the Collector's Edition as well, as I mentioned a little earlier, and I highly reccommend that. The art book is wonderful and the soundtrack is quite good as well. I'm even impressed with the cloth map which everyone else seems to not like so well for some reason. I've gotten cloth maps as omake in other game packages, and this one is by far the best.

[Listening to: Duskwood (Ambient) - Jason Hayes - ]