Where does one start with WoW?

The legends are already so immense with this game that despite approaching three years old it still holds the hearts and minds of followers. My choice of words there is deliberate - this really holds people in an almost cult-like fashion. It held me for one year, it held my Dear Beloved for two, four hours a night minimum. It REALLY gets under the skin.

So, after that introduction, how would one describe the game for those who live under rocks and haven't seen or had a go at this?

Well as things stand, if you have the current expansion pack you have a choice of five "good" races and five "baddie" races which you can customise to a reasonable degree. Each race has it's attributes, some handy (underwater breathing if you're undead), others less handy (gnomes and "escape artistry"). It's easy to get quite attached to your character and very defensive of it. Try me on female gnome warlocks. Just try it.

The game follows a well trodden path in that initially you'll be booted into the world as a wee level 1 and you'll battle your way through various quests that increase in difficulty, gaining experience and equipment as you progress. As you complete these quests you also naturally end up exploring the world and by god, there's a lot to explore. Simultaneously one of the most fanatstic and most irritating things of this game is the size of the world they've created. It's a marvel exploring and unlocking huge chunks of the map but an absolute ballache traipsing around from one end of the hellfire peninsula to the other to hand in a quest.

Quests range from the banal to the complex and multi-staged, from single player to the 40 man dungeons, and it is this complexity and level of cooperation and socialisation that keeps people coming back. There is also almost never any time when there isn't a quest that you need to complete at a higher level than you have or a piece of Tier whatever armour you don't have that only drops 1/100 times at the Black Temple. You can revisit the same temple and fight the same boss endless times looking for that piece and then have to do it again for someone in your guild.

Fortunately the quests tend to be well considered and it's very easy to while away a very long time just so that you can hand in this quest... but while I'm here I'll just do this.... It takes a real amount of willpower (exhaustion) to say enough is enough for tonight and very easy to pick straight up again the next day. There will never be a tidy point to end which is probably 80% of why it's very easy to get into a continual loop of playing.

The music is sweeping and epic and really adds so much atmosphere that it makes it even easier to be swept along into the world.

So, how does one "grade" a game like this. Well, I'm going to do a fair bit of ducking on this one. The experience is very different if you play Alliance or Horde and even within the two camps you can start in different places, have different quests and never the races meet until you're at least a level 10.

The fact that it's purely online can be a help and a problem. Many are the times I have thrown things at my PC when either my connection has been broken, a guildy's connection has been broken or the whole network has gone down altogether (typically when you're midway through a battle and you return to a ghost gnome warlock). Patches are frequent and slow to download and can sometimes stop WoW playing altogether.

This is overall, an excellent game. Even if you're not really into fantasy this may well change your mind. It is beautifully programmed, immense in vision and scale, fun and all enveloping.

You just need to make sure you're not going to miss having a life.