I work for a company that publishes video games. It’s just expected that you spend some amount of time playing games and staying current, otherwise when everyone is talking about the latest thing they’re playing you won’t know what they’re talking about. You have to stay in context.
The biggest thing to happen in a long time is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (wikipedia entry). Everyone I know is playing it and new people get sucked in all the time. It is that good. I don’t even play subscription games and I’m playing it. Even people who have never played an online game before have caught the WoW bug. It’s a phenomenon.
They have sold somewhere around 500,000 copies of the game and their current active subscribers are estimated at 350,000. That’s in just two months. Each one of those 350,000 people pays $14.95 a month to play. It’s no wonder traditional media giants like Fox and Viacom are itching to get a piece of online gaming action. When you compare it to the time you spend watching cable television it is not difficult to justify the expense. It is bigger than Everquest 2 and it is scaring the crap out of anyone who is expecting to compete with it in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online games, as they say in the biz). The game is just that good. It is not revolutionary, but it takes ideas from everywhere and does everything well. Quality speaks for itself. WoW removes any arguments for producing a bad game. A game can be done of the highest calibre.
If you’re looking for a new experience, World of Warcraft is a game that’s fun, accessible, flexible and deep. Check out their website and let me know what you think. I’m the warlock “Sivori” on Sargeras server. Send me a message and we’ll go fishing.
i juat saw the trailer for the game. it looks pretty cold.