The sweat on my hands is more from relentless exhaustion than anything else. The stiff pain in my back has reached a new height of irritation, and I almost think that if I moved too quickly I'd twist a vertebrate. My hands and neck are cramped, my mouth is dry and my eyes water as they are glued to my monitor; they flick for a moment to the clock which defiantly displays 5:53am. A voice in the back of my head is yelling something about needing food and sleep. I've ignored it for so long…. But perhaps now I should listen…. And then….

CRUNCH! 'Well done, you have reached Level 22'. Woooo yea! What new spells are in stall for me now baby? What new talents can I learn? What new armour will I find? Welcome to the World of Warcraft ladies and gents; the genre of MMORPGs is once again alive and well after a serious sketchy patch. This is of course assuming that by 'alive and well' you mean it's horribly addictive and immensely compelling.

MMORPGs have been plagued by massive problems over the past ten years. Things such as massive loading times, intolerable server lag, game-wrecking exploits and hacks, over-camped quest spawns, and so on. I think it's safe to say that WOW emphatically eliminates most of these problems, and it has the best graphics ever seen in an MMORPG to boot. It's extremely addictive and a vast improvement on many of its predecessors; but perfect it is not quite.

The most notable distinction between players in WOW is that of their faction. Those who are familiar with Warcraft will know that traditionally there are two factions in the game, Alliance and Horde. This is the way WOW is set up. Blizzard have actually been extremely strict on keeping the barrier between players from each faction to a maximum. It is almost impossible to communicate in-game to a player from the other faction; you cannot trade with them and you cannot group with them. The Player vs. Player combat within the game is built strongly around this division; more about that later.

Character creation and development is more forgiving in WOW than most RPGs. As is standard practice, you begin by choosing a race - Human, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome (Alliance), Orc, Undead, Tauren or Troll (Horde) - and then a class - Warlock, Warrior, Shaman, and so on. But players have no control over the base primary attributes of their character beyond this. Intelligence, Strength, Spirt and so on, all improve automatically as you level up. This means mistakes cannot be made in this department, as they may have done in other RPGs.

As you progress through the levels of development by completing quests and fighting monsters you gain access to skills or spells which you can buy off trainers. There are no restrictions on which ones you can have besides what level you are, and there are no restrictions on the amount you may have. In-fact the only way in which players may deviate from the build of a character who is the same class, race and level as them, is by something called Talents. Talents are essentially special abilities and skills such as sword mastery for a warrior, which makes you more effective with swords, and improved fireball as a mage, which decreases the casting time of your fireball. You begin to receive talent points at level 10, and each point may only be used once. There are far more talents in the game than the amount of talent points you will receive by level 60 (the max level), and therefore this allows for players to vary their character's specialities from other players. Far from doing this in order that players have to 'discover the best build', Blizzard claim that they are constantly ensuring that all Talent routes are balanced and therefore it is only a matter of specialization which route you take.

The other way players' characters may differ from one another is, as with all RPGs, in their equipment. WOW is packed with various kinds of exotic magical armor, items, weapons, and so on. Some of the items in WOW have a very Diablo-esque feel to them; one sees things such as the 'gleaming axe of the wolf'. Magical items can have properties ranging from increasing your character's primarily attributes, to causing extra fire, ice or arcane damage.

Wandering around WOW you will often come across NPCs with yellow exclamation marks above their heads. This means they have a quest for you. Some quests are race specific, some are faction specific, some are class specific, and all are level specific. Far from the hideous examples of how not to do a quest system we have seen in games of the past, WOW actually was one of the best in-game quest systems I've ever seen. It's very easy to use, the quests work brilliantly, and it's actually the most worthwhile way of playing the game; unlike, for example, the Everquest quest system where only a small handful of 'l33t' quests were ever worth doing. Quest goals and information are kept very neatly in a quest log. For completing a quest that matches your level you typically receive XP equal to killing 10-20 monsters of your level. This makes questing an extremely productive way of levelling up in WOW, and thus the game succeeds spectacularly in being quest driven. As with most MMORPGs, individual quests do not affect the world's permanent state. However, they can affect it temporarily. For example, there is a Horde quest in the barrens where you must defend a barricade from an oncoming army of pseudo-centaurs. When you begin the quest the game actually spawns an on-server army of oncoming centaurs and a unit of Orcs to defend against them (on your side).

Varying from astonishingly large red dragons to glowing undead abominations of reality; the vast number of monsters, bandits, animals and so forth in WOW is impressive by anyone's standards. There are large numbers of various monsters to fight, including bosses (some of whom are extremely difficult and provide a challenge that only 40 organised level 60 characters can overcome together), sub-bosses, magic users, healers, and so on. Every monster has its own beautifully crafted 3d model brimming with various flowing animations.

Blizzard are doing a fairly good job of keeping WOW an ever-expanding world. New quests and dungeons are added month by month and it certainly appears as though they are going to carry on doing a sterling job in this respect. I wonder if the 2 million+ subscribers have anything to do with it.

The most obvious success of WOW is the astonishingly beautiful graphics. The models, textures and virtual FX are quite literally seamless on your screen. Not only that, but WOW makes very good use of your hardware. People who can't even play Doom 3 will be able to load up WOW and enjoy vast pristinely rendered landscapes. After being a Warcraft fan for many years since playing Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, to finally see Blizzard's Warcraft world in full up-close 3d rendering is quite an experience. The great Orcish capital of Orgrimmar is nothing less than the architectural wooden beauty I would expect, and ditto for the Human capital of Stormwind. The actual building, landscape and dungeon design in WOW is fantastically detailed. No effort has been spared in constructing this - the most complex 3d world in an online game.

The online WOW universe is split into many different servers, or realms, which are not interconnected in any way. You choose to play on one of them and that realm essentially becomes the incarnation of WOW which your character exists in. One of the most controversial decisions by Blizzard with respect to this was to make it impossible for US and European players to play on trans-Atlantic servers. This had the effect of splitting apart many friends, and causing a lot of grief for the players, and it has to be said this was probably a mistake by Blizzard as there seems almost no viable reason why they should do this. There are three major categories of server in WOW: Normal, PVP and RP. The Normal servers are exactly that. PVP combat is initiated only by your own actions, and under most circumstance you are immune to damage from other players. PVP servers are much more dangerous than this as they allow other players to attack you at any time, without restrictions. RP (role-playing) servers are set up especially to encourage role-playing. They are essentially the same as normal servers except that excessive out of character behaviour is punished by Blizzard Entertainment staff.

Perhaps my only major criticism of WOW is the lack of a certain feeling of being well populated, and it's hard to say why this is. The emphasis the game places on adventuring and combat certainly doesn't help. If you take an RPG such as Ultima Online, you find there are many players around who simply exist as Tailors, Blacksmiths, Miners and so on. However, in WOW the only way to exist is as an adventurer of some kind, with one of these professions merely as a side-skill. Although this may have its merits, it puts off a whole class of gamer from playing the game. Although myself I much prefer hurling fireballs at giant spiders to creating virtual shirts, there is a large community in games such as UO of people who do not. These people add immensely to the immersive power of an MMORPG world and Blizzards decision to limit character's primary profession to adventurer has alienated this community. So, professions in WOW are very much so 'secondary skills'. You may only have two of these skills, aside from cooking and fishing which everyone may have for free. These skills range from tailoring, to enchanting, to alchemy. They are improved by general usage, and by visiting various trainers across the world.

Furthermore, WOW has no option of player-owned property, and in certain areas of the game a general lack of players can make getting a group together quite difficult - especially for Horde players who are typically outnumbered 3:1 by Alliance on any particular server. It's hard to say how Blizzard could give WOW a 'busier' feel. Perhaps by increasing the population limit on servers, or by encouraging people to join the Horde. As for things like player-owned property, there has already been a rather tenuous commitment made by Blizzard to introduce guild-owned property.

World of Warcraft is a fantastically beautiful and exceedingly friendly MMORPG. It's also nice to finally have a good-looking 3d RPG that doesn't suffer from terrible lag and massive server load-times. It's accessible to all, the quest system is tight, the graphics are seamless and the amount of play-time you wish to get from the game is quite literally up to you - to give you an idea of the time you could put into the game, it takes approximately 12 days of in-game play-time to reach Level 60. As I said before, perhaps the game's biggest fault is the lack of an over-flowing community. That's not to say that the game suffers from a lack of generally community, because there are plenty of players about, especially in the major cities. It's just one can often find that many players are simply 'all about the monster-killing', and certain areas of the game can feel low-populated at times. The game, of course, does unfortunately require a monthly subscription fee that varies depending on the amount of pre-paid time you commit to. The upside to this is that Blizzard are committed to updating and expanding the game as long as players subscribe.