Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor – Review
Ten years after its original launch, World of Warcraft is still going strong and provides us with yet another expansion. World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is the 5th expansion in the World of Warcraft series and this time, it proves to be more ambitious than ever.
Story
The story of the World of Warcraft universe has been going on for a very long time and it’s very big. Warlords of Draenor brings yet another great chapter into this world. We’ll try our best to give you the setting of the current expansion and quickly fill you in about the end of the previous one.
At the end of the previous expansion, Mists of Pandaria, warchief Garrosh Hellscream is overthrown by the combined efforts of the Alliance and Horde and taken into custody by Taran Zhu. Garrosh Hellscream is supposed to stand trial for his atrocities he committed in Pandaria, but he manages to escape before he can be judged. He then finds a mysterious ally and travels back in time to Draenor, the homeworld of the orcs before the rise of the Horde. By traveling back in time, he creates an alternate timeline by preventing the orcish clans from drinking the blood of Mannoroth, which led to their corruption by the Burning Legion and played a huge event in the first three games. Garrosh unites these clans into the “Iron Horde” and together with his clans and technology he brought back from the current time, he starts a war on Draenor and builds a Dark Portal that allows them to travel through time and lay siege on Azeroth as it’s known today.
Graphics
World of Warcraft has been around for over 10 years, but the graphics and artwork they produce is still very modern. Developers are continually trying to increase the game experience by making beautiful new zones and updating outdated models. This time, they updated a lot of the player models, with a few still on the way. These models make cinematics, artwork and characters look even more realistic and fluent than ever before.
A lot of players probably noticed that previous expansions were pretty heavy CPU wise. Blizzard has realized this and did their best to take some heat from the CPU and transfer it to the GPU. This results in far better performance for low-to-mid end PC’s and gives even better performance for high-end systems. What’s also a noticeable change is that Blizzard provided the game with a second set of graphic options which can be configured to enable when you’re in raids.
Sound
Sound wise World of Warcraft never fails to deliver. Their music is amazing and will always have a place in every player’s heart, even after you get bored of it and blast your own music instead. The sound effects haven’t really changed a whole lot, but there wasn’t really anything wrong with them so why would they?
As always, voice acting is spot on. The voice acting in cinematics is brought with so much emotion and excitement that it’s almost impossible to spot a flaw. Combine that with the awesome music and sound effects, and you’ve got yourself an awesome sounding game and cinematics!
Gameplay
If you’ve played any RPG/MMORPG at all, you’ll feel right at home. The game also offers a pretty detailed tutorial when you’re new so there’s not much to worry about. The keybinds have been the same forever and there’s a lot of buttons you can rebind to your liking. There’s also a very big macro module in the game which can be used for almost everything from combining spells to spamming all chat channels at the same time.
With the basics out of the way, let’s talk about the changes, and there’s a whole lot of them! We won’t cover everything in detail, but the biggest and most important ones will be discussed. The first two big changes gameplay wise are “the squish” and the disappearance of a lot of spells.
At the end of Mists of Pandaria, some tanks were topping well over 1 million health. Blizzard thought a lot about this and how they would handle the number curves for Warlords of Draenor, and finally the call was made to reduce item stats from level 1-90 drastically. These items now have around 4% of the stats they used to have, reducing a well geared level 90 character’s health from 525.000 to well below 50.000. Now at level 100, some people are already topping over 300.000 again though, but without “the squish” the numbers would just get out of hand.
Another major change is the disappearance of spells. This was one of the hardest decisions Blizzard had to make but it’s well worth it. As a level 90 feral druid who was into PvP, I had to remember over 50 keybinds in order to do my job well. Instead of increasing this number even more by adding more spells, Blizzard decided to go the other way and remove a lot of spells. Not only does this drastically change the way you’ve learned to play your class, but it allows for better easing into the game for new players. In Warlords of Draenor, you don’t get a whole lot of new spells any more (except some talents) but your spells get improved, giving them unique bonuses for other abilities or your character in general.
The last huge change is the Garrison, which is a highly customizable personal base. In the Garrison you can arrange, construct and manage your buildings and plan operations against the Iron Horde. While leveling, you occasionally come around NPC’s who want to join your Garrison and act as a follower. You can then send these followers out on missions, giving rewards when you’re victorious. Your followers can level up and counter some strategies of the enemy you have to kill, so managing them well is the key to winning.
A Garrison also makes place for a couple of “plots” where you can place a limited amount of buildings of your choice. There are 3 types of buildings: large, medium and small. Large buildings can be constructed on large plots and provide a more specialized benefit to the player. Medium buildings can be placed on medium plots and provide a variety of benefits around Draenor and in your garrison. At last, the small buildings can be placed on small plots and are mostly used for professions.
Sending your followers on missions also grants Garrison resources. Some buildings, rare elites or quests also reward these resources. You can use these resources to send followers on missions again, place buildings or upgrade them.
Since there are an immense amount of changes made in Warlords of Draenor, we cannot cover all of them. If you’re looking for any specific changes or want to read up on some of them, I highly encourage you to go to your favorite World of Warcraft wiki site, read up on this blog post from Blizzard which bundles everything together nicely or you can ask your question below the review and we’ll do our best to answer it!
Conclusion
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor looks to be the best World of Warcraft expansion yet. It has tons of changes that make the game more “Vanilla-like” so surely a lot of old players will come back to the game and take a look at the progression it’s made. However, the game had a very rocky start (it was basically unplayable for a week) and some classes just feel way stronger than others at this time, but this isn’t an issue at all since Blizzard is constantly patching their game to make the experience even better for everyone.
Note, World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is an expansion of World of Warcraft and requires a recurring fee, the base game and this expansion (you can upgrade to the expansion later) in order to play.
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