Hawkstriders. It's like Blizzard decided to balance out the blood elves having the best looking character models by giving them the worst looking mounts.
But seriously...
There's a lot of things that I don't like about World of Warcraft. I've touched on some of them already, and I daresay I'll refer back to those points and add a few more to the list – I'm only 10 hours in (level 21, closing in on Deatholme) so there's still a long way to go.
Of all these things though, there's one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It's the big one, that fuels all my other dislikes and keeps them alive.
It's this. World of Warcraft is a really good game.
On a purely technical level WoW is the best MMO I've ever played – by some distance. It's smooth and responsive and the controls always do what I expect them to do. I don't think I've ever felt like I was fighting against the game to get it to do what I wanted it to do, and there's few games I can say that about.
Visually it remains impressive. WoW's art style is distinctive and consistent and it has aged remarkably well. Iconic is an over-used word, but WoW's art style is just that – you can't look at a WoW character – even in silhouette – and mistake it for anything else.
Every race has its own identity, reinforced through their voicework, their animations, their iconography and architecture, and their lore. It's not all good, but it is all there. Similarly the zones are all very well realised.
The music is good. The sound is good. The UI is unobtrusive and intuitive. The cinematics are the stuff of legend.
In almost every way World of Warcraft is a really good game. At times it is – or has been – a great game. In the MMO genre its success is unprecedented and unrepeatable, but in as much as any game can WoW earned that success. It's the biggest and – in many ways – the best.
Which is why I come back to it. There's always been enough good in WoW to convince me to overlook – or tolerate – the bad, for a while at least. If it was a bad MMO, or even just an average MMO, I'd have dropped it long before now and never looked back.
I don't love the game, but I admire it immensely. It's a pleasure to play, until it's not. It's a fascinating world to explore, until it's not. It's a great game, until it's not.
That's the worst thing about World of Warcraft.
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