I played World of Warcraft for over a year. I was involved with managing WoW Vault since way before the beta, and during beta I wrote the talent calculator and lots of other content for the site (when Blizzard finally released a talent calculator, there were a lot of similarities in layout to the one I wrote, but I won’t go into that here). So I was pretty into the game. However, I stopped playing the game last year. I wanted more solo or small group content, but everything at high levels is based on large raid groups, which take a while to get together. It just wasn’t as much fun as the lower and mid levels, and I could only create so many characters before I got bored of that content.

Despite this, I still look at news of the game’s development once in a while, so I know that there is an expansion coming out soon (which has been in the works for over a year). The Burning Crusade Cinematic Trailer was recently released, and again I am amazed at Blizzard’s CGI. Although the in game graphics are nothing like it, it is still impressive. I got quite a big laugh out of a few moments in the trailer. The trailer starts out very serious and dramatic, but about 75% of the way through it has some humor. First a Human wizard dramatically casts Polymorph at an approaching Tauren, which of course turns him into a sheep. The sheep dangles in the air with his legs wiggling for a moment before falling to the ground with a baa. Next an Undead character casts a ring of fire to kill some nearing murlocs, who are complete with RlrlrlRLRLLRLGRLGRLGlglglglgl!. Those two scenes had me cracking up, and it was hard to take the rest of the video seriously.

Also on the WoW Movie Download Page is a video of the recent WoW commercial that has been airing on TV. It’s a take off on Office Space, and it’s pretty funny.

I don’t know if I will ever start playing WoW again. Maybe I’ll give it another try when the expansion comes out, but I’d almost prefer not getting sucked back into the black whole of time that is MMORPGs. A Diablo 3 would be a lot of fun though, and the time requirements are not as demanding for that sort of game. I haven’t played online games in months, and I like having more free time than I used to.