Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that’s already sold more than 600,000 copies since its launch in November. Available for both the Mac and Windows, the game takes players to the world of Azeroth. They create heroic characters of various races and classes as they participate in quests, join guilds, join collaborative parties to fight monsters and more. Now the game is launching in Europe — Blizzard’s European World of Warcraft site states that the official launch occurs on Friday, February 11, 2005.
World of Warcraft launched in November, 2004 in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In January, World of Warcraft expanded to Korea — a hotbed of online gaming activity whose enthusiasts have long embraced Blizzard games. Now World of Warcraft expands into Europe, where Blizzard says it has already netted pre-orders of more than 110,000 copies.
World of Warcraft’s European launch will again be a simultaneous release for Mac and Windows users, and will be available in English, German and French localizations, though it will also be available with Spanish and Italian boxes and manuals. If you’re one of the more than 400,000 Europeans that have subscribed to the European beta-test of World of Warcraft, Blizzard advises that the current European services “will be taken offline and wiped clean,” which means that all accounts and characters will be erased.
Blizzard will make available a €44.99 standard edition (£29.99 in the UK) as well as a Collector’s Edition for €69.99 (£44.99 in the UK). The Collector’s Edition includes the game on both CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, a free one-month subscription, a behind-the-scenes DVD in English, exclusive in-game pet, cloth map of the game world, a music CD, “Art of the World of Warcraft” coffee table book and commemorative game manual. Monthly fees to continue playing World of Warcraft vary from €10.99 to €12.99 per month (£7.69 to €)8.99, depending on how many months in advance you purchase. System requirements call for a G4/933MHz or higher, 512MB RAM, ATI or Nvidia graphics hardware with at least 32MB VRAM, Mac OS X v10.3.5 or newer and a 56K or faster Internet connection. You can read more about World of Warcraft by checking out Macworld’s review.
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