World of Warcraft: still installing

I thought I was going back to Azeroth. I was wrong. I spent the entire day (and I mean all of it) installing World of Warcraft.

I remember it being a big game back in the day, but good Lord, it has ballooned to the size of Oprah in the mid 90’s, the late 90’s, and now. It is a hefty, hefty game. I put in the first disc, hit install, and then waited. Once it completed, I chose the WoW icon with a swift and accurate double click, listened to the hard drive spin, saw the login screen, inputed my credentials, then watched it ask to update. I’m thinking to myself at this point, “I can understand that, it needs an update, most games do, no problem”, so I let it update. When that smallish update, 80Mb or so, finished, it checked for more updates, and found more, lots more. It seems that there is no such thing as a combo update, as it appeared that it was going through each and every update that was released since the game went live. That was all fine and dandy (actually it wasn’t) until it decided to start downloading the 1Gb+ updates. This is when I realized that perhaps I should install the expansions, even though I had not planned to explore and progress into those areas for quite some time. Well, after going through two other very long installs, one for the Burning Crusade and one for the Wrath of the Lich King, I again double clicked the icon that would finally allow me my start into Azeroth, only to find that when it launched it checked for updates and for the umpteenth time, found some.

It took the better part of a day to install and update WoW to a point where I could actually log onto a server. What really drove me wild was that it was not an automatic process, after each update I had to be at the computer to tell it to download and install the next update. Furthermore, having to install all expansions prior to be being able to play the core game goes against any previous experience with expansions. The extra kicker was that nowhere that I could find was it documented that I do just that. The whole premise of installing expansions before playing the core game is similar to watching a PG13 rated Terminator film, technically it can be done, but should it be? If I had never played, or if had I never heard such positive things about WoW, I would likely not have gone through with the whole process to play it. This goes down as one of the worst game experiences I have had to date. That includes my setup of an Xbox 360, which was an impressive kurfufel of B.S. that needed wading through before ever playing the thing.

At any rate, I am up and running. Tune in next week for an introduction to my bearded dwarf. Make that an impressively bearded dwarf. Probably a better beard than Rob Zombie’s, or at the very least in the same league, and mine comes sans the questionable music career.