Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

First Impressions

I thought I’d write down what my first impressions are of the magazine now that I received it and had a chance to go through it.  The first thing I thought when I saw it was WoW this looks like Nintendo Power…  Now I know this is being produced by the same company, but they kept making a big deal about the quality and such that for some reason I expected a little more.  Not to say there is anything wrong with Nintendo Power, I subscribed to it for years and years in fact back in the day.

The biggest problem with the magazine of course though was that it was late, very late in fact.  This is the Winter 2009 edition, and you can tell by the way things are wrote in the articles that they were written a while ago.  If Blizzard is going to treat this like one of their game releases and the magazine is going to end up this late each time then they may have an problem.

The Art

The artwork in the magazine is excellent!  The cover which they gave us a preview of before Christmas in the form of a desktop background is awesome.  If they continue that level of artwork I hope they make it available as a background as well in the future!  Throughout the magazine you’ll find page after page of concept art, in game screenshots, and custom graphics.  I remember one of the selling points they were pushing that it would be like an art book and you can definitely see that. Some of my favorite was the Deathwing art on page 9 where they began the Cataclysm preview, and the Lich King on page 36 for the article on Icecrown Citadel.

The Content

The content in the magazine is there, and good but it isn’t exclusive enough I think to draw in subscribers yet.  Magazines have it hard I will admit, even harder than a Newspaper.  They take longer to produce and the information gets old.  The thing here though is they have direct access to Blizzard so I was expecting more first hand information.  So far my favorite parts of the articles have been the lore they put in.  Now I’m sure this information is written down somewhere else but it is nice how it is integrated into the information being dispensed.

My biggest complaint about this issue in particular was the lack of any new information about Cataclysm in the magazine.  They had a nice article, but it little to no new information.  They had some charts describing leveling flows for the revamped old continents I don’t remember seeing before anyways. I was hoping for more information, any thing really, but maybe there isn’t anything new to give or Blizzard is being hush hush about it all still   That said the article is very well written and a good review of all the goodies we are going to be getting in the expansion.

The other thing I found interesting and this may be because of the delayed release but there was a nice article about ICC, but mostly about the lore and what was in ICC. Not any detailed raid info or the like but they did have a detailed article about the ToC Raid.  Again the magazine was suppose to come out before 3.3 was put live which is why it ended up that way.  It is too bad they couldn’t have got in like a profile of even the first boss in there or something.  I haven’t read the entire ToC article yet but it looks good, and I look forward to reading one on ICC

Conclusion

This is the first issue so you can cut them a lot of slack I think.  They are only doing quarterly issues so I hope they can get them out on time from now on.  Overall I am pleased with the magazine.  I can complain about it being late, or not having the information I wanted to be in it, but Blizzard is involved in it so I should and will probably have to expect both of those   The artwork is awesome to see.  They have access to Blizzard so interviews with the devs and executives is going to be great.  There is something for everyone in this magazine.  They have quite a bit of PvP content, most of which I hadn’t read yet, about Arenas, and Battlegrounds and the like.  They have the stories and lore we all enjoy.  They even had a section over Blizzards card game version of WoW.  I liked the sections on Healing, Tanking and DPS as well.  It also seemed like they had player interviews and opinions throughout the magazine again which was a plus to me.  Finally they had fun things like the article on warcraftpets.com and cooldown which had some amusing abilities/items you’ll never see

I look forward to first quarter 2010 issue which I hope to be full of great ICC and new Cataclysm information, as well as actually arriving in first quarter