Shutt World .co.uk

No game should really take this long to get installed and working.

Yes its the MMORPG World Of Warcraft, when I set up the trial it took me 3 days of downloading (not 72 hours but 3 days of online time) to get even the basic install before another hour of patches. That was over 6 months ago.

Now it took 3 hours just to install the original game + the expansion pack, 9 CDs worth of data, and there’s still patches do get, about 2 hours worth of downloads (according to the Blizzard downloader) before you can play. Maybe a DVD copy will take less time to install but still its a very long time for a game.

I get the impression to keep load times down all textures and models are pre installed to your hard drive which explains the size of the game as the worlds massive, not to mention 10 races, various skins clothes and weapons.

I know the games huge but for a first time install this is probably too much, especially if its for a trial, you only get 10 days and if your downloading all that content, there’s a good chance your gonna waste a good chunk of your trial account before you even get round to playing.

If you can, find a friend with the full game and a spare afternoon (hard to find as they’ll be playing) and have them install and update the game before you even consider registering your account to play.

Oh and if you’re downloading updates the blizzard downloaders great for the smaller ones but it might be worth searching for the officail patches from a less offical source as I’ve found you get a better download rate. I use Xfire its made for gamers has the patches and the download rates pretty good, and best of all Blizzard know about them and had a competition running with them some time ago so I suspect the patches are authorised, even if they’re not they’re safe or there’d be a lot of angry gamers that use it.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying you should avoid WoW because of the install time, just be prepared for a long wait before you can start playing, but compared to that amount of game time there is, a few hours installing it’s pretty insignificant.