Ok, I’ve been playing enough World of Warcraft the last couple of days. It seems to fill in the empty time between programming and setting up sites. I thought I’d write down a few things here of what I’ve thought about it.
So far, I’ve played a Night Elf Warrior, Night Elf Druid, Undead Warlock (very cool), and a Human Paladin. Of course, if you know me from any of my EQ days, I’ve enjoyed playing my Night Elf Druid the most. She’s a lot of fun to play and seems to play a lot easier than the warrior if you can believe that. The Undead Warlock is definitely a very cool character. Not only are you part of the horde (being bad is good sometimes), it’s just has that novelty feel to it. There aren’t too many games where you get to play an undead character. : )
Gameplay wise, it’s very similar to a lot of blizzard type games. The interface is very comprehensible, I found no questions on how to play. Granted, I didn’t read any instructions either. When you first start off a character, there is a “help bubble” that will tell you what you can do next. I found that really useful. Kudos to Blizzard for making the gameplay not too easy, but not too complex, and for having a help system that is not annoying.
Combat I found really easy. Basically if you’re a warrior, just attack, use your warrior type special moves. If you’re a caster, you can assign hot keys to spells and then simply press those hotkeys to let loose a spell. They do have factors, like being interrupted, if your character moves and so on while casting spells, which would be the norm. Once you cast your spell, unless you’ve moved to interrupt the spell, i.e. interruption of spell not due to combat, the spell will continue to try to cast. So if you’re fighting a creature during your spell cast and it keeps hitting you, the spell will continue to try to cast. I found this kinda useful in some situations, although keep in mind that while you’re casting, you’re not attacking.
The quest system is great. I just love the idea that any quest giver will have a large explanation point above them to indicate such. That is truly helpful, especially for someone like me, who has a hard time remembering exactly who I have to go see. There is also a quest log as well. This is truly helpful. I don’t have to worry about having a bunch of scraps of papers for notes in order to remember what quest I was on or what I needed from it. The quest log keeps track of all this, including how many of the required items you need to collect. Very comprehensive, very useful. I find myself bringing that up quite a bit.
The graphics are pretty good. It’s still a bit cartoony, but they really did a good job with this. It’s not realistic looking, however the “feel” of warcraft is there. Although the graphics may not look like Everquest 2, I still think it’s got some great graphics. I have no complaints.
The loading time for the game was another great thing I saw. Allow me to compare this to Everquest, only because EQ is the only game I’ve played in excess. Everquest can take a while to load up. It first checks for updates to the game. Then it will bring you to the server screen. At this point, you choose the server you will be playing on and then jump into the character select screen. Well, at this point, before your characters are loaded up, the game loads up. For some odd reason this can take a short bit. Anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. While this is not a truly long time, WoW will load up in about 20 seconds all the way to your characters. Now this could easily be due to the fact that there is only 2 servers you can play on right now. However, a loading time of 1 to 2 minutes (including, checking for updates, loading the characters) is too long compares to 20 seconds into and playing the game. Time may vary according to you computer. I love WoW because I can load it up and play just about immediately.
Grouping. You can group in WoW. I have to admit, in the 12 levels that I have played my druid, I have not grouped once. For that matter, I’ve only grouped one time with a partner with my warrior. That is good. I don’t honestly have to spend about 1 to 2 hours sitting around waiting to find a group to play. While this may be because I’m a lower level, I just think grouping is entirely unnecessary at this point. I’m sure things will require grouping later on. But that’s still a far ways away. : )
Skills are nice. Although no where near as complicated as other games. Skills in WoW are straightforward. I’ve picked up skinning and leather working for my druid. So far as an apprentice Leatherworker, I’ve managed to improve my leather armor by adding 3 to the AC of each set. I found that a great thing. I found also, during skinning an animal (to get leather), if I failed, I could try again. Now this is not something that I necessarily agree with, but I found that if you do fail, you will not get a good piece of leather. Although this can happen when you don’t fail. You instead get ruined scraps, which by using the leather worker skill you can manage to get enough of them to create some light leather.
All in all, I am definitely enjoying WoW. It’s just about definitely what I thought it would be, and that makes me happy, although if it was even better than what I thought, I would be even happier. I’m still just waiting for the Hunter class to be released. : )
