Thread: Wow stress test sign up

Well the stress test will be ending shortly (wed or Thursday I believe) and I thought I would post my impressions of the game. I spent quite a bit of time playing the game and got a feel for many aspects of it. I currently have a level 21 Orc Shaman and enjoy playing him very much (there are players in mid 30s , guess some people don't sleep eat or remove themselves from their chair).

First off the performance. The game itself runs smooth, the graphics are beautiful and it ran great (unlike swg and its monster lag towns). The servers were fairly lag free although occasionally it you could feel it. As expected server crashes happened (it is a stress test after all) and in the last 2 days they were quite frequent. I'm not worried about that, i'm sure that will be polished prior to launch.

Secondly I will address the Gameplay. The game itself is not very revolutionary, it pretty much takes the good points of many mmos and tries to meld them together. The game is mostly focused around quests you get form npcs, and this system does a beautiful job of progressing you through the game world. Basically as you finish the quests in a certain zone you have most likely accumulated enough xp to progress onto the next more dangerous zone. There will usually be a linking quest, which will tell you to travel to a new zone where you will find quests more suitable for your current level.

Now, you are not required to do quests to enter new zones and progress. You are welcome to camp a mob all day long if that is how you wish to level up. The quests however offer bonus experience upon completion as well as rewards in the form of credits and items. Therefore you will progress faster doing the quests. Doing the quests (of which many are interesting and challenging - grouping is very common) does not feel like the usual mmo grind (although it still is to some extent). Each quest will take you to a new zone, and will put you in different situations. I myself only fully explored 2 (out of at least 20, there are probably more) zones during my time there (and i'm still finding small areas I missed). The world is fairly large.

Some quests will take you into instance zones. These are zones which are created for only you and your party (so you will avoid kill stealing and avoid undesirable players). These zones seems to be large and quests there can take a long time to complete. So far I heve come across one instance within a cave called "The Wailing Caverns". I spent roughly 1- 1.5 hours in the instance (in a group of 5) and we did not finish the quest we were trying to do (after which the server crashed ).

The characters (every 2 levels it seems) get access to new skills which they may purchase at trainers located in main cities of the world. In addition to this you may choose what are called "trade skills" (ie. blacksmith, engineer, leatherworker etc..) which are basically side professions which you may choose. These are purchased with skill points which you accumulate as you level up. Trade skill abilities are purchased with money and you get access to new trade skill abilities as your level in a certain trade skill increases.

The only real downside I see to the game currently is a lack of variety within classes. Two shamans of the same level will be pretty much duplicates of eachother in terms of skills (trade skills provide a little bit of variety). Their items will vary, but the characters will more or less be the same. This problem may be somewhat addressed when (or if) a "talent" system is implemented. Currently only 1 or 2 classes have these talents. (I am not to sure how this system works since my character does not have talents implemented) Beginning at level 10 you get 1 talent point per level and you may choose to put these points into talents of your choice (from what I understand there will be many talents to choose from to level which will allow for some variety in builds).

ANYWAY, enough of my babbling. I believe I will purchase this title upon release, it should be interesting for a while. I just thought I would make a post on the fly of my current view of the game, there are many things I failed to mention. In its current state I would give the game a 7/10. It isn't perfect or totally revolutionary but it has many highs and with some polishing has great potential.

PS - my take on the game may be a little skewed by the fact that I am a fan of many Blizzard games, and the Warcraft 3 universe in general :P.