The game is polished. Even now the game ran very well on my low-end system. Flawlessly, actually. The stylized graphics are fantastic, the music is great. I love the "mood music" which is incredibly dynamic. I was doing a quest and walked into a house with some spawns in it, and the music immediately dipped into a very sinister song. When I left the house, it was back to the "in-town" music. Very impressive -- the kind of thing you find in single-player games. More on polish: the animations, effects, and overall appearance are pleasant to look at. There are some good effects in there. There are also some pretty bad textures mixed in. The candles look bad on my system, and there isn't as much animation in the world as I had hoped. I wanted it to be a bit more engaging, rather than huge, static worldscapes. It's still an improvement over the old world EQ and many others, but I was hoping a "3rd gen" title would add more sparkle to the world. Overall, though, it feels like a Blizzard title. Very well done UI. Most of the things you wished you had in other games is here. They use typical Blizzard UI conventions, and the controls are intuitive and natural. I have to admit, though... I hit "I" for inventory and got something else. That was odd. Might have been a bug, or a re-assigned key, though. The quest-heavy approach is fantastic. It's "dead squirrel" and "kill # of Xs" kinds of quests mostly, but they move pretty quickly, and they almost always end up with something valuable (for a newbie). I did about 6 quests, and there was a mix of some things, including a very simple "find the items in the world" quest which I was actually pretty impressed with. No killing, no camping... just exploring. Nice. I actually like the "kill # of Xs" quests more than the standard "dead squirrel" quests. But the bigger thing to me is that even at level 1 I had like 4 quests I could. By level 5 I had several quests open to me of different types. It wasn't that there was only one or two level-appropriate quests to be found... there were like a good handful at any time. This made it less like "spend 30 minutes looting eyes" and more like "Hmmm... eyes are camped, maybe I should go check zombies, or bats... or what about that scavenger quest I just got?" There's stuff to do. I like that. The magic and spell effects are OK. They aren't incredible, but they are very colorful and match the overall stylized feel. The spells themselves feel pretty good. The newbie damage spells are nice. Mana regens quickly, and the fact that you can eat or drink to increase the medding speed is a nice touch (especially when you get the bigger spells...). Combat is pretty much like EQ and others, especially while solo spellcasting. Getting the pet makes a big difference, and it starts to feel like a necro by then. The buffs are noticeably effective... even the newbie ones. I tried to kill something without the newb buff and got scratched up. Cast the shield/hp-regen buff (lasts about 30 minutes) and did much better. Like I said before, the damage spells do a good amount of damage. I'd say the balance between a level-appropriate fighter and a caster are about the same from level 1-5. Though, again, clearly that's not saying much. The over abundance of testers right now makes the game feel very crowded, and I found myself camping a quest spawn a lot. That's annoying, but to be expected during the mad rush. I found a few out of the way places to get some xp, with some of the mobs I needed, and it was ok. The thing that makes this bearable, again, is the fact that these quests are over in mere minutes. It's not like camping a spawn for 45 minutes waiting for a single drop. The spawns I camped were all on about a 1 minute cycle. The quests I were on required about 8 mobs to be killed... so you are never stuck in one place for very long. Unless you want to be. Which would be dumb. The world is nice. The stylized graphics to right by it. It's as cartoony as it looks in the screenshots, but there are all sorts of little touches that make things stand out a little. On my machine some of the larger textures (sides of buildings, trees) looked washed out... but you don't really notice it because all of the graphics are like big panels of color. There's lots of color. Even in the dead world. Which is kinda nice, actually. There is pretty varied terrain, though I haven't left the undead areas yet. The hills and the rural area outside the Undercity is about what you'd expect. It all looks very much like what we saw in Warcraft III. Rolling hills, big trees, blocky buildings... etc. It's not really stunning. It's just comfortable. The Undercity is cool. Much more detail, more interesting things to look at. I haven't explored it too much, but what I've seen has been very good. The way they start out a newber (undead) is by putting them out in the wilderness. Then you work your way towards the Undercity. When you finally get there, it feels much more like home than the wilderness area. ;) It's a good place. The Warlock is the only class I've played, but so far I like him. He's definitely modeled after the necro, but with some wizard-like features. More DDs, and utility stuff. The pet is interesting, and I still haven't really had a chance to train the pet or any of that. I did see someone with one of those "social pets"... a parrot, supposedly from "Booty Bay", which is clearly high up on my list of places to visit. I like the class. It can solo, for sure. With the food and the drink features it's easier to prepare for a solo journey. Since you can carry "regen" and "FT" effects in your pocket (food and drink respectively), I could see long solo journeys being a definite reality, and without all the hassles necros have to put up with. The flaws... well, it's overcrowded right now. Some textures look ... err... not very impressive (like zoning into LGuk now-a-days... it just looks.. old). It doesn't really feel like a 3rd gen title. It just feels like a very very well polished and well planned 2.5 gen title. Nothing I've seen so far couldn't be implemented in EQ (sans balance issues). But it definitely has that Blizzard polish that makes the game extra good, extra easy to pick up and play, and extra addictive in a way that doesn't feel like grinding. Yet. I can see a few things on the horizon: camping still exists. They might have reduced it down to a few minutes, but it's still camping. Does it matter if it's not 10 hours for one random drop (AC!)? Yes... I think it does. But it's still there. The game is so heavy on quests, I'm curious to see what level 60 quests look like. If they are just more of the same "kill # of X" then I will be very disappointed. Hmm... there's more, but I've run out of time (dinner time!). Later folks.
I played WoW for much of a year and during that time I didn't do much else. After I emerged from the bottomless void, I realized that the engrossing nature of the game is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakn... Read Full Review
There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said. So I won't say it again - however, WoW is a very overrated game. It's hailed as "innovative" and "revolutionary", but the only way in which it is... Read Full Review
