~ Games - WoW ~
First things first, I had severe problems trying to download and install the Beta. The zip file was huge and had an error with the winzip I was using. After two days of downloading, moving files around to make room, deleting anything I could find, redownloading the zip file, getting asked for the CD once I finally got the zip file extracted.. I had the beta working.
The opening movie was awesome. I don't want to say why, but trust me it was. Then on to character selection, there were some nice choices but I was sad that my night elf could not be a mage. So I went with Priest and Kirieya was born. I also made my mage, as a human but the name Sapphire was taken and SapphireSniper was too long.. So I refuse to name her here as this is an affront to my gaming lineage.
The first thing I've noticed is the voice hotkeys.. There's a chat bubble on the left side of the UI with a tab for Speech.. Some of the things they say are hilarious! But most are practical, like "thank you" "Yes" "No" ... The emotes are kind elaborate too. When I have to go afk I leave my character dancing as it loops itself until you move.
The world and characters look rather cartoony but I still think it's pretty. The city of Darnassus is amazing. It's huge and the temple is impressive.
Another thing I've noticed is that in the last 2 days of playing, is that I haven't had less than 5 quests in my queue since an hour after I started playing. I'm constantly running around, killing a few of these, a few of those for all kinds of NPCs. All give decent exp and rewards, interesting lore, or funny results :)
Fighting itself is a little more difficult than I'm used to. Hitting the attack button does not lead you into the correct position. This may be a problem when trying to keep your fingers on the spell hotkeys and move into position to hit the monster with your weapon. I've had to give up on using the hotkey numbers unless I'm stationary. They really come in handy when you're waiting for one named npc along with 5 other people.
Not that camping has been a huge problem. The respawns are fairly fast for nameds. And for certain quests the items you need only drop when you have the quest, which is neat. Some quests send you to get plants or items on the ground. In these cases you only have the option to interact with it when you have the quest and only until you have the amount you need to complete it.
There's one quest where you have to fight your way into a dungeon and gather items from 5 different chests there. What I thought was really cool is that the chests are always there, they don't disappear, but only one person can use them at a time. Adds a little bit of strategy if you have a large group. You can't all loot it at once so taking turns fighting off the bad guys or repops encourages cooperation.
You can also share some (not all quests will allow this) quests with your group members, if I play all day and my friend gets home and joins me, I can select to share the quest I'm working on with him, rather than have him run around picking them up himself. We can just jump into them together.
All in all I'm having a great time, Ken can barely pull me away. :) The towns aren't that far apart, there's only 1 bank for my area (in Darnassus) and I haven't yet been to the area that has the auction house but there are auctions.
Here's 2 screenshots taken in Darnassus. I gimp'd the item
descriptions onto it so that I could show them without having 10,000
pictures :) It doesn't seem that you can spin the camera to see the
front of yourself, or I just haven't found the option yet.
11-06-04
Kirieya Woodland Robes
11-06-04
Kirieya White Linen Robe
**Edit** Found the camera button.. Under Key Bindings, last
line
called "flip view" I bound it to the DEL key..
11-06-04
Kirieya White Linen Robe
11-06-04
Kirieya Woodland Robes
11-06-04
Kirieya Sleeping Robes
And Here's a shot of my Griffen ride. It was pretty neat :)
11-06-04
Kirieya Griffen Ride
