Yes, I'm anticipating the release of this game. I explored the open beta and it looks and feels great. Lots of cartoony interaction and animations, easy progression, lots of flair to pin to your desktop vest. I've been waiting for a decent DAOC replacement and this one looked like it might be it. After playing the open beta, I think it'll hold my interest much longer than DAOC did (two level 14 characters; by comparison, jay now and still has like 5 lvl 50's), despite what Jack has to say about my commitment and determination (which I know is a ploy and a challenge).
Most of the brief time in the open beta was with three characters:
- Night Elf Rogue, Piksee, Lvl 9
This one, ultimately, was the most fun. The quests seemed pretty straightforward and were a nice mix between exploration tutorials and kill farming. I started talking to as many NPCs as I could, getting quests and I let them stack up so that I had, at one point, five open quests, which really got to the ocd in me. I wanted to complete them, like immediately. At one point, I'd grouped with two warriors and was delighted to see that the game allowed quest sharing so we could all participate in overlapping quests. Not all quests were shareable. Definately made for a more collaborative experience. I didn't explore interaction as much as I would've liked, though I don't really consider MMORPGs to be social worlds like There. The difference and distinction between these worlds requires a whole other conversation.
The skills, such as Backstab, Gouge, and Eviscerate appeared to be well thought out - gaining power over a range of levels, requiring some to be used before others, having a recovery period - and added to the fun in the gameplay. I enjoyed a reptilian / pavlovian feeling by pressing the keys in order and watching the lights go blinkie and the status bars go woosh. By the time I stopped playing Piksee, I had about five different special attacks I could use as well as a buff. Combat was much more Blizzardian (ie Diablo or DungeonSeige) than DAOC and that was a good thing, in my opinion.
I tried out First Aid without really reading up much on how all the primary and secondary professions go together. Also seemed to be fairly straightforward with regards to crafting. Only at the very end of playing this character when I was mobbed by Gnarlpine Warriors did I need to use some of the bandages I'd crafted. Leatherworking and Skinning are recommended to go together, though I'm not so keen on wanting to be a pelt scavenger. Dying, recalling and resurrection were all very easy and didn't really take a toll on playtime for the level I was at.
The world was enjoyable and fun to explore, if a bit overpopulated. I'd played on a PST server - servers are divided up by timezone (PST, MST, CST, EST) and by PVP or huggy. There were limited beta servers available, and only a few times did experience any lag - none in combat situations.
I didn't get the opportunity to go into an instance dungeon, another one of the intriguing features of this game. Hopefully, soon.
- Dwarf Priest, Gronchbat, Lvl 3
Played through a few first quests, joined up with a dwarf rogue to complete one, and basically found the world to be enjoyable and understandable. Spells seemed reasonable and balanced. It appears that all characters have a distance attack or something that makes up for pulling monstrons. Both the priests's basic attack spells and the rogues attacks draw aggro a lot more than, say, a warrior's attacks. Nothing really surprizing, just worth noting.
- Undead Warlock, Aarrth, Lvl 4
I usually don't play primary spell casters or pet classes, but this was a nice experiment. First off, WOW doesn't allow 3 sequential letters in the name, so my original name of Aaaarrrr wasn't working. Intro quests were easy, though I didn't stack them up as I did with Piksee, since I knew there was no point in leaving things hanging with the beta going down. In the last five minutes of open beta, I was able to complete 2 quests and get to level 4. Nothing exciting, really, since it seems that most of the lower levels are pretty rote. Doing this the third time made me wonder about the higher levels.
Jay turned me on to the beta (he'd played both the closed and open beta) and also mentioned that the UI can be customized via XML. Some of the mods, as per CosmoUI (appears to be an in-game UI mod aggregator/manager), look really interesting. Blizzard states that the scripting involved is based upon Lua 5.0, which I'm going to explore a bit more into, since game scripting's always been of interest to me, since Neverwinter Nights brought it to the fore. There's a .NET version of Lua, too, but the author's page for it is down. Lots of opportunistic convergence here.
Some urls of interest:
Firefox Extensions and Themes I like:
Firefox extension tutorial