WOW!

So, I've played World of Warcraft (WoW) open beta for two days now and I have to say, I'm quite disappointed. I've played UO (Ultima Online) before and I think there are various aspects of UO that WoW should learn from. I'm not gonna bother listing them here as ppl who never played these games won't have any idea what I'm talking about, but I can tell you one on one later if you're really curious. The thing that bugged me the most about WoW is how BIG the world is. It literally takes 5 minutes to travel across a major city, and I never realized that you start in different areas depending on what your race is. This would've been nice to know beforehand since I had to take a freaking tram to meet up with my buddy in another region. If we had known, we would've all chose the same race to begin with. Also, I think they put too much emphasis on quests that to me, all seem to be the same thing, ie kill X number of Y, bring this to Z, etc. It was just pointless walking back and forth. I can see them doing that to try to get people to explore, but it seems like there's NOTHING ELSE to do in the game other than accomplishing these tedious quests. At least in UO, you can learn skills that are quite useful (ie you can be "powerful" without even needing to go out and fight - you can just make powerful items yourself). WoW also has professions similar to the UO skills (ie blacksmithing, tailoring, farmer, etc) but it's clearly limited when compared to UO. Hrmm, I guess I did end up ranting about some game specifics. Another thing that was royally annoying was the game lag. It was soooo laggy yesterday at a certain point that we got lag killed several times. They had to resort to resetting the server several times and eventually the lag disappeared. Which led to a bug - we can no longer complete some quests, as even if we had obtained the required items, it wouldn't register! Considering this is as final as the game will look once it hits the shelves by Nov 23rd, I shudder to think what it will be like when it's released. I've contacted their "game masters" (aka tech support/bug reporting) but they haven't gotten back to me yet.

I don't even know what Blizzard is trying to do with WoW now, as it seems like a half-assed put together MMPORG that tried to do too much but are taking away from the simplicity that games require. For example, they definitely spent a lot of time designing the world and cities as they are huge and magnificant (just go look at some screenshot) - but that makes going from point A to B that much more tedious and annoying. They tried to implement everything from the Warcraft universe/games, but that just results in an overwhelming number of spells, which I KNOW eventually, 90% of the ppl will just use that one spell. Everybody will be learning and doing the same thing. Anyway, I'm still gonna play until they stop this open beta and decide then if it's worth it, but yeah.... I'm not impressed. Time to go kill some monsters.