Last week A Friend Who Shall Remain Nameless managed to wangle himself an account for the World of Warcraft stress test, and he was kind enough to let me share it with him. Here are my initial thoughts after about 11 hours of playing. I’ll be comparing the game to Everquest as I do so, as EQ is currently the MMORPG market leader and I spent over 2 years playing it with a variety of characters.

Character creation:

I used to play a ranger back in the Dungeons & Dragons days, played an end-game ranger as my main in Everquest and enjoy being a ‘melee with spells,’ but I didn’t want to create yet another Elven ranger (the closest match in WoW is a Hunter). I started a Night Elf druid — a male character this time, which will probably surprise most of the folk that knew me from EQ where I had three female characters. What can I say, I didn’t like the male graphics in that game.

The Druid class has a lot of variety because it can shape-shift. You can turn into a bear and tank (get hit by a creature without turning into mush), do decent melee damage in cat form and cast heals, cures and offensive spells in druid form. Apparently the class is considered a little underpowered by the player base at high levels, but it’s a lot of fun at the moment. Blizzard have promised to keep working on balancing the classes (there’s only 9 in WoW, compared to 16 in EQ. The more classes you have, the more difficulty you have in balancing their abilities and keeping them unique). I’m not too concerned. I don’t plan to be nearly as competitive as I was in EQ, where I raided 5-6 days a week and caused a lot of stress for my relationship. I don’t need to wave my e-penis this time around. I do want my character to be versatile so I can group with my friends. Need a tank? I can do it. A healer? Got you covered. DPS? Sure, bring me along.

Initial reactions:

The first thing I did was put myself in first-person mode - I don’t enjoy third-person views that put you behind your character, because you’re blocking what’s directly in front of you. The game engine is far better than EQ’s, which crawls along even on my 2Ghz Athlon and GF4 4600. More importantly for me, the game fully supports the Mac and runs quite well on my 1.25Ghz PowerBook (and 64Mb Radeon 9600 Mobility) even in beta. I expect to see minor speedups before the final release as debug code is removed and the development team optimise their routines, but I can happily play in 1024×768 on the laptop with a reasonable clip plane and detail on full. The gruntier PC desktop obviously does a better job, although the client seems less stable under Windows and also doesn’t seem to support windowed mode (a simple Cmd-M keystroke on the Mac toggles full-screen mode on and off, and the client doesn’t steal your mouse pointer and require arcane key combinations to release it like EQ does).

The player character moves better than the current EQ models, which look uniformly stiff and uncomfortable. They don’t have as many polygons, but the overall impression is more natural. Sony don’t seem to realise that graphics are the least important aspect of a roleplaying game and are pushing hard to create cutting-edge graphics and sound for EQ2 instead of rethinking their game mechanics.

Quests:

The most obvious differences between EQ and WoW for the beginner are their quest systems. Both games give experience for creatures you kill and for quests that you complete. The issue is that quests in EQ are difficult to find, in fact the developers seem proud of the fact that after so many years there are still thousands of uncompleted quests in the game. Um, guys, hundreds of thousands of people can’t work out how to use your content, and you consider that a good thing?? The experience and loot you get for doing them is generally insufficient given the amount of effort required, to stop people farming quests instead of grouping. Because of this, it’s more effective to find a group and sit in an area killing the same creatures over and over again until you level up. It’s predictable and monotonous, and compounds as you gain levels. The monsters get stronger faster than you do, forcing you to group to earn reasonable experience unless you’re lucky enough to have rolled a class with decent soloing ability (and in EQ a ‘good’ soloer still gains experience much slower than a group. Many classes can’t effectively solo at all past level 50).

WoW turns this around completely. Creatures give some experience but it’s far faster to earn experience from quests. A creature you kill at level 5 might give you 50 XP, but completing a quest that, for example, asks you to collect 6 items from the same creatures might give you 700 XP. You can only do a quest once, which means you’re exploring the world looking for more quests, not sitting on your arse for hours killing the mobs that give the easiest experience for your level (aka camping).

When you’re given a quest, you’re told not only what you need to do but also what your reward will be. In certain cases you’ll have a choice of rewards and can decide which you want when you complete the quest. Even in the rare case where I haven’t been able to use an item, I’ve still finished the quest, just because the XP is so good. Hey, you can always sell the item!

Another difference is that you can do most of the quests solo. My druid is level 11 now, and has soloed for the vast majority of the time. There’s no issue in grouping though, because you can share a quest with some friends if they haven’t already completed it. There’s also no fighting over rare drops or infrequent spawns, because mobs only start dropping the quest items you need once you’ve started the quest, and drop them a lot. Named creatures respawn almost immediately, and can usually be killed solo or with a friend.

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