World of Warcraft Beta 1

By Holliday

Ok I am going to do this in installments since it would end up too long otherwise and be hard to manage. Also because I can’t seem to pull myself away from the game for long periods of time.

So this is the big daddy. Blizzard in all its fame and glory stakes its claim in a new genre. What on earth can we expect? First I will tell you what my personal opinion of the Blizzard company is. I believe they are best described as Spicey Refinement. By that I mean they take a genre, refine it and smooth it out until it is so balanced and perfected that it is the pinnacle of its genre, then they toss a little bit of innovation, never too much, into the mix.

World of Warcraft is no exception to that formula. The only difference is the MMORPG genre has never had a ‘pinnacle’ of any sorts. It actually hasn’t even had anything that comes close to it. Until now…

This installment is going to cover the pre-beta situation up to character development and first steps.

The Specifics

As you probably have already guessed I am not in the closed World of Warcraft beta thats been going on for quite a few months now. Instead I am in the fileplanet sponsored “7 day stress test”. Basically Blizzard wanted to test their log-in processing servers and the game servers themselves and find the “maximum load”. First and foremost you can see that Blizzard is not a bunch of dumbasses and that their hearts, minds and souls are into this. Testing your servers with a real player load before the game launches makes so much sense I can’t believe it hasn’t been done to this extent yet.

MMORPGs have a long history of having horrendous launches. Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Lineage 2 have all had “hell weeks” when the game first went retail. The amount of players jumping onto both the publisher’s website to get an account and the game servers to (try) and play just produced endless crashes and lag storms and other nasty net things.

So Blizzard, being the devilishly smart guys they are, decides to let 100,000 people get their hands on the beta of the game for 7 days. They know the fevor that is out for it so giving out the keys wasn’t going to be hard; they also knew they could count on at least 75% of the total amount of people showing up for the actual launch.

In the FAQs and emails I received from them they expained that I should be expecting lag and server crashes and such because it was the point of this “stress test”. I assumed that it was going to be a frustrating week of barely playing a buggy game with horrendous lag and busted classes, like most MMORPGs are at retail launch. Boy was I in for a surprise.

Launch Day

The launch of the beta was last thursday at 3 pm EST. I just got back from a class that ended at 2:45 so I was at my computer at around 3:05. In the week before hand everyone downloaded the beta files and got their CD keys and we were just waiting for the ‘account sign up’ website to come up to start playing. Around 3:10 I tried the website to see if I could make my account, it was busted. I expected this so I got up and made myself a sandwich. I came back about 10 minutes later ready to see the screaming and wailing of fanboys who were upset that the server wasn’t working or whatever. Instead I sat down to a screen with the account sign up on it. I made my account, with one try, and no problems. Then I loaded up the program, it was 3:25. I typed in my username and password. Pressed enter and… it worked.

I stared at my screen with my mouse hovering over the ‘create character’ button. I wasn’t sure if this was real. I thought perhaps I was running the program just without the internet working or something. Maybe the server was lagged out and the program just responding for no reason. I thought a lot of things, but then I started thinking about whether or not I wanted to be an Undead Warlock or a Human Warrior.

I don’t know how it was done, but Blizzard has somehow become more prepared for a 7 day beta test than all MMORPG developers have been for their retail releases. Not only do the account and game servers work right, they are virtually lag free and solid as a rock. The program has yet to crash on me. Also the game is more solid and ‘complete’ than Star Wars Galaxies or Lineage 2 are now, and those games have been out for other a year. I will get into more detail about the solid and completeness of the game in a later installment but to generalize the whole situation, World of Warcraft feels ‘done’ (even though it isn’t).

I have no Jaw!

Ok enough about the merit of the company and now to the game itself. Character creation. I love making characters for RPG games. I love customizing my guy or girl and I love choosing its clothing and what not.

World of Warcraft doesn’t take home any supreme awards for character creation. It is a solid system with a fair deal of choices but its not as deep as some games. You get to pick from 8 vastly different races and 9 classes based on the race (some classes overlap). Each race you can choose from a variety of faces, hair styles, hair colors and ‘facial hair’ styles. For women and races that don’t have facial hair (like the undead) the facial hair catagory changes something on their face. For the undead it had different positions of your jaw for that true zombie-like disfigurement.

Here is my lovely creation. An undead Warlock by the name of “Filth”. He lacks a jaw entirely because… well I liked the look. Plus I can justify not talking to some of the scarier people on the internet.

Once you pick a name, your looks, class and race you are off to the World of Warcraft (dramatic music). A short (really short) loading screen later and you are in game. Movement is extremely easy to pick up and theres a variety of ways to move around which I tend to rotate between myself. The movement is very fluid and unrestricted so you can go from turning to sidestepping without an awkward pause. It is also very well animated. The model and character animation is something you’ll get sick of me talking about by the time I am through, it just shines.

The whole default interface just kind of happens, you don’t need a tutorial for it or anything even though there is a help guide. Everything just kind of falls into place very quickly and after 5 or 10 minutes of fooling around with buttons and keys you are pretty confident you can handle yourself and you step out into the world (or get awakened in my case).

The Story of Filth

The rest of these articles will be written as sort of “walk with me” through the game. I chose this way because I feel it will help bring out one of the key elements in the game, character. Also because you can get stats and specifics and screenshots from any place, this will be unique.

Being Undead and all I, Filth, awaken in a crypt. With hundreds of other Deadites (Undeadites?) pouring in behind me I struggle past the confusion and questions and “I 4// 1337!” proclaimations to the surface. The crypt is in a gloomy woodland setting. Everything has a dark gloom about it and the sky is a fairly consistent shade of green. You can see the sun but the light it gives isn’t all that cheerful.

A man (or whats left of him) outside of the crypt has a little yellow ! over his head. I will soon learn that these ! mean that person has something of interest for me to do. I will also find that there are many, many, many, many people with things for me to do. This man specifically gives me a short run down of the situation.

If any of you are familiar with Warcraft Lore you will eat this stuff up like crazy. All quests/NPC interaction are soaked in the history and lore of warcraft. Everything is very much part of the universe and presented with a style that makes me often read each quest twice.

Apparently I used to be a mindless drone slaving away to “The Scourge” but now I am free under a new ruler (yeah it doesn’t sound all that ‘free’). This ruler, Lady Sylvanas seems to have high hopes for us undead but doesn’t dictate us so it looks like most are pretty keen with that. The man tells me to seek out another person to the south in a small town. I take note of it and set off in that direction.

Being a Warlock I have a few tools at my disposal. A dagger for stabbing, some rags of clothing on me and two spells. One is a type of magical armor and the other a dark bolt of .. well darkness I guess. I can see the outline of the town the man spoke of but before I go straight there I wander off a little to see if I can stab something. I find a “Mindless Zombie” wandering around somewhat mindlessly. He looks a lot like me except with more things sticking out of his head. I would later learn that these kind of undead are still under the control of the scourge and are my enemies. At that moment though I knew that I could attack him, so I did. The battle was short and sweet and my spell looked pretty cool. I could use my dagger better than I expected. It appears my undead brethren also came out of the crypt looking for a war and soon the hill side was swarming with people fighting whatever they could.

Seeing as whatever battle we were fighting had no chance of turning ill for us I wandered into this “town” (which was more like a bunch of beat up old houses, 1/2 of them full of zombies and other ghastly creatures). By this time, all the excitement had made me forget the name of whoever I was looking for, so I just wandered over to a guy with a ! above his head and started talking to him. That is pretty much the spot where things really start to begin.

Until next time.