the brief life of a World of Warcraft stress tester

Next to the mass hysteria surrounding the release of Star Wars Galaxies, the MMORPG scene could never have anticipated the reaction to Blizzard's first foray into this growing marketplace. The difference being that most of the people waiting to play a space faring smuggler or bounty hunter were Star Wars fans that just happened to be gamers; this time around, existing MMORPG gamers and neophytes alike are eagerly awaiting the chance to try out what could potentially become the Everquest slayer.

Standard game commentary hyperbole aside, after spending five days and just shy of 20 hours with World of Warcraft I can say that this description is more than adequate. The easiest comparison I can make is to Blizzard's own Diablo II, which transplanted the simple "kill-reward" system into a decent looking game where the goal is not just to complete quests, but to get better equipment and level up as many times as possible. Along with a free online component, all of these things created a theoretically endless game. And deftly executing this simple design concept is where World of Warcraft succeeds. The level grind in MMORPGs is a design contrivance that will never go away, unfortunately. But in World of Warcraft, it doesn't have to feel that way.

Probably the most disappointing part of the game is character creation. The races familiar to anyone who has played the Warcraft games are all here, and your race will determine what region of Azeroth you begin the game in. However the options for physical features are way too limited given the recent headway made by games like Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes. Granted, World of Warcraft has been in development for three years, but I would still like to have more than a handful of face and hair types. It makes the world feel like more of multiplayer RPG - not a MMORPG.

Classes are the standard fantasy variety: warrior, paladin, mage, warlock, priest, rogue, etc. Some classes will not be available to every race, but will sometimes make it up with an equivalent class. For example, the Orcs do not have Priests, but they do have Shamans. And as expected, the Undead are not able to be Paladins. Your class dictates your character's basic abilities and restricts the types weapons and armour you can use at first. Your class also gives you your first special abilities (spells for magic users, power attacks for melee/ranged characters). Multiclassing is not an option at this stage, and I doubt it ever will be. Instead, Class development is handled by Professions.

The beta was recently modified to allow only two professions, but they can apparently be unlearned to make room for more. This may be irrelevant, though, as most Professions complement each other. For example, the Weaponsmith can use metal to forge weapons, but in order to get the metal he must take on Miner to forage for raw materials. Skill points are the basic currency of improving your character, and are gained through the usage of weapons and spells, as well as by taking damage (which improves defense). Skill points can then be used to upgrade existing special abilities like spells and attacks or to gain new professions and learn their associated abilities.

With each profession you learn a base number of "recipes" to create new items, whether they be weapons (weaponsmith), explosives (engineer) or food (cook). Some items may only require a few ingredients to make, but the more complicated building items, such as metal bars, will need you to work a forge to create. Forges can be found in most towns, and can be used by Engineers, Armoursmiths and Weaponsmiths.

Learning new Class and Profession abilities requires a visit to an NPC Trainer, with an associated gold and skill point cost. This is where I think SWG's skill system is a lot more developed, as the ability to train other players is one of the better concepts to come out of that game. A persistent world should allow for player characters to have an effect on its own population. Apart from the Auction House where crafted items can be sold, World of Warcraft seems overly simplified, with players taking a passive role as mere content consumers (something that Guild Wars hopes to alleviate with its massive Player vs. Player battles).

At level 10, you can use your skill points to begin upgrading "Talents", which are a kind of high-level combat skills for your Class. This is more akin to Diablo II's skill tree, and allows you specialize your character's abilities even further. Although in the beta you can un-learn talents, in the retail version this will not be available. In Diablo II I can see how unlearning would make the game too easy; in an MMORPG where building up your character takes much longer, this might have been an added bonus. Perhaps even a limited amount of times you can un-learn a skill would put a restriction on power gamers trying to game the system. With these rules in place character development becomes very precarious in this regard, as you can't really afford to spend points experimenting. Overall the system seems less open than SWG, which allows you to rebuild your character countless times, taking on multiple professions, and even changing your physical features if you have the money to spend on an image designer. World of Warcraft takes the more traditional class-levelling approach, while Galaxies is more aptly described as "Career building" .

The quests delivered by NPCs are not as blatantly repetitive as Star Wars Galaxies, but I can still see them getting tiresome fairly quickly. Quests can vary from simple delivery errands, to destroying X number of creatures, or taking on "Boss" monsters. But where SWG's quests are governed by a cold, unfeeling terminal, World of Warcraft at least provides a small storyline behind each minor quest, and are exclusively given out by the game's many NPCs. The Quest Log was appreciated, and although practical in its own way, made me really miss Galaxies' datapad and waypoint system. When you accept multiple quests it becomes tricky to remember where everyone is, but because most of the quests you take will remain in one city and its surrounding area this isn't as hard as it sounds.

Every new character that starts WoW gets an artifact or item in their inventory based on their class - activating this starts the underlying quest that will run throughout the game. As grand and sweeping as Blizzzard's world is, this quest lends a very obvious air of linearity to the game. That is, after completing the quests in a town's surrounding area, the main Class quest will almost always take you to the next town to report to another NPC to continue your Class-based quests. This is good to give starting characters a bit of direction while gaining XP during travel through the wilderness, but it doesn't really force characters to go out and explore. The world really is massive, almost comparable to Galaxies, but there is nothing compelling enough for new to mid-level characters to ever venture outside their Race's region.

Luckily, Blizzard spent a lot of time creating these virtual provinces, and everything about each race is exuded in the rolling landscapes that teem with monsters and bandits that are just begging to be slain. The mighty snow-capped dwarven mountains were very distinct from the gloomy and drab homeland of the Undead. Although the painted landscape shadows threw me for a loop, the graphics aren't entirely sub-par. They're slightly cartoony, blockish, even - at times I felt like I was playing a single-unit version of Warcraft III. But the effort spent creating a Warcraft-themed world shows, and made me see past the graphics that are definitely behind those of its contemporaries.

As expected, there isn't much beyond the standard form of PointClickDeath combat. Melee characters get power attacks aside from their basic attacks that need to recharge before using them again, with the most powerfull attack taking the longest. Spellcasters can also attack with their basic weapon (usually a staff), but spells are their primary arsenal and recharge a lot faster. However upon casting you begin a timer, which must reach the end before a successful cast. If the spellcaster is hit during the duration of a cast they become distracted and must start re-casting, with a limited number of retries depending on any bonuses to Concentration. This timer also applies to any other classes that attempt to use enchantments in combat, whether they be an increase in Defense or a Healing spell.

However unlike other MMORPGs, soloing is a viable option as most monsters two, or even three levels above your character can still be taken on. Grouping is beneficial, but not essential to beginning and intermediate characters. Quests that involve slaying a number of monsters get annoying fast, though, as NPC guards will sometimes steal kills. And because the quests are not instanced, the lower level quests are populated by characters trying to complete them and it becomes a chore to wait for monster or evil NPC respawns. Upon successful completion of a quest, you get a choice for your reward - usually a selection of items beneficial to your class, which can be helpful when you're starting out and don't have much gold.

When you die, you resurrect as a spirit in the nearest town's graveyard, where you can regain corporeal form with an XP deduction or you can run back to where you died to find your corpse. In this form you can't really interact with the environment like retrieving your body in Diablo II, and your actions are limited to running and jumping. What was a little annoying was that you couldn't chat while dead. Sometimes after a tense battle I just wanted to kick back and chat with some of the other testers, but this was impossible until I found my body. I could see this being especially troublesome in group or raid situations, where status reports or re-strategizing would need to be communicated between the fallen and those that are still fighting. Even stranger is the fact that your ghostly form is still bound by physical limits - I couldn't float or run through walls; I had to jump over obstacles and scale cliffs as if I was alive.

I made three characters during the stress test: A dwarven Paladin (Engineer/Miner, level 11), a human warlock (level 6) and an undead mage (level 5). I would have liked to try all of the classes, but obviously time was of the essence. The Paladin plays very similar to the Hero characters in Warcraft III, and despite my levelling him the farthest I was much more interested in my undead mage. Spellcasting visual effects had some weight here of course - there was nothing like seeing my mage produce fireballs to be launched at giant bats - but I found that the back story for the undead as a race was quite interesting, and my meager quests seemed that much more profound. The warlock seems to be the most powerful class, as it combines the effectiveness of a mage's spells, with those of a Priest/Shaman (think Necromancer).

The community of World of Warcraft felt younger, measurable I suppose by the AOL-speak and inane conversation. Not to say that everyone I talked to about their enjoyment of the game was a mouth breathing idiot, but I couldn't help but compare it to the subtle maturity of Star Wars Galaxies. Granted I'm making a huge generalization here, because the immature are not completely exiled from Galaxies. They're just less noticable amongst all the roleplaying that goes on in the more populated areas. Based on their experiences with Diablo II, I'm sure Blizzard wants to put a cap on this behaviour for fear of scaring away the more serious players that are considering this game, as a recent post in the World of Warcraft forum shows. I'm not sure that this type of regulation would seriously affect gameplay; if anything it would deter those that are just looking to waste their time on another MMORPG. Star Wars Galaxies has another advantage: the level of social interaction via body language within the game. Even though each race in World of Warcraft has its own dance (which are all quite funny, right down to the Undead rocking out and throwing up the horns), only the basic emotes are covered here. Galaxies has a much more comprehensive list, but still primitive when compared to Second Life.

Needless to say I had an excellent time with World of Warcraft, and although my heart was set on an immediate purchase this fall, I may need some additional reflection after my recent dive back into Galaxies. This reflection may also be unavoidable - if the Open Beta isn't scheduled to start until October, a November release seems even less likely. World of Warcraft will easily appeal to Action RPG gamers looking for a more prolonged experience, but it still boils down to slaying monsters, levelling up, and amassing an impressive collection of loot. After the initial novelty wears off, the game's inner workings will be exposed and we will have another straightforward MMORPG. As much grief as Star Wars Galaxies gets, it's still a much deeper and involved game - it just happens to be for those that have more time than sense. World of Warcraft will succeed not because of its originality, but its mass appeal. Most importantly, though, Blizzard has been listening to players from the beginning of its development, and that's not something you see very often with MMORPGs.

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