First Impressions
Here are my initial thoughts:Good
Graphics are great - While the bad guys seem a little boring, I realize these are the early ones and designed for newbies like myself. The atmosphere and backgrounds all look fantastic. Also, my 2.26 P4, 768 RAM and 128 meg FX card is powerful and fast enough for me to run the game at full speed with all graphic options at 100%.
Very minimal lag - The first day had one hiccup, and since then I have had one or two extremely minor lag situations and that is it. Amazing when you consider the size and scope of the game and the thousands of folks all playing at once.
Tons of quests - My lvl 9 Night Elf is only in the second city and I still find quests around every corner. If I do every quest I find (which is my current plan) the one-player aspect of the game will last forever. I may never need to buy another game (besides HALO 2 and Half-Life 2 of course).
Gameplay - Is simple, intuitive, and fun. Combat and spell-casting is a piece of cake. Inventory management and selling loot are easy. Loot is extremely plentiful (although all I find is cheap crap I can sell I bet the good stuff comes later).
World size - Oh my goodness. The world is amazingly huge. Just seeing how big the Night Elf island is and its size in comparison to the rest of the world is just crazy.
Quick gameplay - With SWG you had to spend 3-4 hours just to rest, fight, repair, travel, etc. Not here! You can easily jump in and spend 30 minutes getting some XP, doing a quest, etc. GREAT for the casual gamer.
Professions - Wow, until I saw the trainers I had no idea there were so many professions. I haven't selected any yet, but seeing how many there are and the different types is impressive.
Bad
Character creation - The characters all look the same. Besides hair and color, one Night Elf looks just like another, one Dwarf looks like the rest, etc. COH spoiled me. I really think Blizzard dropped the ball here. It's kind of stupid running around and seeing everyone on the continent looking almosi identical. Except the Undead which have some cool variations.
Too many newbies! - I have found that soooo many new folks in the same area is a killer when you need to rely on bosses or quest items to spawn. Last Tuesday I spent an hour or so waiting for spiders to appear because EVERYONE was killing spiders. Yesterday, I got extremely frustrated waiting to kill a boss because everyone was there doing the same thing. The boss spawned four times and I only got to try him once (yes, he kicked my ass but that is beside the point!).
Server wait. - This is annoying the shit out of me. It has gotten better (last night I had to wait 9 minutes one time and 2 minutes another, and last Tuesday I had to wait 28 minutes in the afternoon). I think Blizzard should have foreseen the massive usage and been prepared or at least set caps on servers to prevent this.
Maps - I think the mini-map and the world map stink. The mini-map shows too little and is too restricting. The world map needs to show more detail. Users should also be allowed to set markers or waypoints.
SPAM - There are a lot of idiots out there and they all seem to want to use the chat menus.
Ugly
None really. And that is amazing when you consider a launch of a MMORPG of this size and scope.
Overall score - 9/10 - the good bits HIGHLY outweigh the bad ones. I am thoroughly enjoying my Lvl 9 Night Elf Druid and my Lvl 5 Undead Warlock on the Argent Dawn server.
BHT
