Cheap WoW Classic Gold
- Buy WoW Classic Gold at IGGM. 6% Off Coupon: vhpg. Awesome prices, instant delivery.
What's more is how the quests are introduced. In the town you fly into, there will be people standing around with yellow exclamation marks above their heads. If it's gray, that means you're not high enough level to do it. When you accept the quest, it turns into a gray question mark that turns yellow when you've satisfied all the requirements. There's very little hunting around for someone who's name you've been given by another NPC, or just hunting around for anything to do.
With the instanced quests, though, WoW isn't quite so newb-friendly, frankly. It can take hours to finish some of these, and a lot of people just don't have that much time to sit down and play. As your character progresses, you'll be introduced to more and more involved adventures, some of which take you into territory controlled by the enemy faction, which is frustrating on the player-versus-player (PvP) servers. In PvP, the zones are green, yellow and red. In a green zone, the enemy can't attack you until you attack them. In a yellow zone, it's anybody's party. So when you go into someone else's green zone, you'll be unable to proactively clear a path to your destination. You also can't communicate to the other faction in the general chat window, and the game has built-in language differences that translate your words into gibbering (although the assumption is that you'll eventually be able to learn the languages of other races). So you can't just tell the locals that you come in peace and won't be staying long.
And since they have no particular reason to trust you anyway, it's a pretty risky endeavor for a Paladin to head to Silverpine to get one of the items for Verigan's Fist, a very powerful mace accessible to this player class at level 20--provided they gather all the ingredients. During beta, I took my level 20 Undead warlock into the Wetlands, the third-tier Alliance zone (levels 20-30). Since PvP wasn't implemented at that point, all I had to worry about were the hostile non-player characters wandering around, and the challenging monsters blanketing the zone. Adding hostile players would have made it nigh-impossible to do solo, and there isn't a lot of incentive for people to party with you and go out all that way, since they're not getting any quest reward for it. Perhaps Blizzard could introduce side rewards for party members who help someone complete one of these large quests, but cap the reward with diminishing returns to prevent guilds from powering their low-level members through the mission all day.
Although Verigan's Fist is a drool-worthy weapon, it's not necessary in the way that the warlock's Succubus is. The creatures he or she can summon are part and parcel of the class--an extension of their list of spells. The warlock can't "tank" like a melee fighter--he can't just sit their and soak up damage, so he needs someone to keep the enemy distracted from him while he whales away with powerful spells. He does a better job here than the mage can, but he needs a minion to add the extra damage that a mage can do on his or her own.
Still, when you put it in perspective, these issues beat the heck out of swinging at the same dumb mobs all day. It beats taking several minutes to recoup from each fight and wait for another mob to appear. Several minutes might not seem like a lot, but when most players do the MMO thing for several hours a day, those minutes add up fast. Since the retail release, I've spent around 100 hours of play leveling my warrior up to 30, and I spent a few more hours testing out a mage on both the Alliance and Horde sides. (My warrior is a member of the I Got Nuggets guild, created by the IGN editorial team and consisting of a few of us and the Insider members that play the game and asked to join up with us.) That's a lot of time that usually spent running or sitting down, but the quick, inexpensive and extensive transportation system and the tools to eliminate downtime pack so much content into the experience that it puts the genre in the shade. DAOC was, when I played it, more of a graphical chat room than a game, because of all the time spent not actually playing. This may make for a strong community, but what's the reward when it's a community of people sitting and running in between the actual content phases
On the other hand, to be fair, the amount of action in WoW makes it relatively difficult to communicate and plan effectively. Many players resort to chat macros to say, "Hey, I'm being attacked, I need help," or, "I'm going to cast a spell on this mob that will remove it from combat, so please don't attack it and thereby pull it back in." WoW could use a more robust voice macro system for when things get hairy. And with the dynamic spawning system, things can get hairy indeed. It's definitely the lesser of two evils, the other being waiting for the mobs to appear when they're good an ready, but it still needs work, as there will be times when they just keep coming and coming until the whole party's been wiped out.
However, the instanced dungeons are a different story, and there are some simply eye-popping set pieces, like the final stage of the Deadmines in Westfall. There's a bunch of screenshots of that in the gallery, as well as many other images I've taken over the past several months I've been playing.
And here's where I talk about the graphics. World of Warcraft is not cutting-edge in this department, but the artistic direction is top-notch. Take the Undercity, for example, the Undead capital beneath the ruins of the former human city of Lordaeron. It's like Beetlejuice meets A Nightmare Before Christmas, with fanciful shapes, bright colors, and lots of endearingly silly touches of spookiness. Then there's Orgrimmar, the Orc capital, with its mesas that look almost painted by hand, with the layers of soil and soil streaking and banding like streams of water. Or perhaps Ironforge, the massive city built into a mountain and featuring a central forge large enough to house a football stadium, with lava pouring from the ceiling and giant gears churning all day long. You can also use the countless braziers to cook food, which is one of the equally countless touches that makes WoW so friendly. Then there's Darnassus, with the Ancients (like Ents, but much larger), slowly wandering the city with booming footsteps.
Still, the relatively low number of polygons will not help WoW in the long run, as strong as the art style is. People's hands are particularly blocky, and each gender has one body type, making a mage as beefy as a warrior, which looks a little silly. You can make an argument for a barrel-chested Merlin making the player feel heroic, but I would like more options for character customization. The other big MMOs offer an order of magnitude more here, and the lack of differentiation makes people look a little too similar to one another. Variety is a good thing, especially when you put so much play time into the game and see countless other players in a single session.
Thankfully, the environments do not suffer this, and they also transition smoothly, with no loading times. Yes, you read that right. Entering the underground train puts you in an instance, but flying from one end of the continent to another will not require staring dully at a single progress bar as it inches painfully from one side to the other. The game also starts up impressively fast, probably thanks to the low complexity of the objects and character models. Like I said before, there's not a lot of waiting around in this game. At any rate, each zone has a distinct character, almost as if a completely different art team worked on each one, and they may have. At the same time, the transitions are never jarring. As you fly from, say, Ironforge to the Wetlands, you'll descend down a snowy mountain, gradually making your way down to the green and brown marshes full of crocolisks (six-legged crocodiles), gnolls, and many other beasties. You can still definitely sense when you're moving into a new area, so they must have done a lot of work on getting this balance just right.