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World of Warcraft Open Beta Online
Everyone and their brother wrote in to mention to us that the World of Warcraft Open Beta has begun, breaking Fileplanet in the process. The WoW community site has also been hammered into a whimpering ball, and the normal version is down in favour of a simple black page of text. The torrent to download the game is still up but if you're looking to join you'd best be signing up soon. The Open Beta is a first-come first-serve affair. For our friends across the pond, IGN has details on the European Beta Test, which sounds like it will be a profitable venture for Blizzard. From my experience, if you are at all interested in fantasy gaming this one will knock your socks off.
I've been in the closed beta since July.. this one, unlike other high profile MMOs, is ready as its going to be for launch. And its fun; well worth the 15 bucks a month..
If you are a casual gamer you have to try it out..
The proprietary downloader is going slow as heck. I saw mention of a torrent in the news item, any chance anyone has a link to the torrent file?
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
I've played every MMO from EQ to FFXI to Eve to ATiTD. Here's my thoughts on your comments.
... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.
the character customization was a letdown. you can choose skin color, hair color, hair style, and facial hair, but each option has only 10 presets. you can't pick any RGB combination.
Funny someone from FFXI complains about this- weren't there 10 or so total choices per race there? This is a good amount of customization. Letting someone pick any RGB would be bad, we'd have pink and purple Taurens which would ruin the atmosphere. Also, WoW has the most important part of customization- skill customization. Warrior A is different from warrior B by more tha just his gear- he has different skillsets and abilities due to race and talents. THis is far more important and fun than just looks.
it was a little confusing when trying to get in to play with friends. apparently you start in your race's home town, and half the races (horde) start on the other side of the planet from the rest (alliance). so you have to coordinate and have everyone at least on the same island, and same race if you want to level up together.
This is a good thing. The game is a PvP game- horde vs alliance. You can't have PvP realms if you're playing lovey dovey in the same city. The racial cities help give the game more of an RP feel (and its all about rp), and a better atmosphere. I really think FFXI would have been better if they had enforced racial starting cities instead of using the weak bonus item thing.
the first thing i noticed was navigation. there's a little map but it doesn't show anything important. if you get lost an NPC can put a marker on it for you but i didn't see a way to mark it myself. guild wars has an awesome feature where you can draw on the map and everyone in your party can see it. ffxi has a full screen map mode that shows everything in your current zone (although you have to do a quest to get the map). the WoW map was jsut
As you explore more of an area, additional information appears on the map. For example when you find a new area, it will color in on the map, mouseover will show the areaname, and additional details will show up (roads, rivers, buildings, dungeons). An FFXI style marking or guildwar style thing would be nice, but it isn't as low featured as you claim. But since you only got to 5, you may still be in your starting town and not have noticed this.
it took me about 2 hours to get level 5. apparently the best way to level up is to do quests, most of which require you to kill stuff. in ffxi, you have to be ok at your job at 10 and good at your job by level 15 or you will die every fight. in wow, i was soloing stuff 2 levels higher and reading the news in another window - it's very easy.
The difficulty does go up, but I consider the easy leveling a *good* thing. I quit FFXI not because the game was poor, but because leveling became too much of a pain post 50. ANd I love leveling from quests- it adds so much more to a game then just killing mobs. Wait til you get some of the higher level quests. As a shaman, for my fire totem I needed to find a shrine in the mountains. It required finding a small mountain path that twisted through the zone. If you didn't know a path and a shrine had to be there, you'd never find it. Similarly, I've found quests started by hidden items. If you explore you can find all sorts of stuff.
will it be the biggest MMORPG in time? i'm gonna go against conventional wisdom and say No. when i first started FFXI, i immediately felt like i was part of a big complex world and every time i went around a corner there was something really cool to discover. wow just seems antiseptic and empty. then again, when FFXI released in NA, it had already been out for a couple years in japan and for many months in NA beta. this is a fresh new world in WoW so maybe that's how all MMORPG start out.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I played FFXI for approximately 6 months and attained level 40 with my main job. I played WoW during the stress test and attained level 15. I am a casual gamer. I enjoyed FFXI, but I grew bored of leveling, thus grew bored of FFXI.
If you are a power gamer, you will probably want to stick with FFXI because the leveling and quest system in FFXI is based around playing the game 3-5 hours at a time. If you are tired of leveling or a casual gamer, then switch to WoW. WoW has an extremely elaborate quest system that drives you through the game. Unlike FFXI, you get some small story tidbits while you work on rank. In WoW, everything has a story, and like FFXI, the quests are driven to make you explore new areas.
Grouping. You know that in FFXI, you can't do anything without a full group. Not to mention a full group of good players. In WoW, that is not the case. You can choose to do solo missions are group missions since the quest are color coded according to their difficulty. I enjoyed doing the solo quests and the harder, group quests. With that said, you have more options with WoW, than you do with FFXI.
Leveling. After I reached level 10, the level came a lot slower, just like in FFXI. You can work on a sub skills, but you are pretty much stuck with the main job you pick in WoW. FFXI was cool because you could just switch jobs whenever you wanted, you cannot really do that with WoW...but, the jobs/skills in WoW are very customizable and are more detailed, so you have more to choose from. In FFXI, you received ability A at level 10. In WoW, you have to choose what skills you want to concentrate in. Example, mage would choose, fire, water, or earth. In FFXI, you just earned more money to get what you wanted.
I found FFXI to be too slow and time consuming to get anything done in the end, that's why I quit. I enjoyed WoW because of its casual atmosphere. That and not ever having to wait for a WHM to pop-up and join my group. I suggest you try the open BETA. I think you will find all you need to know and will be able to make a good decision based on it.
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.