16 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
World of keep the customer in the dark.
Date of Review: Dec 8, 2004
The Bottom Line: Buy with caution. Fun now but who knows what may happen since they aren't saying.
I've been playing WoW since the open beta started. I pre-ordered the retail version so have been playing that since day one. The game is only two weeks old so many things will change but I really wanted to give my first impressions. I have several characters at levels 2, 2, 7, 12, 12, 12, 12, and 28. They are all different so I think I have a pretty good basis to judge the early game at least.
I'll start with the bad just so we can have a happier ending. The worst part of the game is there is a complete lack of customer communications. They don't tell you squat about what's going on.
First example. Just a few days into retail and over the long Thanksgiving holiday they completely shut down a large part of one of the most popular tradeskills, fishing if you want to know, with no warning and no word for four days. One minute it's working, the next the servers go down, again, no warning, then the servers come back up and the fishing is borked. For FOUR FREAKING DAYS they tell us not one single word. Finally they tell us it was on purpose due to exploits and they would fix it in an upcoming patch. That was a week and a half ago and bet you can guess what they've told us since. Nada. Not one single word. Most people are expecting the mighty nerf bat to be brought into play but it's all just guess work since they won't tell us. If they are going to bring out the mighty nerf bat this early and with no warning everyone needs to look out. The mighty nerf bat is magic and can not be put away once you start swinging it. Ask anyone that has ever played one of these games when the nerfing starts.
For those that don't play these games a "nerf" is when they take away some features, almost always as a result of someone whining about how much better someone else is doing than they are, of the game in order to "balance", note the quotes, no one else ever calls it balance except for game devs, the game play. When the mighty nerf bat comes out it means they are going to pound some aspect of the game into pretty much a not very fun thing to play. Once the nerfing starts it usually keeps going until there's nothing left that's really much fun. No matter what they do there will always be people that whine about someone else so it's a never ending cycle. Once again though, we really don't know. Know why? Repeat after me, because they don't tell us anything.
Another example is server maintenance. They say on their forums that they have daily maintenance for their eastern and central servers from 4:00 am est to 5:00 am est. Since they posted that the servers have come down once that I can remember at 4am. One day at 5:30am, a few days not at all, and another at 1am. See any pattern there? Makes it hard to plan on almost any quest because you don't know if you will be able to finish or not. The normal warning for servers going down is five minutes. That's ALL the in game warning there EVER is. Five minutes to get to a safe place before they shut down. Anyone that has ever played this type game knows five minutes is just not very much time if you are in the middle of a cave or something like that. If you read the forums it's a little better. One day we got nine minutes warning in the forums. Don't believe that one hour down time other. It's rare that the server I play on comes up in less than two and a half hours. I will admit that many come up faster, but many of them don't. But again, you never know when or for how long because they don't tell you. You just get that message in game saying server shut down in five minutes.
That's just two of the worst examples but there are plenty more. Basically it seems their policy is what we don't know won't hurt us. Or hurt them more likely. So if you are looking for a game with good customer communications don't even think about this one.
Now for a little better part.
They have fixed some of the very early problems. There were waits to get onto the servers that could last well over an hour because of server full messages. You got put at the end of the line and people were let on as others quit or got booted. They put up a lot more servers over the first few days and raised the allowed number on the existing servers.
They also had the most amazing lag for a few days. I mean server side lag that could last several minutes per action. You hit the attack key and it could take several minutes, the longest I actually timed was eight but I got real bored of timing lag really fast if you can imagine ;-), before anything actually happened. You would just stand there looking stupid until the server caught up. Of course you were dead when it did because you attacked something and then didn't fight back. The server thought things were all hunky dory and you just enjoyed being ripped to pieces while standing admiring the graphics and let the attacks continue. This wasn't just a once in a while thing, it went on for hours at a time. They did fix it though.
There was some problem with these fixes. For several days the servers were going up and down worse than the stock market. Can you guess what they were telling us and how much warning we were getting? I'll give you a hint if you really need it. Nothing, and five minutes. Usually five minutes anyway, sometimes you just got booted and when you tried to get back on you would get server down messages.
Now on to the pros.
Where to start? The graphics are excellent. This game looks really really nice. I have everything turned up to max and it runs very smooth with no frame lag at all, even in the most crowded areas. I am playing on a p4 3.0ghz, 1gb ram, a 9800xt, and two raptors in raid and showing on a nec 22" monitor so your mileage may vary. But for me at least it looks great and runs great.
Sound is ok. These games usually aren't known for their sound effects and this one isn't going to turn any heads. At least as good as the mmorpg standards, but that ain't saying a lot.
The game is very stable. I don't remember having a single in game crash. I've had one or two when starting the game for some reason but it starts fine when I try it again. I'll have to give it a ten on that one.
Gameplay now.
The game is great fun to play. At least for the moment. See my comments above about the mighty nerf bat. How fun it stays is really up in the air right now. If they start nerfing all bets are off. But for now it really is a lot of fun. I've been playing these games for seven or eight years now I guess and I've not played a single one that was as much fun as this.
This game is really solo friendly so if that's your style, which mine mostly is, you'll love this game. You are not forced to group just to play. There are big quests and the like which will require large numbers of people, but that's to be expected and it's not the only way to play. Hats off to blizzard for letting all their customers play the way they want when they want. It's about time someone did this.
The game is also played in groups just fine if that's the way you would rather play. All the different classes are really different, at least until the nerf bat hits, and you can make some really strong teams by using characters that can cover different needs.
The game seems to be quite well balanced too. There are always going to be the people that complain that one class is so much better than the others, or one that is so much worse, or all the classes except the one they are playing is way over powered and needs to be beat with the nerf bat, but at least through the levels I've played I can't find any real advantage or disadvantage to any of them. They all have different strengths and weaknesses but if you play with that knowledge and use it to your advantage I'm finding I can level all of them at pretty much the same rate. Some I enjoy more than others, but that is strictly due to what I like doing rather than anything about the workings of the characters.
The game is very friendly to first time players, both to this game in particular and to this type in general. Pretty much anyone can jump in and start having fun right away. Plenty to do and see with a fair number of quests. I wouldn't mind seeing more quests as some of the popular ones can get quite packed at times. That's going to be a fact of life with this type game though and WoW isn't near as bad as pretty much any other that I've played. I would especially like to see a lot more instanced quests as I think that would take care of a lot of the stuff that happens when you get a group of strangers together in the same spot trying for the same kill.
I'm really not sure what the long term play is going to be like for a lot of people. It's really pretty easy to level in this game if that's what you want to do. There are already people at the level cap of 60 and it's just two weeks into the game. Personally I don't see a problem for me for quite some time even if the game remains static, which it won't. While I do tend to have one character I play the most in these games I will always have several others of different styles that I play quite a bit just for a change of pace. I don't see me leveling all of them to 60 any time in the very near future and by the time I do there should be more content added. So if you just play one character as fast as you can you may get bored with this game. Everyone else should get a lot of fun out of it. Even the casual few hours a week type will probably enjoy this game because it is so newbie friendly and easy to play.
I'm not going to go into character classes, races, detailed game mechanics, or anything like that. You can find that all over the place. My intent was to give you my overall view of general game play at this early stage and what I think about it. I hope I've managed to do that and give enough information to help without getting too deep.
So for now at least I'll give this game a 65%. Overall it's above average and in game play it's well above average. The lack of any communication with the customer is so horrid that it drags the game down from what it could be. I would say if you like mmorpgs it's probably a safe bet to try. If you are new to these games but have been wanting to try one this is probably the best for newbies. City of Heroes is newbie friendly in game play but with no real loot, very few different enemy types, and no real exploring, I think WoW just smokes it. Most, if not all, the other games like this that are out there have much steeper learning curves and while you may like them they usually have a period of time to really get into them and they generally require a lot of game time to advance your character.
Just keep in mind that any of this can, and eventually all of it will, change if the mighty nerf bat gets taken out of storage.
It's going on 3:00am so please excuse the typos. :-)
