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Friday 9 February, 2007
For quite some time I have had a number of friends playing this addictive MMORPG, but I resisted getting into it--not in small part because until quite recently I never had a computer capable of running it.
I run Linux on my laptop, which used to prevent me from doing these sorts of things, but I recently got my hands on a copy of Cedega, and I had to test it. You know, for science.
So I created my first ever WoW character. I'm still new to the game, so let me start with a few comments on my general first impressions before I give a more detailed spec.
First: I don't play a lot of PC games--I'm a much bigger console player (although my real forte is tabletop RPGs)--so there were a couple of weird steps for me to make there, such as system requirements and lag.
I set up my character on a low population server, so the lag isn't bad, but my graphics card is barely adequate so I get some rendering problems under certain conditions, which makes things difficult sometimes.
Anyway, onto things slightly more specific to the game. the first few levels are kind of interesting, although not very exciting, and are also very misleading. They go by quickly until about level 10... at which point leveling starts taking hours, and as I hear it only takes more time as you go along (although it is faster when it isn't your first time).
The whole game so far is fairly slow-paced, and a lot of the world isn't explained very well--this makes it a lot harder for new players, but it really isn't a big issue or deterrent for me.
My naive, first-three-days-of-playing perspective is that if you have friends to play with, it will be worth your while to get into World of Warcraft, but if you don't have a specific goal (like running "instances" and "raids" with friends) then you will probably waste your life creating max level characters and exploring the nuances of the remarkably beautiful and well-developed world.
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