In the future, there are cars with guns. Lots of guns. There are vast, unending reaches of post-apocolyptic wasteland to explore, in varying shades of brown and grey. And sometimes it rains, making the polluted atmosphere almost tangible as your headlights attempt to penetrate the gloom. Then the mutants come, the pallor of their tainted skins reflected in your high-beams. You mow them down with machine gun fire, one by one, running over a few for good measure. But they don’t die. The machine gun only does 1-2 damage. The mutants rise again after your 2 tonne vehicle just ran headlong into a crowd of them. Something isn’t right here.

Welcome to Auto Assault.

Auto Assault certainly succeeds at capturing the look and feel of a post-apocolyptic environment. The influences of movies like The Road Warrior and tabletop classic Car Wars are immediately obvious. The setup is that a plague spread across the Earth leaving three factions in its wake: the last humans who managed to find protection, the BioMeks who are mechanically enhanced humanoids, and the mutants, who braved the contamination and gained abilties of their own in the process. Each faction has four classes each, but upon close inspection there really wasn’t much difference between them. I attributed that to the typical overbalancing that goes on with newly invented classes that don’t fall into the typical mold of other RPGs (see rogues, healers, warriors – they are all pretty much the same in every game).

I levelled two characters for the beta: a level 5 human commando, and a level 8 BioMek agent. I spent quite a bit of time at the beginning tweaking my avatar’s look with the game’s many options, but I found this incongruous with the amount of customizing I can do with the class’ default vehicle. Considering I spent 100% of my game time within my vehicle, I expected at the very least to decorate my car with a variety of decals and other assorted ornaments, though obviously nothing that would affect gameplay (such as a cow catcher – something I never found in the game, unfortunately).

Within the game, the “hard points”, or major components are customizable. These are the weapons, armour plating or motor which can all be looted or purchased, and the game’s skill and crafting system allows you to tweak the parts you do have or craft entirely new ones. This was a lot like the many spacefaring RPGs like Freelancer or even Jump to Lightspeed, and would be immediately familiar to veterans of that type of gameplay. To me, this is the meat of the game – creating mobile weapons of mass destruction that can be pitted against other players, or NPC driven vehicles. But things don’t exactly work out that way. Players have to earn money and experience to increase their skills somehow, and this is where the conventions of MMORPGs are wedged in.

Combat is the lifeblood of most MMORPGs; it is the means by which rewards are obtained and ultimately the reason why we continue to play the game. As such, it should be consequential in spite of its repetitive nature, because it’s what players are going to be spending 90% of the game doing. Halfway through Auto Assault’s tutorial it became clear that the combat needs a lot of work for this game to succeed.

I’ll get to the point: damage doesn’t make any sense in this game. Introducing guns into the RPG is a difficult compromise. The skill and damage output can be left up to the player themselves, removing the need for points to be spent in this attribute, and focusing instead on bonuses to each hit. Or, the skill is left entirely to the amount of points spent, creating a kind of glass ceiling for gamers that are used to the behaviour of pointing the mouse to target a guaranteed hit. Jump to Lightspeed followed the former system; Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines held fast to the latter. In a game where the action is intended to be fast paced, this is a hinderance.

I think what it comes down to is reasonable expectations: when I rotate my vehicle’s turret and target an enemy within range, I expect a hit rate of at least 90%. I don’t want to see a chain gun emptying hundreds of bullets that do a possible 1-2 damage into an unarmoured targets in close proximity and then have most miss. But this is what ends up happening. As a result combat in Auto Assault degrades into holding down the “fire” button while driving around the target in circles, reminding me of some of the worst battles in Freelancer. Though there is a side effect to this approach, as weapons will overheat through extended use. Against tougher enemies this is a problem, but the fact that you can simply try and out maneuver your opponent by driving away makes this vulnerability a nonissue. Enemies on foot could take direct hits from my vehicle, and it usually took a couple of tries to actually run one over successfully. In a nice homage to Carmageddon, they erupt into a could of red. Other vehicles don’t take much ramming damage, either. I’m giving the devs the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that my armour plating wasn’t strong enough. Though something is telling me this system simply wasn’t implemented. I also took no damage after crashing my car through buildings or into obstacles.

The majority of terrain, buildings, and obstacles are destructable – but it regenerates. This still provides some interesting side-effects to firefights, and is honestly the way it should be in a game that’s so action-heavy. The physics are complete completely out to lunch, however. I can be stopped dead in my tracks by driving into an NPC, yet driving headlong up a cliff produces some fairly realistic responses in my vehicle. Driving overall feels sloppy, and while I don’t expect precision controls, some noticable difference between driving an armoured car and a dune buggy should be expected.

What’s worse is that there is no real penalty for death, as your car’s “health” simply reaches zero and you are instantly transported to a repair station that will regenerate your vehicle’s armour for free. And since repair stations are usually close to mission areas, there’s no real time lost getting back to the task at hand. The worst I had to put up with was fighting off other players for a spot on one of the repair platforms. I had flashbacks of trying to obtain a tank at the beginning of a map in BF1942.

It’s generally accepted that quests in World of Warcraft are repetitive, they just happen to change the environment in which they’re given and executed. They end up feeling different (to a point), and along with the offered rewards allow players to forego the monotony. The quests in Auto Assault feel more like those of the original Star Wars Galaxies, before it turned into every other MMORPG (definitely a topic for another day). The NPCs in Auto Assault might as well be mission terminals, because the seemingly random Kill Ten Monsters or Deliver Part X to City Y quests are completely uninteresting and do little to enhance the gameworld for your particular race or class. There is a lot of travelling, too, and so having a vehicle right away is a bonus for new players who have to suffer through many levels in other MMORPGs before getting a mount or vehicle.

I presumed that the amount of driving at full throttle through the dune-scattered desert would result in some kind of sub-game that monitors tricks or style. I received some medals for significant air time, but that seems to be the extent of it. What about leaping off of a cliff to land in crowd of unruly scavengers or demolishing a building? There was a bonus for pretty much every stunt pulled in Carmageddon. Joined by the absurd levels of violence, it’s part of what made the game interesting to play. The possible avenues of destruction available in Auto Assault make including these types of gameplay bonuses kind of obvious.

The post-apocolyptic, Road Warrior-styled setting is one that is ripe for material, yet has never really been exploited by games. As such, Auto Assault could have easily differentiated itself from its competitors. Instead, it suffers from its desire to become the next big clickfest MMOG. It’s unfortunate that the game’s designers have clumsily grafted the standard MMORPG model onto a setting that doesn’t require it. The action-heavy gameplay would be fine for casual sessions that encourage players to do battle with each other. Vehicle upgrades and tweaking add enough depth to the gameplay that encourages a long term investment. However this insistence on having character “levels” doesn’t suit the material when most of the game is encountered while driving. As a result Auto Assault is reduced to the tired old grind, which undermines the entire setting. It becomes easier for prospective players to detach the game world from its underpinnings – they will gladly pay the same montly fee for something like World of Warcraft instead. Put simply, Auto Assault just isn’t that much fun, and the lack of any real discerning factor from its contemporaries make it a tough sell in an already saturated market.

Note: These thoughts are based on the weekend beta event that took place from January 27th to January 31st, 2006. I understand there have been some significant improvements in the game since the beta launched last year, but that means absolutely nothing when the product I’m playing is not any good.

Blizzard officially closed the World of Warcraft Open Beta test on Thursday, announcing that they would be wiping clean the servers in preparation for the game’s launch this Tuesday. According to the official site, over 500,000 people signed up for the World of Warcraft open beta, before they had to turn away account requests. The game was absolutely packed during the first few days of the open beta: wandering around my test server I couldn’t stretch my arms without hitting another player. Adding to this percieved chaos were the truckloads of monster swarms surrounding each population centre. Low level character quests thrive on these “Kill X number of [Monster]” quests, but at peak hours it was like walking through the killing fields. The server lag was equally troubling – but what a perfect way for Blizzard to test their architecture.

The amount of traffic settled down after a while, and I was able to continue my adventures in earnest. I created another Human Warlock, an Undead Warrior, and a Night Elf priest. Once again I was amazed at how well designed each race’s homeland was. This was my first time playing a Night Elf, and though some of the quests were a little uninteresting, the virtual realm that was sprawled before me kept me thinking about other things. And when you die as a Night Elf, you are converted to Wisp form instead of the standard ghost form every other race must endure, allowing a few extra degrees of freedom when trying to find your corpse. Blizzard has to be commended for really dipping into every piece of Warcraft lore and making it so believable. Originally I thought the low-poly graphics were a little too cartoony compared directly with my experiences in Star Wars Galaxies, but looking deeper at the World of Warcraft reveals a cohesive whole.

There are many areas to explore: the dwarven mountains of Khaz Modan to the undead stronghold of the Undercity are all reachable by foot. And you can hop on a Zeppelin to travel between the islands of Kalimdor and Azeroth if you wish to explore the homeland of the Orcs. I have to admit it was pretty amusing to see my Undead warrior hanging out with some Tauren Shamans and an Orc warrior in the barren lands outside the orcish city of Ogrimmar. Mounts are also available to travel great distances, and though I talked to players who had ridden on the back of a mighty griffin, my own efforts to obtain a mount were fruitless. I wanted to get a skeletal horse for my undead warrior, but a level requirement (and significant amount of money) was needed. This wasn’t a huge deal, though, because the game’s quests mostly depend on the surrounding area they are assigned in.

This time around I paid particular attention to the initial character building stages. I found that beginning characters don’t feel as useless as in Star Wars Galaxies, and can fend for themselves on all of the beginner and intermediate missions. Any mission you pick up that would be a challenge for your character will be marked in red in your quest journal. You can either team up to complete this mission, or level up a few more times until the quest is marked in green. And because each quest will more than likely take place in one region, this makes it easier to prioritize and plan your trips. It also makes your game sessions much more manageable, instead of spending your time marathon running to your next objective. I found I was able to have satisfying gaming sessions that were sometimes less than an hour with a feeling that I’ve actually accomplished something: whether it was levelling up or completing a few quests.

But this gives rise to a serious flaw surrounding quests, weapons, and monsters: once you get out of a town or region you have no real direction except to go forward. Going back to previous towns and locations will always contain lower level monsters that don’t give out as much experience or better loot, which is understandable to some degree. But I also remember clearing an older quest after levelling up a few times in a later area, and my reward was a weapon that was a lot weaker than what I was currently using. As a result, you will rarely see higher level characters going back to the starting areas, unless they are grouped up and helping out some newer characters with the more difficult quests. In that sense, the game world seems like a bunch of “zones” of increasing difficulty tacked together – something I’ve heard a number of times used to describe Everquest.

I made a conscious decision to put myself onto a roleplaying server, to see if this would affect the way the game is played. I know that during the first stress test roleplaying was the farthest thing from people’s minds as all of the servers were made up of first-time players. During the first two days of the open beta, players on my test server did their best to keep conversation in character. But as new players joined, some not even knowing what “roleplaying” was, this diluted the effect and all but eliminated any hopes of getting a believable game world up and running. With newbies asking questions on one side of me, I had powergamers challenging me to duels on the other. The Blizzard-sanctioned game masters tried to keep out-of-character (OOC) conversation in check, but when you have hundreds of players in one zone, it becomes a large and unmanageable task. I doubt this will change for the full release. But as I have said in the past, I can’t imagine this action and levelling-focused game will be attracting the serious roleplayer. To give some perspective about the game’s intentions, out of the 12 or so Eastern test servers only one of them was for roleplayers.

On the Player versus Player (PvP) servers, Alliance and Horde characters are automatically at war. Anytime you encounter a player of the opposing side, you can fight them – or be promptly killed – without any warning or authorization. On the Player versus Everyone (PvE) or “Normal” servers, if you wander into an Alliance or Horde area and are of the opposing side you will not be touched. If, however, you decide to attack a town NPC or character while in this area, you will be identified as hostile and will become a potential target. This allows potential for massive, player-driven faction wars befitting of its source material – something that Star Wars Galaxies still hasn’t been able to nail down a year after its launch.

This final leg of the Beta testing phase was a good indicator of what things will be like at launch, and allowed Blizzard to prepare for the new user onslaught unlike certain other developers. I said in my first experiences with World of Warcraft that the traditional level grind didn’t feel like a grind, and was more like part of being a resident of this virtual world. I would often wander the wilderness while completing my quests, slaying a few beasts on the way just to pick up a little extra experience. Certainly this side effect of all MMORPGs will get tiresome, but during the Open Beta I put any negative thoughts about the grind aside and actually enjoyed absorbing everything this unique game world had to offer. As stylized as the environments are, Blizzard has done an excellent job in converting their legendary universe to a MMORPG. They just have to stay ahead of the curve, and make sure players stay interested once they discover the grind has just been dressed up in some new clothes.

why can’t we just look the other way?

Soon after I joined Star Wars Galaxies, I enlisted myself in the Beta program for Jump to Lightspeed. Being a fresh recruit into the Galaxies fold, I envisioned this expansion as being the game’s saving grace. How could SOE/Lucasarts make a better Star Wars MMORPG experience? Easy. Add in the spacecraft and dogfighting that made the movies so fun to watch and you’ve got yourself an instant hit. And for a good portion of the beta, I almost believed it. But after signing off the day before the expansion’s official release last week, it hit me: Jump to Lightspeed is just a clever distraction.

If you create a new character, you begin the game by choosing a faction – Rebel, Imperial or the Freelance guild – and thereby choosing your starting location. You also recieve an email from each faction with a waypoint to the location of a pilot recruiter. In less than 10 minutes, your novice pilot can have a starter ship and be flying through space. Using an existing character, I can only assume that you get the email from each faction when you sign on after installing the expansion.

At this point I already had a gripe about the game. The ground based game never assumed allegiance with a faction, as any character can remain neutral for their entire career. You have free reign of what missions you complete, being able to live the life of a true mercenary. However, as a pilot you must join some organization; your ability to get missions depends on it. Even as a freelancer, you must choose to ally yourself with one of the many smuggling outfits, or independent organizations like Corellia’s CorSec.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the method of getting into space is a bit disjointed. When you’re issued your starter ship, you are effectively given a deed, which is the same way vehicles and mounts are dealt with in the land based game. To “launch” into space, you have to visit the appropriate terminal in any starport, select your ship and be on your way. After a loading screen, of course – it’s not like you see a short cut scene of your ship taking flight.

You can enter hyperspace from any given location by picking a planet on your galaxy map. A bit too clean for those who want the feel of navigating a course through hyperspace, though I’m just happy this functionality was included. For Star Wars purists, this won’t make a lot of sense for light fighters and similar craft, as they typically aren’t outfitted with hyperdrives. But for the sake of convenience I guess this feature was necessary to keep players happy. The Waypoint system, something I’ve grown to love about Galaxies, is perfectly adapted for space travel. The space waypoint system allows you to create your own star maps to commonly traveled areas, even setting your ship to auto-pilot to these points. This is especially handy for people that don’t want to stare numbly at the blackness of space on the way to the next mission. You can also skip launching into space altogether, and fly directly to another planet. High level players with fat bank accounts may not really notice this, but beginners who are tired of paying exorbitant return-trip fees to visit another part of the galaxy will appreciate the help.

Combat in space is of the standard twitch variety. I would recommend investment in a joypad, as the controls are almost unusable with a mouse and keyboard. Anyone that’s familiar with X-Wing Alliance will be completely comfortable with the controls and default keyboard shortcuts. Though the very act of having to switch from Joystick to Mouse and back during play in each setting reinforces the disparate nature of this expansion. There were a number of bugs in the Beta related to targeting enemies: sometimes I would target friendly craft or space stations thousands of kilometers away, while taking a severe beating from three fighters right outside my viewport.

This is where I had the biggest problem with the game, and not because it wasn’t fun. I had a great time fending off the Black Sun from a Corellian frieghter with some wing mates. For a MMORPG, though, there needs to be more, well, RPG. There is a skill tree for every type of pilot (Imperial, Rebel, Privateer/Freelance), but most of these skills are related to the type of ship you will be authorized to pilot. Your ability to let loose your laser cannons or dodge the fire from an Imperial gunship rests solely on your skills with a joystick. Even Jedi, who supposedly have inhuman reflexes, receive no bonus while piloting a fighter. I found experience to be extremely slow, but like the land based game there is no shortage of swarms of enemies to kill in orbit around a given planet. It seemed a bit strange that the airways around Tatooine were so busy, but people have to earn their experience somehow, right?

Given that this is supposed to emulate a traditional space sim, the collision detection felt incomplete. There were times during combat where I would get damaged for ramming another ship, but my trajectory or speed wouldn’t change – after taking the damage I would fly right through them. At other times, I could fly right through a larger cruiser or another fighter without taking damage at all. It’s possible this may have been fixed for the final release, but I’m assuming the physics modelling involved would take more than just a day’s work.

If your ship’s shields get destroyed and your hull starts taking damage, it’s time to start making evasive maneuvers. When you do receive the killing blow, you’ll have the option to eject, but I found this made no difference at all. In fact, I ended up severely wounded and in need of serious medical attention before I could even pilot my ship again.

Once your ship is destroyed or incapacitated you are automatically relocated to the nearest space station. I would strongly advise repairing while still in space. I remember I was destroyed in my starter ship, found a space station and landed planetside immediately to collect myself and repair my massive body injuries from ejecting into deep space. Because starter ships are not modifiable, I was unable to get access to my ship’s parts to repair them. As a result I was stuck on the planet without an operational ship, and had to join another faction. Later on I found a Master Shipwright who gave me a schematic for a brand new upgradable fighter, but you can’t always rely on these acts of kindness. You can only purchase and upgrade components for your ship when you’re planetside. You cannot upgrade your ship or add components at space stations, or get out of your ship and wander around. As an aside, a space station setting complete with cantina in orbit around a planet would have been a nice addition as a pilot stopover.

Shipwrights will be essential in this expansion, as they will be the ones fabricating new parts and new hulls for purchase on the Bazaar terminals. Only high level Artisans will have access to this profession – taking Novice Shipwright requires Engineering IV. Presumably high level Artisans will have a number of materials harvesters under their control, because ship parts, and especially hulls, will require a lot of material. The Beta gave everyone unlimited access to materials and professions, so I was able to try my hand at building my own ship. One thing I noticed about the crafting interface is that a material’s attributes are a lot more usable for those that like to get the best possible performance out of a crafted item. The idea of completely customizing my ship with paint kits and souped up parts made me appreciate the level of detail that went into this part of the game. But as any Artisan will tell you, crafting items take time, and eventually turn into a real life job. I remember talking to someone when I first joined Galaxies who made their primary function supplying speeders and swoops on Tatooine. They didn’t sound bitter or anything, but any way you slice it, it’s a thankless job and not exactly how I’d want to spend my gaming time.

One of the biggest problems the fan community has with Galaxies is that the base game remains broken, while the developers push out game publishes introducing a more defined structure to deal with Jedi characters, and devoting valuable time to the release of Jump to Lightspeed. I have to admit I was disappointed with The Jedi Trials, as the only visible addition to the game was the “/detect” command, which gauges your attunement to the Force. Depending on this level of connection, you might get a visit from a Mysterious Man™ who will begin your journey into the ways of the Jedi. In the end the only thing this update really changed was the way the system handled the Jedi skills and the way Jedi behave in combat. I originally thought The Jedi Trials was intended to attract new players. Instead, it’s putting a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in front of them, where being a Jedi is long term goal. How are new players to know what Classes to choose in the beginning of the game? Even though in the end they’re fairly interchangeable, there is still the theoretical waste of experience and time spent in the grind to unlock your affinity for the Force.

Shortly after the release of Jump to Lightspeed, the much anticipated Combat Revamp was officially announced as being in development and slated for release in the near future. This couldn’t have been timed any better, because while the players are distracted work will resume on this long promised game publish. This is all beside the point, though, and says more about my current feelings towards the game as a whole. I have hinted on more than one occasion to those that I play with about cancelling my subscription; I think all it will take is something better to come along to give me the final push.

A Star Wars fan could complain that any MMORPG based on Star Wars without space flight is some kind of crime. Though flying my Z-95 Headhunter fending off Imperial TIE fighters or doing a patrol in my Scyk fighter was fun for a while, it just didn’t feel right. Even the obvious interface update while in space left nothing connecting it to the original game. I think Jump to Lightspeed would have been better served as a separate game. It wouldn’t be the first space-based MMORPG, as the recently shut down Earth and Beyond tried to get people to live the life of a pilot. I can see how the promise of Star Wars space battles is attractive – I bought into it with the best of them – but I can’t see any lasting appeal in spite of the reasonable price tag. Until the Galactic Civil War is completely implemented to cover both land and space-based battles, there is no Force compelling me to get this expansion.

you’ll never see a finer ship in your life

Next to the mass hysteria surrounding the release of Star Wars Galaxies, the MMORPG scene could never have anticipated the reaction to Blizzard’s first foray into this growing marketplace. The difference being that most of the people waiting to play a space faring smuggler or bounty hunter were Star Wars fans that just happened to be gamers; this time around, existing MMORPG gamers and neophytes alike are eagerly awaiting the chance to try out what could potentially become the Everquest slayer.

Standard game commentary hyperbole aside, after spending five days and just shy of 20 hours with World of Warcraft I can say that this description is more than adequate. The easiest comparison I can make is to Blizzard’s own Diablo II, which transplanted the simple “kill-reward” system into a decent looking game where the goal is not just to complete quests, but to get better equipment and level up as many times as possible. Along with a free online component, all of these things created a theoretically endless game. And deftly executing this simple design concept is where World of Warcraft succeeds. The level grind in MMORPGs is a design contrivance that will never go away, unfortunately. But in World of Warcraft, it doesn’t have to feel that way.

Probably the most disappointing part of the game is character creation. The races familiar to anyone who has played the Warcraft games are all here, and your race will determine what region of Azeroth you begin the game in. However the options for physical features are way too limited given the recent headway made by games like Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes. Granted, World of Warcraft has been in development for three years, but I would still like to have more than a handful of face and hair types. It makes the world feel like more of multiplayer RPG – not a MMORPG.

Classes are the standard fantasy variety: warrior, paladin, mage, warlock, priest, rogue, etc. Some classes will not be available to every race, but will sometimes make it up with an equivalent class. For example, the Orcs do not have Priests, but they do have Shamans. And as expected, the Undead are not able to be Paladins. Your class dictates your character’s basic abilities and restricts the types weapons and armour you can use at first. Your class also gives you your first special abilities (spells for magic users, power attacks for melee/ranged characters). Multiclassing is not an option at this stage, and I doubt it ever will be. Instead, Class development is handled by Professions.

The beta was recently modified to allow only two professions, but they can apparently be unlearned to make room for more. This may be irrelevant, though, as most Professions complement each other. For example, the Weaponsmith can use metal to forge weapons, but in order to get the metal he must take on Miner to forage for raw materials. Skill points are the basic currency of improving your character, and are gained through the usage of weapons and spells, as well as by taking damage (which improves defense). Skill points can then be used to upgrade existing special abilities like spells and attacks or to gain new professions and learn their associated abilities.

With each profession you learn a base number of “recipes” to create new items, whether they be weapons (weaponsmith), explosives (engineer) or food (cook). Some items may only require a few ingredients to make, but the more complicated building items, such as metal bars, will need you to work a forge to create. Forges can be found in most towns, and can be used by Engineers, Armoursmiths and Weaponsmiths.

Learning new Class and Profession abilities requires a visit to an NPC Trainer, with an associated gold and skill point cost. This is where I think SWG’s skill system is a lot more developed, as the ability to train other players is one of the better concepts to come out of that game. A persistent world should allow for player characters to have an effect on its own population. Apart from the Auction House where crafted items can be sold, World of Warcraft seems overly simplified, with players taking a passive role as mere content consumers (something that Guild Wars hopes to alleviate with its massive Player vs. Player battles).

At level 10, you can use your skill points to begin upgrading “Talents”, which are a kind of high-level combat skills for your Class. This is more akin to Diablo II’s skill tree, and allows you specialize your character’s abilities even further. Although in the beta you can un-learn talents, in the retail version this will not be available. In Diablo II I can see how unlearning would make the game too easy; in an MMORPG where building up your character takes much longer, this might have been an added bonus. Perhaps even a limited amount of times you can un-learn a skill would put a restriction on power gamers trying to game the system. With these rules in place character development becomes very precarious in this regard, as you can’t really afford to spend points experimenting. Overall the system seems less open than SWG, which allows you to rebuild your character countless times, taking on multiple professions, and even changing your physical features if you have the money to spend on an image designer. World of Warcraft takes the more traditional class-levelling approach, while Galaxies is more aptly described as “Career building” .

The quests delivered by NPCs are not as blatantly repetitive as Star Wars Galaxies, but I can still see them getting tiresome fairly quickly. Quests can vary from simple delivery errands, to destroying X number of creatures, or taking on “Boss” monsters. But where SWG’s quests are governed by a cold, unfeeling terminal, World of Warcraft at least provides a small storyline behind each minor quest, and are exclusively given out by the game’s many NPCs. The Quest Log was appreciated, and although practical in its own way, made me really miss Galaxies’ datapad and waypoint system. When you accept multiple quests it becomes tricky to remember where everyone is, but because most of the quests you take will remain in one city and its surrounding area this isn’t as hard as it sounds.

Every new character that starts WoW gets an artifact or item in their inventory based on their class – activating this starts the underlying quest that will run throughout the game. As grand and sweeping as Blizzzard’s world is, this quest lends a very obvious air of linearity to the game. That is, after completing the quests in a town’s surrounding area, the main Class quest will almost always take you to the next town to report to another NPC to continue your Class-based quests. This is good to give starting characters a bit of direction while gaining XP during travel through the wilderness, but it doesn’t really force characters to go out and explore. The world really is massive, almost comparable to Galaxies, but there is nothing compelling enough for new to mid-level characters to ever venture outside their Race’s region.

Luckily, Blizzard spent a lot of time creating these virtual provinces, and everything about each race is exuded in the rolling landscapes that teem with monsters and bandits that are just begging to be slain. The mighty snow-capped dwarven mountains were very distinct from the gloomy and drab homeland of the Undead. Although the painted landscape shadows threw me for a loop, the graphics aren’t entirely sub-par. They’re slightly cartoony, blockish, even – at times I felt like I was playing a single-unit version of Warcraft III. But the effort spent creating a Warcraft-themed world shows, and made me see past the graphics that are definitely behind those of its contemporaries.

As expected, there isn’t much beyond the standard form of PointClickDeath combat. Melee characters get power attacks aside from their basic attacks that need to recharge before using them again, with the most powerfull attack taking the longest. Spellcasters can also attack with their basic weapon (usually a staff), but spells are their primary arsenal and recharge a lot faster. However upon casting you begin a timer, which must reach the end before a successful cast. If the spellcaster is hit during the duration of a cast they become distracted and must start re-casting, with a limited number of retries depending on any bonuses to Concentration. This timer also applies to any other classes that attempt to use enchantments in combat, whether they be an increase in Defense or a Healing spell.

However unlike other MMORPGs, soloing is a viable option as most monsters two, or even three levels above your character can still be taken on. Grouping is beneficial, but not essential to beginning and intermediate characters. Quests that involve slaying a number of monsters get annoying fast, though, as NPC guards will sometimes steal kills. And because the quests are not instanced, the lower level quests are populated by characters trying to complete them and it becomes a chore to wait for monster or evil NPC respawns. Upon successful completion of a quest, you get a choice for your reward – usually a selection of items beneficial to your class, which can be helpful when you’re starting out and don’t have much gold.

When you die, you resurrect as a spirit in the nearest town’s graveyard, where you can regain corporeal form with an XP deduction or you can run back to where you died to find your corpse. In this form you can’t really interact with the environment like retrieving your body in Diablo II, and your actions are limited to running and jumping. What was a little annoying was that you couldn’t chat while dead. Sometimes after a tense battle I just wanted to kick back and chat with some of the other testers, but this was impossible until I found my body. I could see this being especially troublesome in group or raid situations, where status reports or re-strategizing would need to be communicated between the fallen and those that are still fighting. Even stranger is the fact that your ghostly form is still bound by physical limits – I couldn’t float or run through walls; I had to jump over obstacles and scale cliffs as if I was alive.

I made three characters during the stress test: A dwarven Paladin (Engineer/Miner, level 11), a human warlock (level 6) and an undead mage (level 5). I would have liked to try all of the classes, but obviously time was of the essence. The Paladin plays very similar to the Hero characters in Warcraft III, and despite my levelling him the farthest I was much more interested in my undead mage. Spellcasting visual effects had some weight here of course – there was nothing like seeing my mage produce fireballs to be launched at giant bats – but I found that the back story for the undead as a race was quite interesting, and my meager quests seemed that much more profound. The warlock seems to be the most powerful class, as it combines the effectiveness of a mage’s spells, with those of a Priest/Shaman (think Necromancer).

The community of World of Warcraft felt younger, measurable I suppose by the AOL-speak and inane conversation. Not to say that everyone I talked to about their enjoyment of the game was a mouth breathing idiot, but I couldn’t help but compare it to the subtle maturity of Star Wars Galaxies. Granted I’m making a huge generalization here, because the immature are not completely exiled from Galaxies. They’re just less noticable amongst all the roleplaying that goes on in the more populated areas. Based on their experiences with Diablo II, I’m sure Blizzard wants to put a cap on this behaviour for fear of scaring away the more serious players that are considering this game, as a recent post in the World of Warcraft forum shows. I’m not sure that this type of regulation would seriously affect gameplay; if anything it would deter those that are just looking to waste their time on another MMORPG. Star Wars Galaxies has another advantage: the level of social interaction via body language within the game. Even though each race in World of Warcraft has its own dance (which are all quite funny, right down to the Undead rocking out and throwing up the horns), only the basic emotes are covered here. Galaxies has a much more comprehensive list, but still primitive when compared to Second Life.

Needless to say I had an excellent time with World of Warcraft, and although my heart was set on an immediate purchase this fall, I may need some additional reflection after my recent dive back into Galaxies. This reflection may also be unavoidable – if the Open Beta isn’t scheduled to start until October, a November release seems even less likely. World of Warcraft will easily appeal to Action RPG gamers looking for a more prolonged experience, but it still boils down to slaying monsters, levelling up, and amassing an impressive collection of loot. After the initial novelty wears off, the game’s inner workings will be exposed and we will have another straightforward MMORPG. As much grief as Star Wars Galaxies gets, it’s still a much deeper and involved game – it just happens to be for those that have more time than sense. World of Warcraft will succeed not because of its originality, but its mass appeal. Most importantly, though, Blizzard has been listening to players from the beginning of its development, and that’s not something you see very often with MMORPGs.

i want to know all the lurid details