WoW
So thanks to the fact that fileplanet (even after I had canceled my account) decided to continue to bill the account with monthly membership, I easily got into the WoW beta stress test. Promptly at 3:18 (they were a bit late opening up registration) I, along with countless others, plunge into the game at the exact same time. The first few hours were nonstop KSing, which MADE NO FREAKING SENSE! XP is given out based on one of two things it seems...who hits it first and who does the most damage. So if say, my dark elf has been swinging at something until it's almost dead, there's no need for other people to attack the creature! You can obviously see my health is not even halfway gone (thanks to a very speedy HP/SP recovery system), so it's obvious I don't need the help. Yet...it still happened again and again and again and again. Ugh. Luckily that died down once people started spreading out over the land.
Though there is nothing especially significant that makes WoW stand out from any of the other countless MMORPGs, there are a few very nice features in the game that make playing it a lot easier. First off...the grinding issue. The ONLY time it felt like I was grinding was in the beginning, before I had gotten down the whole "Get every freaking quest possible that you can find" thing. Quests give out massive XP...so much in fact that grinding xp from monsters is a waste of time. You kill monsters for items needed for quests or because they stand in the way of you and whatever it is you have to collect. This might seem repetitive, but in truth it's a lot of fun. Grouping has always been about 'getting the best and biggest groups' in other games, but here it's "Damn...I'm level 7...while I might be able to kill that level 9 special monster, I can just team up with Dark Elf Warrior over there and we can BOTH get the item we need from it". This game rewards you for soloing (finally), and rewards you for grouping as well.
On soloing...heh I'm a big soloer. I hate joining groups. First few invites I got I declined without thinking twice. But really...joining a group is SOO easy. 15 minutes here with a handful of people you'll probably never meet again, nice words exchanged (Wow...the maturity I've run across in this game is refreshing after so many months of iRO), item you needed gained, have fun on your next quest. There's also the fact that you can actually take on creatures equal in rank to you or even one or two higher. At rank seven, I was easily taking lvl 8 and even a few 9 monsters without having to use a potion. In most games, it's extremely difficult to fight something your own level, but here...it's not! In other games, it's sucky to think that a monster that's 'equal' to you could kick your ass any day of the week. Here...it's a lot more even (in truth, if I didn't use the thief's chain combo's, it would be a closer match).
If you happen to face off against two or three monsters who are equal to you, however, you're gonna die. EVERY MMORPG I've ever played before makes death a bitch. Normally you lose a good chunk of your xp, or worse, you have to deal with the complete mess that SWG thought would make the game 'better' when they couldn't fix corpse runs. Here, you have a choice. You can do a corpse run (as a ghost, you run faster and cannot see/be seen by any of the other players (and most monsters)), which results in no XP loss. Or you can pay your local friendly grim reaper at the graveyard to rezz you for a loss (I haven't used this method yet, mostly because money is still a very very precious commodity (Extra bags cost either 5 silver or 25. The 'big' mission in the city I'm in now paid me a little under that when I completed it. So yeah...I'll run, thanks). The no xp loss is great, and with the corpse run you can't take a free ride on the death express back to your save point.
Playing a rogue is a blast too. I decided on a Night Elf this time (blue skin with long green hair), but the whole "There's only one town for the elves and it's miles away from any other city" does kind of suck when it comes to interacting with other races. I'll probably be making a few other races just to see what it's like elsewhere. Rogues have a slew of abilities, though sadly enough steal doesn't seem to work ;_;. Sneak does, and man have I been abusing it ^^;;. I made it three fourths of the way through the difficult quest mentioned briefly above just on sneak alone. The last part, as well as a side quest down in the dungeon itself, required a bit of help from a friendly mage. Rogues also have combos, though I only have one right now. I've never been able to get backstab to work yet, but I will in due time :).
There are a lot of little things too that go on. In one quest, you bring an elf some seeds so that he can grow and study the creatures they turn into to find out why they've become aggressive. With other MMORPGs, you finish the quests and never see what happens next. While giving the guy some other items for another quest, I saw that someone waiting like I was...was being attacked by something. Since he was on the edge of the screen, I figured it was one of the agg monsters. When I went to help him, though...he was being attacked by the plant creatures the NPC had grown! It was kinda gross too...baby trees covered in this icky slime attacking the poor elf ;_;. Back to the KSing issue, there's also a plus to the system. If I happen across someone fighting a monster, and they're losing (why a lvl 3 elf was in a forest filled with 5-9 monsters I'll never know)...you can run up to them, help them kill the monster before they die...and you take none of their experience! It's nice when a game lets you help people in trouble without being a healer and without taking their xp/items.
That's about it. I could talk about the graphics and fighting and monsters (which are all the same five monsters, just with different names ;_;), but that's what screencaps are for. With deadlines coming up for next week, I'll have some of today to play and then that'll be about it for playing during the daylight hours. It could've been worse though...they could've started this five days from now, and then I'd only have two or three days to play before my parents arrive.