World of Warcraft
Well, I've done it. I went and tried that 10 day trial of World of Warcraft. Here's what I've got to say:
- My first impressions:
- It loads fast, very nice in todays programming standards of bet he has 2 GB of RAM
- The graphics are decent, there's some nice panoramics where you could just sit and watch the world.
- It connects darn fast, again this is against the status quo of programming today.
- The social aspect is really lacking. I've seen people discuss everything from how racist Americans are to sores they have on their body. While this sort of talk might be acceptable in a setting where you know everyone you're talking to, its not something I want to see on general chat. In simud we don't put up with that kind of talk, and once we go beta, it'll be almost strictly role-playing. This is a much nicer envirnment for RPGs.
- Along the same lines, way too many people use AOL-speak. We've only had one instance of that in simud (lol ur funny!) and I promptly wrote a gag that would translate it into normal speech. I can see shortcuts like LFG that are game specific, but really, there's no excuse for things such as lol everytime you kill a crocolisk.
- The business model is what I really hate. Now, lets look at the trial. You can install it, for free, simple download, and its the working game. If that's how they distributed the whole game, they'd be herelded as the next big thing for games (right after Valve's Steam). But now, they make you buy the software, then pay to play. This is just like leasing a car, you don't own it, you have to pay if you want to use the thing you "own". And its wrong. This trial proves they don't need the $50 per game, and if they had an option to just sign up now, and not have to buy it, I'd probably sign up for a real account.
- The GUI. I love it. Simply put, it is impressive coding. The only criticisms I have are that you can't open things such as socal and your player stats at once. In other words, you should be able to move the windows around, such as Morrowind. But this is a really impressive GUI, and my hats off to the guys that designed it!
All in all, it might be worth $15 a month if they keepo opening servers, have decent tech support (haven't checked yet) and no server crashes (barring the unforseeable). However, there's that leasing problem again, its as if you have to buy the car before you can even pay to drive it. Any other industry, that'd get no business, game industry, unfortunatly, it's become the norm.
