After some early stumbling, Blizzard seems to have gotten their feet under themselves, and WOW is running pretty well now, even on high traffic servers like Kel'Thuzad, which is where I've been playing. At this point, I have two characters going. The main one is a Night Elf Warrior, level 19, named Nafuolt. The second one is an Undead Mage, level 9, named Guodlag. I should point out that despite the fact that the game has been out for only 6 days now, and I spent most of those days playing constantly, Jay has an L32, L26, L18, whatever else. That fucking guy plays MMORPGs like he's New York City, and they're German tourists. I'm sure he'll have an L60 character in all the possible race/class permutations, on three different servers, in a month.
The game is very fun. It's very quest oriented, much moreso than DAoC was. In DAoC getting experience was based around knowing where different monsters lived, so you could pick out the ones that were of the right level to give the best xp reward by risk. There were quests, and you wanted to do certain ones to get good items like weapons and armor, but you basically spent your time murdering things for xp. WOW is really a lot better in terms of the quest system, and how it drives the game. There's still quests that require you to farm a certain type of monster, driving you to run about in its habitat, looking for new ones to spawn, but there's other more interesting quests, to find things, loot things, kill certain targets, etc., and it all fits together much better than it did in DAoC, and it provides sufficient xp to drive the game. Generally speaking, if you complete all the quests available to you at a given level, even just in one area, you will level up.
And there are MANY different areas. Hussain and I have both been playing Night Elves, so we spent our time in the Night Elf sorts of areas, doing Night Elf sorts of quests. There are 8 races, however, and thus there's 7 other areas, just as full of quests as the one we'd been running around in for days... This became apparent when I raised my skill in the mining and blacksmithing professions past where local miners and smiths could teach me anymore. At that point, I had to go find a better teacher, and the place to find that is in the Dwarven capital of Ironforge. So Hus and I set off, walked a long way, saw lots of monsters that could eat us, and finally go there. The game is just terribly visually impressive. Seeing the gates of Ironforge up on a hill, after wandering around aimlessly for some time, was pretty cool.
Speaking of mining and blacksmithing, the “professions” system is also very nice. DAoC was very repetitive and stupid about this. You buy components, you press “make” over and over, skill goes up, repeat. As with all things in DAoC the emphasis was on repetition. WOW loves itself some repetition, but not like DAoC, and it throws some neat twists in as well. For a miner/blacksmith like Nafuolt, that twist is finding mineral veins, and looting them for ore. This adds to the gameplay, because it means you're always on the lookout for a vein of copper, or tin, or whatever, as you walk along. You can combine this with your quests, and with certain monster item drops, to create a pattern. For example, Nafuolt spent some time looping around a section of Darkshore where he knew there would be copper veins, where certain monsters he needed to kill for a quest lived, and where other monsters that dropped linen fabric for making bandages lived. Making bandages falls under the first aid profession, a “secondary profession” that Nafuolt is working on, along with cooking. So, in addition to completing quests, Nafuolt is always on the lookout for mineral veins, for linen and wool fabric for his first aid skills as well as stuff to practice his cooking with.
All in all the game is far more engaging that DAoC was, it's a quicker pace, with levels coming much faster. The graphics and worldscapes in DAoC were really pretty impressive, but WOW raises the bar, and has a generally more powerful graphical engine behind it. The only areas I'd fault WOW (besides the server uptime issues) are in the animations for different attacks. DAoC gave pretty clear feedback on when successful special attacks went off, by showing differenent animations in the character making the attack. WOW, at least with the Warrior class, falls short. He pretty much does the same spinny move for all his special attacks, and there's few visual cues beyond that. A few moves have their own animation, but it's not as varied as I'd like. It might just be the moves I favor, or the Warrior class itself, but that's the impression I get.
Anyway, fun game, it's taking a lot of time, and Munk hates it.