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January 14, 2005

World of Warcraft

I've been playing World of Warcraft now for a few weeks with some friends who have also abandoned their lives.
The game is a joy to play and behold, with many many things done brilliantly - right down to the scriptable xml/lua user-interface.
There is so much right about the game that my other games are just sitting there next to my PC, unplayed for almost a month. Pirates!, Halflife2, LotR:BfME are gathering dust while I indulge myself in the world that is WoW.
Even the mundane tasks of cooking/fishing/etc are fun, we've spent many an hour just gathering stuff and making things from it - rather than fighting evil.
Fighting, when combined with a utility such as Skype, is a joy with the right party. However as Penny Arcade pointed out, not everyone is the right person for your party!
WoW usually copes with the 400+ms lag that I have, the lag only becomes an issue when it heads up to the 1second mark (and I've been in a party where one player hit 11second lag!)
The scale of the world is still mindboggling to me, I've got a level 23 gnome who has visited just a small percentage of the world (10% would be a generous guess).

However, it's not all good. Here are some of the problems I've personally run into:
1. The game won't run fullscreen on my PC, it bluescreens the PC after a short while (!)
2. My sound.mpx file became corrupt and the game doesnt check, it took FastSum to figure out what was happening. I'm not alone in this problem, so the game is most likely at fault (what are the odds of dozens of people all corrupting the same one file on their PC?)
3. The game crashes out now and then, bad memory accesses and the like, despite my PC passing every test I can throw at it.
4. We lost our Guild charter last night due to a game-bug, which caused much gnashing of teeth and screaming, since it takes so long to get those things organised!
5. Looting/gathering bugs that put you in a bad state

Still, I'm hooked.

Posted by Zaph at 02:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack