Wednesday 16 February 2005

Pic of the day: Dwarf girls look a lot better than the males, at least if you don't mind some serious hips on a girl. I sure don't, but you already knew that. Those hips are meant for babies, don't you think? (No, you can't actually have babies in the game. But I would not have been totally floored if they had thrown in that too. This game is weird enough for it.)

WoW day 2

The World of Warcraft is split between two factions. Each faction has four races. The four ugly races constitute the Horde, and the four cute races constitute the Alliance. What a way to divide the world. In the past, the Horde was considered evil and the Alliance good, and I expect many players to still choose sides based on this. So naturally I chose Alliance. Besides, they are the only one with Paladins. (Most classes are common to both sides, and there aren't all that many classes in the first place, but the Horde has all the shamans and the Alliance has paladins.)

My first character was a female dwarf paladin. Note to the new reader: I'm actually male, and when I play female characters it is not out of the gayness of my heart. Rather it seems to create a moderate distance between me and my character, so I can easier remember that it's just a "toon" and not myself. The characters I have played the longest and identified with the most have all been male. And anyway, female dwarves look a LOT better than their male counterparts. This is so even with humans, but it is really obvious in dwarves.

***

A genuinely new feature in WoW compared to any other game I have played is that different classes have different power bars. Magic classes have the good old mana bar which starts out full and declines as they cast spells. (Although it regenerates quickly – you can make it fill up faster after a battle by sitting down and drinking water, but I have never had the need for it so far with any of my characters.) Paladins are a magic class, so they have mana. However, rogues use "energy", roughly the same as stamina in CoH I guess. And warriors use rage, a red bar that starts out empty but fills up during the battle, especially if you get hit. This rage can be used to power special attacks just like energy and mana are used for class-specific effects. Sadly it dissipates fairly quickly after the fight, but this is also a motivation to keep fighting one enemy after another as long as your health can take it. And warriors are generally quite tough.

Paladins are not by default as tough as warriors, but they can wear all armor (but only blunt weapons). They cast various types of spells on themselves to make them harder to hit, or to hit harder, or to heal faster. One type of spell is the aura, which is always on (until you turn it off or die), affects your whole party (group, team) and costs no mana to maintain. Auras don't stack, but a party with two paladins can run one aura each. Other spells cost mana and expire after a set amount of time. The type called seals can only affect the caster (or rather his enemy), but the others can be cast on any alliance member.

Paladins don't have pets, but can get a riding animal later in their career. I haven't seen one, so I don't know if it is race-specific or class-specific. Anyway there are only two races that can become paladin, human and dwarf, so the selection would be limited. However, every race except Tauren can get some kind of mount late in their career if they are willing to pay for it. Paladins however get theirs for free - if fulfilling a tough quest can be considered "free". More about that if I ever do it, I guess.

***

Having finally registered my account (after a night of technical difficulties) it was a snap choosing my server and creating a character. In all fairness, I had read past page 90 of the manual before I even installed the game, but I think even the typical newbie could do this without help. There is a good selection of faces, hair colors and hair styles, so you can make your character reasonably unique. And of course over time you can distinguish yourself more by the armor you choose to wear. (Or not wear ... this is the first game since Sierra's The Realm where you can evidently dress down to your undies. Even so, I have only seen it done once, whereas cities in The Realm was dotted with female toons in white undies.

Anyway, back to character creation. Strangely enough there was no slider for body height or width, like there is in City of Heroes. Not even a choice between different degrees of tallness, like in Dark Age of Camelot. For a game that reputedly has several hundred different types of trees, that's remarkably simplistic. Then again, with a unique name, it's not like you have to guess who is who even if they look the same from some distance. It's purely cosmetic. Still, a strange omission. Perhaps they simply had trouble dealing with so many different meshes (you have to design a new instance of EVERY piece of armor that can be worn, to the best of my knowledge there is no software for "stretching" armor seamlessly. Well, City of Heroes has it, but there you don't pick up armor during the game – it is all in the character creation module.

Once my character was created, she appeared in a tiny camp, a small circle of stones and a few people and a trader's wagon. Right away there was one character with a bright yellow exclamation point over his head. This means he got a quest to give. This was the local variant of "rathunter's quest", although in this case it was some other passive wildlife, wolves I think. Generally each enemy type is instanced across two levels, such as level 1 and 2 for the wolves. This allows you to choose how much of a challenge you are up to, and also to keep the challenge constant if you level up during the quest. Which is not at all unlikely, as the first levels come very cheap. Indeed, leveling up is said to be faster in WoW than in any competing MMORPG. At low levels it is certainly fast, I can vouch for that.

The quest system is partly similar to CoH in that your contact will give you another contact, although in this case in the form of a quest to deliver something to that other. Also each quest-giver usually only gives you one or two quests, although there are exceptions to that. The first contact in the human realm can easily keep you occupied until around level 5, although he sometimes sends you off to someone else to get the actual quest.

The mini-map is blessing for all us who have problems navigating. I am extreme in that regard, but then again I have these problems in real life too. Somewhat confusingly, the mini-map looks rather different from the full-screen map rather than being just a subset of it. They are both doing a decent job, though, and combined they make it possible even for me to find my way around. Not quite as easy as CoH, since Paragon City tends to have nice regular streets going north and east, but better than the trackless wilderness of Camelot.

One weak point is that there is no inn near the starting circle, you will probably be level 5 by the time you can safely make it to the first city with an inn. The inn, as you may have heard, is where you log out in order to accumulate "rest" state while offline. The more rested you are, the longer you can get double experience from your kills after you return. For maximum XP, you should play only a few hours a week or so. Or you could do what I do: Make several alts (alternate characters) and play them one at a time, letting the others rest meanwhile. ^_^