November 24, 2004 - I wouldn't call it "first" impressions, since I've been playing since about April. But with every build, there's a few changes and a few more options in the interface. I could probably write an article just about the ways you can tweak performance and visuals.

For example, you can now isolate and disable specular highlighting just by checking a box. There's also triple buffering, which is difficult for a user to enable in Direct3D games. And since the world doesn't have a large amount of polygons, it can run butter-smooth. With a Radeon 9800 Pro, I have 1280x960, with 4xAA and 16xAF set in Windows, and every possible in-game bell and whistle enabled, with nary a slowdown. Sound also has a bunch of options to isolate music, local sound, global sound, emote sounds, ambient sounds, and four sliders for separate elements.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to reference the UI at the moment, because demand has been far exceeding supply since WoW launched at midnight the day before yesterday. They have a ton of servers across all U.S. time zones, but it still ain't enough. Last night, I had to queue up to log on, and it took about fifteen minutes until I was able to create a character on the Frostwolf server. The estimated queue time isn't very useful, as it bounces up and down from ten minutes to almost an hour, I some cases.

Once I got in, things were fairly smooth, considering the avalanche of players in the starting location. You see, the servers can handle a large population, but it gets difficult when that population is concentrated into a tight area. At any rate, there were some delays in initiating attacks and looting corpses, but that was the worst of it. Latency hovered around 300 on a 3 megabit cable connection, and it's in the double digits here at the office.

I noticed that quest locations will show up on the mini-map, in addition to active quest NPCs. When the location isn't close enough to show on the mini-map, there will be an arrow pointing to the direction it's in. And of course you have the large map screen to get yourself oriented. And every new build I play seems to have an additional quest I don't remember doing. I recall that Blizzard had planned on originally having only around 600 quests, but it ballooned to around 2000.

Since quests drive the action, this makes sense. And that's something I like about WoW--that you don't have to camp the same area all day, killing the same monsters with the same tactics until you finally level up and can wash, rinse repeat in the next zone. I'll get more into that for the review proper, which we'll post fairly soon. I want to see how the lag issue and queueing shakes out before I start scoring it.

I was able to log on early this afternoon without waiting in any queue, and quickly got down to business, but eventually the game, frankly, became unplayable. Long lag spikes meant I was being attacked and killed by creatures I couldn't see or interact with.

When you die, all your equipped items have their durability reduced by 10%. All items in the game decay, so your Gloves of Uberness go from 20/20 to 18/20 when you resurrect at your body. At low levels, getting repairs is relatively cheap, so it's not a huge problem. But I don't have the money to replace my wardrobe after dying several times in a row, so eventually I had to log out. Or, rather, the client crashed. I may still be logged in according to the database, which is struggling to keep track of every player's inventory and quest list.

So there's some growing pains at the moment, but I'm confident that Blizzard will find a solution pretty quickly. They'll need to, because the first impression is the most important. You see, I know the game is fun, and I can tell you it's fun, but a person still has to see for himself. Unfortunately, it's still a crowded place, even if it was running smoothly. The beginner areas are packed with people, so you have to compete for creatures that you need to kill to satisfy quests. Once things settle down a bit, it should be much smoother.

We'll have more updates and screens for WoW next week, so stay tuned!