With the beta finally going live, it’s time for me to write Stratics’ first impression of the beta. But before I could lay my hands on a character and venture into Azeroth however, I needed to actually get the beta client.

As many of you know, Blizzard is using bit torrent to distribute the beta and like many others I had my doubts. Those worries did not go away when my downloader was showing a skinny little 1 kb/s download speed and the estimated time was showing more than 300 hours. But to my joy only a few minutes later the download sped up to a much more acceptable level for my connection and it became only a couple of hours download for the 2 GB beta client.

Creating a character

Creating a character in WoW is easy and simple (for better or for worse). There are no numbers to worry about, no stats and no skills. You simply pick your race, class and gender. And from there on to the characters appearance customization, which shouldn’t take long at all as it’s limited to the point of being a disappointment. There are very few options for each category; face, hairstyle, skin colour, hair colour and facial hair. There are of course no height and weight options as known from before. I really hope they add at least more choices in each category if they won’t add more categories such as height and weight.As my first character, I picked a human rogue carrying the name Jonah. He started like all humans do (at least in the beta) outside Northshire Abbey in the Elwynn forest.

Starting out

Taking the first few steps into the world really felt like moving into the world of Warcraft. The graphics are very stylish and atmospheric. Not very far from Jonah was a Deputy with an exclamation mark over his head, indicating that he had a quest for me. He promptly sent me off to meet a certain Marshall, ready to give me my first real quest.

I was to kill seven kobolds, so I wasted no time and hurried off towards their camp. It was only a short run away and before long I was battling it out with Kobold vermin. The combat system isn’t all that boring as most games have at the early stages. There is more then just one attack animation, and the special attacks usually look a little different. Getting the first quest done didn’t take long at all and I even levelled before I went to collect my reward. And from there, quests moved me forward. After each quests the quest giver usually has another one to give, closely linked to the previous quest. Or they let you know of whom to talk to receive another quest. I tried to level without doing quests but noticed rather quickly that even though you could do it, running around erratically didn’t only make levelling slower but also boring; there was no plausible reason to randomly moving around and killing things.

Needless to say, I was back doing the quests before long, until I was reminded that I had to write this little piece. ;) Hope you enjoyed it; we’ll be bringing you more reports; more detailed than this and also quite a lot more of other things. :D

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