When it comes to gameplay let me say that any of you Roleplayers who have hoped from something radically different from past games, you will be disappointed. However, that is not to say there is no room to be impressed.

Buildings are perhaps one of the greatest gifts Blizzard has given Roleplayers. This has to be the first fantasy RPG that I ever found myself actually looking at walls. That might seem strange, but its true. The first dungeon I went to was literally within eyesight of my starting town. Deep inside I found a furnace, a crane suspending giant beams and an eerie fog. Within a Goldshire tavern there were kegs behind the bar, intricate rugs with a little wear and tear painted on to them. Within a blacksmith was a sooty. Don’t even get me started about the Nightelve’s town. Perhaps there will never be a game where the players all Roleplay, but WoW truly feels like a game world that is trying to.

Now lets talk gear. I am still a lowly noob so I may be off on this, only time will tell. But I love the feeling so far, that low end gear exudes. I have yet to see anything real cool looking. Now, some might say that is a negative. I for one love it. I don’t think a mid level adventurer should look like a megastar adventurer. We should look like scrubs trying to scavenge for gear. Otherwise, how can the high end gear look cool, if the low end stuff does too. Sure we’re all going to min max with stats (except for the hardcore out there who go for style over stats), but I love the less than impressive gear I see on most folks. I am able to tell how powerful they look simply by the quality of their gear. Most games have this for a while, but lose it once the expansions start dumping old gear with new stats on the masses. Hopefully WoW will avoid this trap.

Emotes bring a great bit of added depth to a Roleplayers arsenal of emotional conveyances. There are quite a few and not as many are wacky ones that you will never have a need for (Like Teapot from Asheron's Call or YMCA from Anarchy Online). I wish they had more with sound, or simply added sound to more of the existing ones, but I realize that we'd need gigs of RAM to do it right. For now, I'll say that emotes are a silver star with potential for gold.

Quests have become a staple of MMORPG diets with recent releases. However, I have to say I am pleased from a Roleplaying perspective. For one, you are forced to read the dialogue. In games like Anarchy Online, you didn’t have to and it hurt immersion. You would just read the title of the mission find out that you needed to kill someone at such and such location and run off. So far the several quests I have completed have really drawn me in to a story for my character. Sure I feel a little bummed knowing that everyone can get my quests, but then again, the random quests in Anarchy Online just seemed too random to the point where they didn’t matter and neither did the story behind them. Not to mention that I blazed past three people who started at the exact time as me, by purely working quests and avoiding leveling just to level.

Tonight I am off to find a group of Roleplayers to see RP at work in a group setting. Check back with us to find out what WoW has to offer to the socializes in the community.

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