Author Topic: World of Warcraft  (Read 2236 times)

Prometheus

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World of Warcraft
« on: October 28, 2002, 03:05:17 PM »
Last Friday, Blizzard released it's first new packet of information about World of Warcraft in months. I haven't been back to the bnet message boards yet, but I'm sure they're buzzing about it. I'll go over the highlights.

Skills:
Each character will have some class skills, those considered vital to your class, and secondary skills, those which will make your character unique from all the others. Your character level will determine the maximum potential your character has in those skills, but usage will determine the actual skill development. While some skills might have prerequisites, they won't have a Diablo II style skill tree.

Questing:
The plan is for quests to give meaningful amounts of experience and loot. A Quest Log will track your currently assigned quests and Blizzard intends to supply enough quests to ensure that it will never completely empty. To me this is a big factor, because it could potentially open up an entirely different style of play in MMORPGs. If you can level up just off doing quests, questing becomes something other than a breather between bouts of tedious leveling.

Mounts:
Mounts are in, including race specific mounts such as wolves for orcs and horses for humans with additional potential to gain the ability to ride the mounts of other races. Mounts are under player control, not like the town-to-town horse rides our staff experienced in DAoC.

Instancing:
Some areas of the world will be instanced, meaning that when your group enters, a new instance of that area of the game is created, allowing you to quest/fight privately and avoid other camping/PKing players. Much of the world won't be instanced so the game doesn't end up feeling single player, but you will always have somewhere to go if the other players of the game get too annoying.

Rituals:
Multi-User spells that require multiple characters to preform. No specifics.

Player Housing is in. No specifics.

Guns are in. No specifics but I'd guess it'd only be a class skill for dwarves given the Warcraft Universe we've come to know.

AI Behavior:
They didn't give many specifics, but they gave the example of a Gnoll Taskmaster devoting 4 troops to the fighter in a party, 1 to the healer, and 1 more to the wizard in back. Probably not the best we could ever hope for, but a big improvement on the 'Attack Nearest/Lowest HP' type AI MMORPGs have sported to date.

Not mentioned: (big things the community was hoping to hear about and didn't get info on)
PK rules
New races
New classes
Anything new about combat...there was a question on it, but we didn't hear anything we hadn't heard before.
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Tage

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Re: World of Warcraft
« Reply #1 on: October 29, 2002, 12:18:59 PM »
Well, the most important question (to me) wasn't addressed at all:

When?
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Prometheus

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Re: World of Warcraft
« Reply #2 on: October 29, 2002, 11:26:34 PM »
Lol, that's Blizzard for you. Our latest answer on that is that the beta is scheduled for 2003.

Sometime.

What did you expect?
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Prometheus

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Re: World of Warcraft
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2002, 05:50:05 PM »
Blizzard finally updated their World of Warcraft page if anyone feels like taking a look. Their screens are pretty awesome. The FAQ's have been updated on some important issues, too. (Not the release date, sadly, but a lot of other things.)

http://www.blizzard.com/wow/
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