I got my hands yesterday on the alpha leak of WoW. YOu can’t really do much with it, but all of the gameworld is currently available for sightseeing. I spent the day trying to find interesting areas to show to people that were never shown on fansites or the blizzard site
You’ll notice a picture picture with a ziggurat, a slaughter house, the altar of storms from WC2, there’s also the throne room of the capital city of lordaeron (this also happens to be the entry to the undercity, the major undead city), you have ratchet the goblin town with a goblin laboratory.
Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy. Beta signups are at the end of this month!
I tried finding the dark portal, if someone is familiar with the lore of Warcraft and can tell me in what region of azeroth it is I will try to go look.
If other areas spike your interests and you would like to see screenshots of them feel free to post a request here. I will see what I can do.
Note: Loading the pictures might be a bit slow as I’m hosting them on my webserver(at home) on a cable modem.
WoW isn’t all that great it’s good, but FFXI did a better job in my opinion the game didn’t have anything overly innovative or impressive and what quests I saw were just sterotypical fetch quests. The game felt more like a way to cash in on WC than anything really.
Alphas are made after a game is well over 90% complete and large scale alphas for MMOs are closer to 95% completed with the alpha testing mainly being to find the major bugs and most of the minor ones. Beta tests are to mop up the ones that the alpha testers missed. Currently as is WoW can go gold because everything for the game is in it, but there are still bugs they need to work out.
The alpha is not legal(in the sense that I should have it), but it’s real. Some guy who had access to it and could play on the real blizzard servers decided to take the folder and make it available on the internet. The way it works right now is that you connect to a fake server that lets you load the part of the game world that is stored on your computer. There are no monster, no NPCs, no loot, no other players. It’s there so people who were wondering what the interface, the quality of art and graphics, the geography of the world can explore it and enjoy it.
As for the game, everything is supposedly in it(although I think the art/graphics are incomplete), but there’s no way to know how well the features are working right now since they’re not available to us(people who have the leaked alpha). They are probably not balanced or ready at this point. That’s why there’s the beta. Obviously it’s not ready to go gold because there was no balancing done and it’s quite nice of blizzard to try and do that instead of following the trend of releasing a MMO game half finished(EQ, AO, FFXI(in japan), SB, etc. were all unstable and/or unbalanced at release).
To say WoW is not innovative to FFXI is to say FFXI was innovative which it was not. If you read well every interview(with developpers) or article from people who have actually played it, they never once mentionned the fact that it was innovative what they did mention is that it is FUN. There is no leveling threadmill, there is other things to do than join a guild and camp the rare loot and that was their goal.
It’s still debatable how fun, great or innovative WoW will be, but at least you can be assured that it will be stable and balanced AT RELEASE.
Found the dark portal, it’s pretty sweet. It’s screenshot 11. If people tried connecting earlier to see the pics, it wasn’T working due to a power outage here. Everything should be working now.
The features are working quite well from what I have played. Just so you know and don’t think I’m pulling shit out of my ass or anything my brother came to visit a us before christmas and he is in the legal alpha and he let me pay it a few hours. It was cool at first but quickly started to degrade. Also most games are ready to go well before they are released. SC: Ghost for example could be releasted within a month but they doubt it will be out before the end of the year because they are going to spend a lot of time polishing it to make it a great game rather than a cheap SC ripoff. It’s pretty much the same with WoW but they haven’t succeeded in really making it better than the other MMOs out there.
I’m looking forward for that game, yes, maybe is not innovative, but, how can you make a MMORPG innovative? They all work into the same basis: Kill/Level Up/Make Friends/Chat, and continue killing.
Actually Framskip you’re wrong, the alpha build is the very first series of builds for a program, the second you hit compile for the first time on the exe it’s considered an alpha build, but it’s usually called a debug version. The beta is the version that’s mainly complete and has had already a fair bit of debugging done to it, it’s the version you allow the public (or at least the rest of the company) to poke around with and provide feedback. Once that’s done you produce the release version (a gamma if you want).
You really can’t judge a program based on an alpha, I’ve had projects where I had an alpha going at about 10% completion. Alpha’s a mainly a way to test out ideas and see how they work when applied into the framework of the rest of the program.
Originally posted by Kor I’m looking forward for that game, yes, maybe is not innovative, but, how can you make a MMORPG innovative? They all work into the same basis: Kill/Level Up/Make Friends/Chat, and continue killing.
All it requires is a team of GM’s with a creative mind. Back when there were MUD’s instead of MMORPG’s, I used to play in one in which the admins always came up with creative stuff that drove the game away from the kill-pillage-destroy line.
Originally posted by PanamaJack Don’t be a Pirate. Give Blizzard a little respect.
Hmmm… No?
Why pay to play with a world of empty-minded underage kids who speak AOLish and TYPOish when I can set a pirate server in my city and play for free and only with people who play serious?
Originally posted by Ren Why pay to play with a world of empty-minded underage kids who speak AOLish and TYPOish when I can set a pirate server in my city and play for free and only with people who play serious?
Blizzard has spent a great deal of time, effort and money to create an awesome new game for us. The least you could do is play by their rules.
Frameskip, how did it degrade? Was it because the quest were too boring, the fights to long, etc? It would be good to explain your opinion if you are probably the only person here who has played the real alpha.
You could do like Ultima Online (create a server emulator) and very probably there will be servers that will emulate the WoW game servers. That won’t really be a problem as most people will play on the blizzard servers. I doubt that a fake server will hinder them much as all the content is stored on the blizzard servers. It will take a lot of time and effort to emulate this completly. There are already teams at work creating a server software to run WoW, but they will have their own npcs, loots, monster spawns and such because they don’t have access to them. So Blizzard will always have the upper hand in this situation regardless.
As for typoish and young people playing and ruining the game, well they won’t make it into the late game or in the more mature guilds. There will always be kids around in any mmog, but there will always be more adults so I have no doubts that you will be able to find a welcoming community(at worst maybe RPGC will be playing a lot like RO) and your friends might end up playing to and you can group with them.
What Blizzard has been trying to do is not really innovate, but to fix or remove existing features from other mmog so that they are more fun. Hopefully, there will be no threadmilling. There will be no more camping and loot stealing(due mostly to instanced areas and spread out loot tables), crafting will be better. Known features will be better implemented. I believe from all the articles and interviews posted that it’s what they’re trying to achieve. Will they? We’ll see in due time.
NOTE: I’ve added quite a few new pictures for those who want to see them. All of the pictures are of interesting known(Medivh’s tower, the two lesser known dark portals, theramore island and Dalaran) and unknown landmarks. Enjoy!
Originally posted by PanamaJack Blizzard has spent a great deal of time, effort and money to create an awesome new game for us. The least you could do is play by their rules.
I will start playing pay-to-play online games by companies rules the same day when we are forced to get rid of all the MP3’s in our computers, since that argument is also valid for music ;D
And no, I don’t care about the effort they spent to make the game. All I care is about the price. Pirates can give it cheaper than Blizzard. I think it will cost you some $US10 per month, which is an optmistic guess placing it cheaper than RO, to play WoW. I’ve had news that as soon as they can set a pirate server, it will be for free here. Such servers are kept with part of the money they make selling pirate CD’s, or so the local mafia head says. If blizzard made it the same way they did with Diablo - you buy it once and they you play as much as you want for free - nobody here would resort to the pirate servers. Let’s use a practical comparison. Suppose WoW ends up costing 10 bucks a month to play. Diablo 2 is selling at 15 bucks in the stores here. So if I want something to keep me busy for a whole year, D2 would cost me 15 bucks (since I’ll only pay it once), but WoW will get $120 away from me.
It mostly degraded in the quest department, all the quests I did were your basics of bring me X number of item Y and it’s dropped by enemy Z. Fighting was your normal MMO fighting, run up and smack the enemy around until someone dies. It just felt like there was nothing new brought in. There is still treadmilling but it’s broken up by the quests because you run out, kill for a bit, realize you have what you need then go finish the quest, run back and keep killing. I didn’t get really far enough to see anything that would get camped like a boss or anything so I can’t really say on that aspect, I’ve also totally forgotton how the loot system works and can’t really comment on that. Anyway, I probably was a bit harsh about the game, but I honestly thought FFXI was the better of the 2. I also wouldn’t reccomend the game to a person that already plays another MMO because WoW didn’t really bring anything that great to the table, but if you don’t already play a MMO or are a ravinous WC fan (90% of RPGC) then you’ll probably really like the game.
