y Anton Zlygostev
"....This will be a massively multiplayer online role playing game where hundreds and even thousands of players will live and explore the vast and persistent game world that this game has to offer. You will form friendships, go on conquests to slay monsters and just hang out while having friendly conversations with other players. World of Warcraft will feature rich environments and will contain interesting content which will be frequently updated and changed
Warcraft 3 will
blend very well with World of Warcraft. You will see familiar monsters, spell effects, places and even interface icons. Yet at the same time, World of Warcraft will be a completely new and a unique experience that will captivate its players for a very long time to come. At the time of this preview the game features 5 different races: Humans, Orcs, Tauren, Night Elves and Dwarves. Blizzard plans to add more races in the future to expand the
player base and give more options to current players. Each character can be customized to look unique and you will be provided with many character modification options such as hairstyles, skin color, tattoos and unique facial builds.
As you start up the game and start playing you will level up fairly easily and therefore you don't have to be a hardcore fan in order to enjoy this game. There will be no painful deaths and you will
not have to wait to retrieve your body. In order to make the game appealing to all players, Blizzard decided not to punish the player for dying, thus you will not lose any experience points that you accumulated if you die. As you level up and gain more experience points you will have access to more spells and abilities that can be shared between different classes.
Person vs. Person combat will be a major part in World of Warcraft along with heavy guild support. There will be special areas in the world dedicated specifically and clearly marked as PvP zones. Players are not forced to go into these areas or do any PvP combat at all. The game will feature plenty of other things to kill and places to explore. If PvP combat is not your thing, you can still fully enjoy the game. PvP areas are not policed, so expect someone to sneak up on you and
attack you if you happen to be a lower level than them.
World of Warcraft will feature very rich and colorful environments. The world is divided into zones and each zone is different. No textures are being reused and the design team creates each zone separately. The game will feature a lot of eye candy and great visual effects. The sky will dynamically change and each zone will have its own weather patterns. Through the presentation John hopped onto a griffin, which is used to travel between zones. While we flew, we were observing the scenery below us; huge trees, lakes, roads, populated cities and when the world is full of players, you will see people below you having battles or socializing in groups. Going from zone to zone is done by flying on a griffin as mentioned above; there are no loading screens but just a smooth sequence transition from one zone to the other.
The interface is fairly simple, yet it will give you full control over the game. World of Warcraft is so easy to play, that it can be done with no keyboard and just the mouse! However if you want some more advanced features, like binding keys to perform certain actions, that's when the keyboard comes in handy. The interface itself will feature a menu, a mini-map and a portrait of your character, which reflects the clothes that it's wearing. The
interface will be very moddable and you can hide, show and move things around as you wish. The mini-map will assist you on your quests, to make sure that you will never get lost in the huge world. Waypoints are assigned to special places, or you can assign waypoints to places of your interest to make sure you get back wherever you need.
Keeping in mind the players with slower hardware, Blizzard was able to run 6 instances of
World of Warcraft on a 600Mhz machine with a GeForce 2 graphics card. While this stress test does show some good results, John clearly stated that these might not be the minimum system specifications. Blizzard is thinking of beginning the beta test of the game closer to October and will try to avoid player wipes during testing. Stay tuned to GameMarshal for the latest beta information and more coverage of this game."
Source: Game Marshal
Article Source: www.warcry.com