It's just this little chromium switch, here... (derspatchel) wrote,
It's just this little chromium switch, here...
derspatchel

being Blizzard, you can play Poke The NPC

Well, the good news is that it's Blizzard's baby, and the game is very beautiful to look at and, I do admit, fun to play. Of course, that's all once you actually get the goddamn thing installed. It took over 12 hours to get from "Hey they have beta keys available online, let's get one" to actually logging in and being able to make a character. First we had to contend with webservers that were not ready to handle the crush of people wanting to get a key (Blizzard actually did away with unique open beta keys at the end, just handing out one generic key for everybody.)

Then we had to deal with actually downloading the 2 gigabyte game -- Blizzard's proprietary download client is actually just a BitTorrent client. That's nice in the sense that it shows people are actually using BitTorrent for things other than, say, copyrighted movies and warez. But the proprietary client wouldn't let me throttle my upload speed, which I need to do because I share the cable modem and a constant 20k/sec upload while I get 4k/sec down on a 2gig file is decidedly not fair for anybody involved. So I had to download it off of Fileplanet's servers, which meant a wait in line followed by ... well, a nice constant speed. Took two hours. Color me impressed.

And I'm coloring you indifferent at this point, I see. SO I SHALL JUST SHARE PICTURES


Here's my gnomish mage Frotz about to release a fireball of fiery fire on some poor unsuspecting low-level creature. I am happy I can make him look a wee bit like my EQ gnomish wizard. I'm also happy that he has fireballs and will someday be able to build exploding sheep.


Here's Martha the gnome warlock. I would've named her Chornya, which is Frotz's sister in the little piece of canon I like to call "HOW I LIKE TO NAME MY CHARACTERS" but for some reason I don't think the filter liked h-o-r-n-y in the name or something. Oh well. Most every character type in the game looks cool; the gnome females all look like they were designed by Margaret Keane, however. Warlocks are one of two pet classes, and Martha is able to summon an imp that helps fight and also makes snotty remarks from time to time.


The undead race looks DAMN cool. You can have a zombie with a stiff closed chin, a zombie with a jaw broken and hanging limply open, as shown here by my undead warrior Harryhausen, or you can have a zombie with a jaw ripped clean off, and a tongue dangling obscenely down from the hole where the mouth shoulda been. Now that's rad.

Currently I'm playing on Test Server 20, which I think you can get by looking thru the Eastern Time Zone offerings. I'm still not sure if I'll buy the game when it comes out, but I'm pretty psyched I'm gonna have a week or so off to just play the hell out of the beta.
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