I had the good fortune of being a part of the World of Warcraft Stress Test Beta. I can say as a long time EQ veteran that it is almost exactly what I have always wished EQ could be. Most of your experience is gained from questing, rather than endless and mindless slaughter of mobs. Travel is fun and easy right from the start. The game is sufficiently challenging whether going solo or grouping. (Raids have not been added as yet) Tradeskills are far more interesting, useful, and worthwhile. Combat is more intuitive, less time consuming, and more enjoyable. Finding quests is far easier due to the markers that appear above NPCs that have quests for you. The graphics engine... my god... it FAR surpasses the efficiency of EQ's engine while concurrently rendering far more realistic and immersive textures on what seems like a much higher polygon count. In layman's terms, the graphics engine has WAY less lag than EQ, and WAY better graphics. Even while flying above the world in a zeppelin or on a gryphon, I experienced NO lag on either of my 2 comps that I tested it on.
Test comp #1: Medium spec machine;
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core
1GB DDR266
120GB 7200rpm ATA133 HDD
GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB
SB Live! X-Gamer
:: This machine ran the game with no problems whatsoever, and all of this hardware was available 2 years ago.
Test comp #2: Higher spec (Not top of the line);
Athlon 64 3000+ 1MB L2 Cache
1GB DDR333
160GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
GeForce 6800 GT
SB Audigy X-Gamer
:: While others like myself may be upset about this... there was no real noticable improvement in gameplay with this machine over the other. (Granted, this is without 72+ players on screen at once as we would see in EQ raids, but it is still very impressive.)
Anyone with a mid-range PC can play this game easily. Very impressive for a game that has such incredible visual quality. You have to see it to believe it.
Now that the stress test is finished, I am left like a crack head who had his stash and pipe tossed in a lake. This game is THAT good.
Sony must be chewing their fingers completely off right now... World of Warcraft is set to take away at least HALF of their customer base within a week's time. Maybe Sony will pull a magic trick with EQ2 and really give us something more fun than EQ, and not just prettier graphics, a bit of tweaking and much higher system requirements. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
WoW Beta Stress Test
If you have been dying for a sneak peak at World of Warcraft, this is your chance. Blizzard is looking for 100,000 people to download the client and play the game for 7 days to stress test their servers under high load. The date of the test is not yet set. Just the ever popular "soon". I figure I should forewarn you. Based upon the amount of lag still experienced on the regular beta servers during prime time, I suspect the stress test will be very difficult to play during those hours, especially if you don't have a high end computer and video card. Plus, that many people starting at level 1 at the same time means hugely crowded newbie zones. Still, this is a great game and if you are lucky enough to be able to play in the off hours, you may actually get some nice gameplay in.
The download is hosted by Fileplanet, and for a few days will be only available to their subscribers. For those who are not current fileplanet subscribers or are not willing to pay eight bucks for 7 days of what will likely be laggy, overcrowded gameplay, non-subscribers will supposedly be able to sign up in a few days, but with no guarantee of getting in. I personally suspect there will be plenty of space left for non-subscribers.
This is the link to the main Fileplanet page for the stress test signup.
This is the link for Fileplanet non-subscribers to sign up when it opens up.
Be sure to check out our WoW site for more info on the game.
Update: They changed the free signup link. Here is the new one.
