WoW Forever Beta Vibes

I have not been playing a ton of the WoW Forever beta.  As I said last time around, I am already bought in on the idea.  I am going on the ride.  I don’t need to go crazy in the beta.

WoW Forever

But I have been logging in, mostly on the weekends, to get a feel for it and how it is different from both the retail and classic branches of the game… and to just enjoy the game a bit.

Some of it is… of course… the same.  I ran through the human starter area with a paladin and have a dwarf hunter who has made it as far as Loch Modan.  I will probably go make a night elf druid this coming weekend, just to close out the usual trifecta of WoW classes I tend to favor.

The familiarity, overlayed by some of the improvements in visuals, has been an interesting mix.  I am still not sold on the high definition character models… not the human male models in any case… but I can keep that option turned off.  I am fine with the standard definition graphics.  If somebody wants to see me looking like a crazy person, that’s on them.

The high definition human males are… strange

The atmospheric updates with lighting and fog and whatever, as I said previously, I can be kind of heads down and focused on some task then suddenly look up and see a vista that is stunning due to what Blizz has done with the visuals.

Just flying from Loch Modan to Ironforge and back… the texture of the sky, the mist and the lighting changes… it is everywhere and adds an unexpected texture or depth.

I have been moving slowly, though that seems to be one of the themes of the venture.  So it isn’t like I have much of a choice.  But I am also down with the idea for now.

I did go through and get my hunter his first pet.  As with WoW Classic, it was like old times.  I am not sure spending ten levels as a leather wearing melee class with a gun to pull mobs is necessarily the best design, but it is the old school path and going through it felt both fresh and familiar.  And once you get to level 10 it is time to start back with hunter pets and how they used to be.

Going to have to feed you and train you and level you up…

I have been trying to avoid some of the new things.  I skipped a couple of quests at the very start that had been added.  But ended up following a couple more later down the road.  There are definitely new things in the world.

Meanwhile, under Ironforge

I am liking some of the changes I have seen.  Introducing the harvesting skills right away feels good, as does the camp system.  As usual I put my hunter on to skinning right away.  There is always plenty to skin in the dwarf starter area.

When I added leatherworking… I sold some of the leather scraps to vendors to build up a bit of coin because you can still find yourself coming up short on cash when you are training up early skills, but started holding onto it after I got past the first hump… I found that I could make some useful gear.  There is something new.

I’ve not been paying too close attention to the updates.  Things have been changing in beta on the regular and there is little point in getting too invested in things that are in flux.  But some of the goals they have laid out resonate.

The encouragement of alts… that was always a strong pull in early WoW as well, just doing it all again… but with some different path options to spice things up a bit seems like a good goal.

Likewise, the view on dungeons… no dungeon finder, no summoning stone, reduced xp so that running dungeons isn’t optimized leveling… well, it sounds good.  I like the idea of being able to run a dungeon a few times without completely leveling out of it.  We’ll see how that ends up in practice.  But with NINE NEW DUNGEONS I guess they have to do something.  They posted a preview of them.

Then there was the mention of pulling shared bank slots into this version… well, let’s get back to encouraging alts.  I would like this please… if only because the mail system seems a bit broken at the moment.

Meanwhile, some things never change.  The chaos of the wendigo cave when they pop up behind you, and the the comedy of trogg valley, where Potshot and I ended up in the thick of an ongoing respawn cycle that we eventually had to flee from.  Good times.

Meeting up out in the field

We only have about a week left to go before beta closes up.  Then it will be the long, two week wait for launch.

I am sure the launch will be a chaotic mess given the popularity of the beta and that Reddit will be on fire with complaints.  But then it will settle down and become whatever it is we end up making it.