World Of Warcrack 10 Day Trial

Ladies and gentlemen I officially lost my mind. I decided to download the World of Warcraft trial and blog about the experience. From what I hear, this is equivalent to deciding to smoke crack for the first time. I’m aware that this recklessness might actually ruin my life, but I’m willing to try it for your entertainment and great justice.

Since I only get 10 days to mess around with the game I will need to play few hours every day to get my values worth out of the trial. I will also try to blog every day about the experience along with few screen shots of my progress so I will have to resist any urges to use up all my free time on WoW. I don’t see this as a huge problem because I usually don’t play that much on the weekdays anyway. I will also try to throw in few non-WoW related posts here and there for those of you who don’t feel like reading the diary of a WoW virgin. :P

I will also strongly resist the urge to actually purchase the game at the end of the trial unless the experience is a truly amazing, mind shattering experience. I do not expect to get addicted – I usually don’t. I tried few MMO’s before and none of them rocked my world. I got totally bored with Guild Wars after few weeks, I never actually got out of the starting area in Anarchy Online and I gave up on Eve Online after 6 days. Why should WoW be different? I think that 10 days is plenty of time for me to level up a character to the point where I’m bored with the repetitive mission, and do enough sight seeing to satiate my curiosity.

I plan to make this a slightly more in depth review than the half assed one I did for Eve. I might do it day by day (oh noes, 10 days of WoW posts) or just do 3 or 4 longer posts summarizing my experience. I’ll see how much I will have to say each day. Also, you will probably be reading these posts with a 2-3 day delay because of the way I queue posts around here. So if you want to meet me in-world please note that I might be far away from the location I just blogged about by the time you read it. Also please note that by the time you read this introductory post, I probably already leveled up my character a little bit and moved away from the starting area. :P

I’m trying to do this from the “complete n00b” perspective so I picked a low population PvE server at random (Undermine) and created a character there. Since I don’t know anyone there, I’m starting fresh with no outside help which is kinda what I wanted for this review. I’m not sure how this works with the trial but I think I should be able to get another character on a different server in case someone wants to give me awesome l00tz and monies to start me up. But the initial few posts will be with a clean, fresh character and no help from high level players.

I downloaded the “streaming trial” which is actually pretty impressive. Initially I was a bit concerned that the world will load in real time and look all retarded like in Second Life, but this was not the case. The environment is all preloaded and looks great. It took me only few minutes to download the trial exe file, and I only spent 2-3 minutes on a loading screen when I first launched the game. I didn’t experience any lag or jumpiness in the game either – in fact, if it didn’t tell me it was the streamed version I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. This is impressive, compared to the long download sessions I experienced in Guild Wars.

The full installable trial is around 4GB in size – I briefly considered downloading it, but I don’t see a reason for now. The streamed version is working perfectly for me. In fact, I’m not even sure why Blizzard insists on people buying a full version of the game – they could just let people install the streamed trial version, and continue using it after the 10 days provided they pay the monthly fee. They make most of their money on subscriptions, no?

My goal here is to learn more about WoW by playing. I want to figure out what is so fucking awesome about this game – why do people get so obsessed with it. So that’s one of my angles in this review – is it really that great? Is it addicting me right now? What the hell do people see in this? I will try to explore these things in the next few posts. Another goal is to give those of you, who like me haven’t played this game yet, some insight into this phenomenon. I mean, it’s not a new game – this is not some cutting edge reporting, But I figured someone might find this sort of thing useful. :)

If you have any suggestions, or tips for a first time player please post them here. Note that you are reading it with a delay, so I might already be past the point where I could find your advice useful. :) Tomorrow I will summarize my first steps in the game, my thoughts on controls, graphics, character creation and etc.

[tags]WoW, world of warcraft, warcraft, wow review[/tags]