…waiting impatiently for the WoW servers to go live…

Impressive.

Apparently someone in our guild has a family member working for Blizzard… And apparently Blizzard employees and family members can log in to the game servers early. She’s already level 8, and apparently Legion will already be a guild before the servers even go live. Very, very nice!

Looks like Blizzard had some fun with the end of the beta. The guild boards are filled with pictures of people battling tons of demons and dragons. Apparently the cities were all attacked and mass chaos ensued. I wish I could have been around for some of that…

Looks like the WoW beta is ending today. I knew it was coming, and had to be soon, but I’m still sad to see it go. I was really having fun playing with Kelvin and all the Legion folks again. I don’t know how many of them are actually going to purchase the game when it goes live on Tuesday… I’m really looking forward to retail, to finally being able to build up a character that won’t get wiped. I’m especially looking forward to Tuesday afternoon…I’ll be getting done at 5:00 and I don’t have to do a thing for the next day or two. I’m going to thoroughly enjoy my days off.

Terri’s been playing with the character creation options in Catacombs for a little while now, and I’ve been peering over her shoulder. For the most part, I’m not terribly impressed. Yes, the characters have many more polygons than they used to and look generally better…but they still don’t have the same life/personality that the characters do in WoW. They seem very cold and stiff…more like a statue than a living person.

While Mythic stated several times over that they were going to update the old world terrain/architecture/whatever to bring it up to date…I didn’t see any signs of that. All the old world stuff I saw (in and around Mag Mell and Tir Na Nog) was the same old stuff I’d been seeing for years. And now that we’ve got the high-poly character models running around all that old-world geography, it just looks even worse. I never noticed how chunky and blocky the stuff was in TNN, until last night when I saw these new character models running around.

As for the character models themselves…well, I’m really not all that impressed. Sure, there’s more options to play with, you can really customize a character. But I just don’t like how they look. Dwarves, in particular, look pretty bad. The basic structure of their body changed. It doesn’t look like a dwarf anymore, now it looks more like a monkey. Valkyns don’t look hairy anymore. Yes, they’ve got some kind of texture to their skin…but it doesn’t look like a shaggy coat of fur anymore. The Sylvans also look far less like trees, and more like humans carved out of wood.

I also think the ability to change your character’s appearance whenever you want to is just silly. In CoH it made sense…you were wearing a costume…go to a costume shop and change it. It works. In DAoC you aren’t wearing a costume – that is supposed to be your character’s real face/eyes/hair/whatever – but you are allowed to change it anyway. I could understand letting people change their hair color or style…but letting people adjust the size and shape of their nose, eyes, jaw, ears…that’s just wrong. What, did DAoC get a shipment of plastic surgeons?

To be fair, I didn’t see any of the new content. Terri was just playing around with existing characters in the old world. I didn’t get to see any of the new classes or new areas. Maybe they’re more impressive than what I was seeing. But, frankly, from what I did see, I’m just not interested. No surprise, really, because I’m absolutely hooked on WoW. But I really thought Catacombs would be more impressive than this.

Had great fun in WoW tonight… Got a group of Legion folks together to do a run through the Dreadmines. We were really just looking for Van Cleef’s head, but we had a lot of fun along the way.

Now, I’ve been in the Dreadmines before, but I never made it especially far. The furthest I’d been was the mast room, with that goblin shredder guarding the door. We ripped through him in no time and continued deeper inside… There was some kind of forge room that looked vaguely like the Great Forge in Ironforge…but not really. Far less impressive. It still had the molten metal pouring from the cieling, and lots of chains. It looked very cool. Got to fight some miniature golems in there, and lots of goblins.

We eventually made our way into some kind of underground shipyard. There was a huge boat bristling with cannons docked there. We fought our way along the docks, and eventually onto the deck of the ship itself. I got to meet Mr. Smite, a Tauren pirate. He was great fun… He periodically shouted out comments during the battle. We battled our way across the decks of the ship, fighting pirates that were accompanied by killer parrots. We also fought an especially large Murloc named Cookie – apparently the ship’s cook.

Eventually we made it up to the very top and did battle with Van Cleef himself. Frankly, I was not much impressed. He brought friends, and wasn’t a complete pushover, but he just stood no chance against us. The battle was over fairly quickly, and we left through a conveniently-located backdoor.

The whole adventure took a somewhere around two hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. The dungeon was instanced, so we didn’t have to worry about any other groups coming in and stealing our kills or competing for spawns. The respawn rate was quick enough to keep us moving, but nothing that’d overwhelm. And the ambiance was just great! How many other MMOG’s out there let you battle your way into a pirate hideout…fighting from mines, to an engineering room, and eventually onto the deck of a ship? I was truly impressed by the whole thing…great fun.

Terri just got an email letting her know that she’s been accepted into the Catacombs beta… Kind of funny, since she’s not at all interested in DAoC anymore. Ah well, it’ll be interesting to see what Catacombs is actually like, and I know she’s been interested in the new character options.