A creative chef over at WoW Insider has posted a recipe based on the World of Warcraft game recipe, Murloc Fin Soup! The recipe includes the translation into real food (for example, murloc meat = boneless skinless chicken breasts). Personally, I always thought murlocs would taste more like tuna than chicken given that they are fish people, but the recipe sounds fun.
My last experience with an MMORPG beta (Vanguard) was less enjoyable than I expected. The game wasn’t very fun and did not seem ready for release. Now I’m playing in the Lord of the Rings Online beta. Since the NDA (non disclosure agreement) has been lifted, I’m free to discuss my experiences. So here are a few of my first impressions.
First impressions last in the world of gaming. It is inescapable. Beta testing can either make or break a game… before it is even released. A good way to build a solid player base for a game is to have a solid beta. The game should be playable for the most part, and large bugs should be mostly ironed out before this time. World of Warcraft is an excellent example of this. Blizzard opted to go through beta testing without an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). This meant that all beta testers were allowed to discuss their testing experiences, both good and bad, post screenshots, etc. It was quite a risk to take, but Blizzard triumphed because the beta made a great first impression.
I played World of Warcraft for over a year. I was involved with managing WoW Vault since way before the beta, and during beta I wrote the talent calculator and lots of other content for the site (when Blizzard finally released a talent calculator, there were a lot of similarities in layout to the one I wrote, but I won’t go into that here). So I was pretty into the game. However, I stopped playing the game last year. I wanted more solo or small group content, but everything at high levels is based on large raid groups, which take a while to get together. It just wasn’t as much fun as the lower and mid levels, and I could only create so many characters before I got bored of that content.
Despite this, I still look at news of the game’s development once in a while, so I know that there is an expansion coming out soon (which has been in the works for over a year). The Burning Crusade Cinematic Trailer was recently released, and again I am amazed at Blizzard’s CGI. Although the in game graphics are nothing like it, it is still impressive. I got quite a big laugh out of a few moments in the trailer. The trailer starts out very serious and dramatic, but about 75% of the way through it has some humor. First a Human wizard dramatically casts Polymorph at an approaching Tauren, which of course turns him into a sheep. The sheep dangles in the air with his legs wiggling for a moment before falling to the ground with a baa. Next an Undead character casts a ring of fire to kill some nearing murlocs, who are complete with RlrlrlRLRLLRLGRLGRLGlglglglgl!. Those two scenes had me cracking up, and it was hard to take the rest of the video seriously.
Also on the WoW Movie Download Page is a video of the recent WoW commercial that has been airing on TV. It’s a take off on Office Space, and it’s pretty funny.
I don’t know if I will ever start playing WoW again. Maybe I’ll give it another try when the expansion comes out, but I’d almost prefer not getting sucked back into the black whole of time that is MMORPGs. A Diablo 3 would be a lot of fun though, and the time requirements are not as demanding for that sort of game. I haven’t played online games in months, and I like having more free time than I used to.
