Some scenic shots from World of Warcraft’s two continents.

And so mainly the benefit to unlocking the Horde races is that it’s opened up the Horde areas, giving players (like me) who had pretty thoroughly explored the Alliance lands new places to hang out. Unfortunately, the Horde lands don’t provide the most visually stunning vistas ever seen, which is no surprise given some of their names, like the Barrens and Desolace. Pretty much if you play the Horde you have to like red rocky ground, or else you’re in trouble. I’ve had more fun in some of the “mixed” lands, like the Arathi Highlands, which are “owned” by both the Alliance and the Horde.

Also new this push is that Blizzard introduced a resting state. You start out “well rested” and get double experience for your kills, but then the more you play the more tired you get, and eventually you only get about 50% of the experience you’d normally earn. To become well rested again, you have to stay at an inn for 8 hours (including hours when you’re logged off the game). The theory behind the resting state is to help casual players keep up with hardcore players, but mostly I found that the bonuses simply make gaining experience easier, and I expect this is something Blizzard will tweak quite a bit before World of Warcraft is released.

One last new thing: whereas before characters only got skill points (to learn trade skills and weapon proficiencies) and talent points (to improve weapon skills and increase damage) when they leveled, in this push characters get skill points after every 600 (I think) experience gained from kills, and talent points have been taken offline completely. Currently this means that every character can eventually learn every skill, which is boring (my warrior is an expert in six trade skills right now), and combined they make this push feel much more like a beta test than the previous push did. However, my understanding is that the prices for trade skills will change to prevent people from mastering everything, and that talents will be where characters differentiate themselves. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Raptors, ogres and water elementals, oh my!

Ok, but what about your inventory? This is where World of Warcraft most resembles Diablo II. When you create your character, you start out with a backpack that can contain 16 objects. You also have four “slots” where you can put bags. Each bag can contain between 4 and 16 more objects, meaning you can hold up to 80 objects on your character. There is also a bank that can hold 24 objects, and banks have bag slots as well, but unlocking the slots gets wickedly expensive after the first couple. In all, you can potentially hold 200 objects per character, and while that seems like a whole lot, especially since some objects (like potions and herbs) stack, I somehow always find myself needing more room. (Of course, I’m cheap and I only unlocked two bags at the bank.)

Finally, just how does the interface work, anyway? It works about like you’d expect in a 3D game with a third-person perspective. You use the mouse to control the camera and perform actions (like attacking enemies and opening boxes), and you use the keyboard to move around. The game starts out with the WASD and arrow keys set up for movement, but those keys and about 50 other hotkeys can all be configured. There is also a hotkey bar at the bottom of the screen, which is set up mostly for combat skills and spells, but which you can also use for macros that you create. For example, ranged weapons in the game are mostly for angering enemies and drawing them towards you (that is, “pulling” them), and so you might have a macro where you say “Shooting now!” and where you also perform the action.

Some miscellaneous shots, including the map for Mulgore, the home zone for taurens.