Long lag spikes meant I was being attacked and killed by creatures I couldn't see or interact with. I was able to log on early this afternoon without waiting in any queue, and quickly got down to business, but eventually the game, frankly, became unplayable.

I want to see how the lag issue and queueing shakes out before I start scoring it. I'll get more into that for the review proper, which we'll post fairly soon. And that's something I like about WoW-that you don't have to camp the same area all day, killing the same monsters with the same tactics until you finally level up and can wash, rinse repeat in the next zone. Since quests drive the action, this makes sense. I recall that Blizzard had planned on originally having only around 600 quests, but it ballooned to around 2000. And every new build I play seems to have an additional quest I don't remember doing. And of course you have the large map screen to get yourself oriented. When the location isn't close enough to show on the mini-map, there will be an arrow pointing to the direction it's in. I noticed that quest locations will show up on the mini-map, in addition to active quest NPCs. Latency hovered around 300 on a 3 megabit cable connection, and it's in the double digits here at the office. At any rate, there were some delays in initiating attacks and looting corpses, but that was the worst of it. You see, the servers can handle a large population, but it gets difficult when that population is concentrated into a tight area. Once I got in, things were fairly smooth, considering the avalanche of players in the starting location. The estimated queue time isn't very useful, as it bounces up and down from ten minutes to almost an hour, I some cases. Last night, I had to queue up to log on, and it took about fifteen minutes until I was able to create a character on the Frostwolf server. They have a ton of servers across all U.S. Unfortunately, it's difficult to reference the UI at the moment, because demand has been far exceeding supply since WoW launched at midnight the day before yesterday. Sound also has a bunch of options to isolate music, local sound, global sound, emote sounds, ambient sounds, and four sliders for separate elements. With a Radeon 9800 Pro, I have 1280x960, with 4xAA and 16xAF set in Windows, and every possible in-game bell and whistle enabled, with nary a slowdown. And since the world doesn't have a large amount of polygons, it can run butter-smooth. There's also triple buffering, which is difficult for a user to enable in Direct3D games. For example, you can now isolate and disable specular highlighting just by checking a box.

The 3D Body Revolution by Donald Driver