World of Warcraft is fantastic!

After finally managing to get the Open Beta client downloaded (the downloader uses BitTorrent, but still took the better part of a few days), I played for a bit today until server issues forced me out of the game. I will say that so far, I'm incredibly impressed. I wasn't sure if Blizzard could pull off a MMORPG as well as their RTS type games, but I've had a blast playing so far.

The game looks just stunning, and the graphics are very styleized (it looks almost identical to Warcraft 3). It's incredibly colorful, and the hazy gray effect when you are a ghost is pretty nifty. More than that, the gameplay itself is just pure fun. There doesn't appear to be much micromanagement of your stats, in fact, I haven't found any way to "level up". You can train to get new skills or spells as you progress, but stats get boosted automatically.

Overall, it's left me with a much better first impression than any other game, save for City of Heroes. COH ended up getting pretty boring after about Level 20 or so of the same thing over and over, so it'll be very interesting to see how WOW avoids the dreaded "mid-level funk".

I've got about two weeks left before the game hits retail and my "free trial" is over, but it'll be interesting to see if WOW can convince me to pay monthly for a game again.

Update: Yep, it sure did. Turns out that the Beta was over far faster than I thought ... TODAY. I wasn't nearly done having fun yet, so I went to go pre-order. They were sold out of Collector's Editions, but they had regular ones left. So I'll be playing hooky from class Tuesday to play. Best part is, I had plenty of store credit, so it didn't even cost me anything. I just don't know how I'm going to make it through the weekend ...