Third Time, Still Lucky

I’ve been extremely lucky in scoring a beta test key for Cataclysm – this will be my third beta (I never played the original WoW beta) and I have to say that I really, really enjoy betas. There are some parts of them that are more fun than the live game, in fact.

So, I spent half the weekend downloading the Cataclysm client and its many, many, many patches (and exceeded my internet quota to boot!) and I’ve been poking around and I’m pretty impressed.

(You’re shocked, right? :))

This beta feels very different to past betas; there’s no one obvious place to go to level, there’s no central hub city like Shattrath or Dalaran. There are various breadcrumbs from existing Azeroth to the new zones, but – unlike past expansions – there are so many changes, big and small, in old Azeroth that it’s easy to get distracted poking around what’s changed.

I’d hoped to provide a fly-through video of the new-and-improved Stormwind, but unfortunately I’m having trouble recording decent quality videos at the moment, so that will have to wait. In the meantime, I’m working on a rundown of the paladin changes in Cataclysm – there are some very interesting design decisions becoming apparent – and I hope to post it ASAP.

7 thoughts on “Third Time, Still Lucky”

  1. gz on beta key :)
    And there are lots of fly-around videos of many areas out there at tankspot/mmo-champion/worldofraids/whatnot. But really not much about paladins, it seems, that they are working mostly on DKs and hunters now.

  2. I suspect that they’re giving keys out intelligently – i.e. to people who are active on forums, blags, etc. in order to get as much player-generated squee as possible, thus getting the hype going for the eventual release.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *