I will start my review of both WoW and Istaria by pointing out some in my eyes pro’s and con’s of both games and make an overall conclusion in the end.
Istaria
- Dragons
- Huge world in which every place is reachable by walking except for the guild islands and some special locations.
- Loads of crafting.
- Biped multi-classing
- Loads of Lag causing very long portal times, sometimes almost as long as actually walking or flying there.
- Great chat system
- Area Revamps… T1 and T2 area looks great and wonder what is to come (maybe adding a few embalming dust dropping mummies in Deadpool would be cool… hint hint hint) in the future with the other areas.
World of Warcraft (started as a Dwarf and played up to lvl 13 solo)
- Nice graphics.
- Fun Fighting.
- Large variety of mobs.
- Those annoying mr. T grenades.
- Massive mob steals !! Large groups simply not caring you are there just annihilating an entire area and leave you with nothing… Even the mob that I was attacking.
- Stupid cartoonish text bubbles forcing you to be at keyboard and minding your surroundings for every second you are online.
- Little to no lag, not even in that big dwarf city… Iron Forge or whatever it was called (with hundreds of players walking or riding about were ever you went).
- Walk back to your corpse or wait 6 minutes thing… Weird but in a strange way fun.
- PvP requests by high level characters.
- Quest locations placed on the map… People cannot read and get their behind to a in the story mentioned location?!? While some quest in Istaria can be a little vague and some might be just plain impossible (none come to mind right now) I prefer to use what little brains I have instead of:
a) Accepting a quest
b) Looking on the map
c) Walking to that locations
d) Kill x mob and loot y loot.
e) Run back to questgiver.
All in all WoW is I guess for some people a cool game, most of the time I enjoyed it actually. However the constant mob stealing, constant PvP requests from characters 2-3 times my level and those text bubbles just annoyed me big time up to the point that I actually longed for Chaos maintenance to finally be over so that I could play an in my eyes normal and relaxing game (even if it was just boring crafting at that time).
If however Istaria had the landscape and graphics from WoW I would love it even more then I do now.