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World of Warcraft: Beta 7 Patch |
Written by:
Matt
Wednesday, October 13, 2004 11:58 PM
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Er...at least I think this is the 7th patch,
but Blizzard has been churning them out so fast, I've lost count. The last few
patches have added a considerable amount of content (new areas to explore, new art, new audio). That's all well and good,
but these patches have also kidney-punched the existing content over and over, causing hundreds of small, very annoying
bugs. Hell, there were even some major ones, like getting killed from the water pressure when flying above the ocean.
Most of the smaller bugs were just annoying to look at constantly. Your weapons disappeared whenever you performed
any action that wasn't swinging them; your character would kind of float along the ground after falling of an object; you
would stop resting if you did anything, even something simple like opening a bag or clicking on another player;
and there were many, MANY more. But that's in the past now, because this most recent patch fixes pretty much all of them.
There is now a level of polish on the game that I haven't seen since June, before all those crazy patches. All zones now
have a drawn map, and there's a ton of new music and voice acting. They even had time to give
female dwarves a dancing animation!
The patch isn't all good, however. The new durability system (which is almost exactly the same as durability in
Diablo) obviously needs considerable tweaking, as you're forced to
repair your equipment far too often. Also, Warlocks were smacked around pretty good with the nerf bat, and their usefulness
is once again in question.
Something that was painfully absent from the patch was Paladin talents (hunter talents were missing as well, but that class
has only been in the game for a couple of months). Paladins are in dire need of some help, and the talents just might
be able to save the class...if they're ever implemented. Tigole did
reassure the community by making a statement on the forums:
"We omitted Paladin talents because our new stance is PRO-HORDE here at Blizzard. Sorry, Alliance...
ok, actually kalgan is sitting next to me working on Pally talents right now. hunter talents are done."
So hopefully they'll be patched in really soon.
Overall, this patch was quite good. It corrected most of the annoying problems, so now they just need to finish talents
and get the game content-complete. A couple more patches like this, and the game will be ready for release, no doubt.
While I don't like attaching ratings to beta products, here's how the patch scored!
Rating: 8 / 10
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