World of Warcraft beta is over

Blizzard will shut down the Open Beta servers sometime tonight, so our week-and-a-few-days tenure of playing this game for free scrupulously and meticulously reporting game bugs as we find them is, sadly, over. My impressions of the game overall are very positive -- each MMORPG strives to look very good by presenting the improvements they've made over previous games. This means that when we play World of Warcraft, we find much to our delight and glee that hey presto, everybody's favorite game flaws and pet peeves are miraculously solved, crafting is actually fun as opposed to a grind, and combat is a lot of fun. Cynically speaking, however, a week-and-a-few-days is not enough time to play before the bloom falls and the novelty wears off and we begin to find new flaws or boredom points in the game.

But that's, of course, exactly what Blizzard wants to keep us from doing before we get the retail version.

I've included a little gallery of screenshots, edited and otherwise, that I've bothered to take during my sojourn as a beta tester. Keep in mind my system barely met the minimum requirements for the game, so the screenshots will not look as Stellar as those with other computers might see it. That's okay, for even with my low settings I really loved the game's look. It felt hand-drawn and hand-painted in a way -- like I was in the middle of a 3D Asterix cartoon or something. I liked that a lot.

( Screenshots ahead, cap'n )

I fear it will be a long time before I can afford a new MMORPG, so I will not be playing WoW immediately upon release. That's okay... let the rushers go on their way and let the newbie areas clear out a little bit before jumping back in, several months down the road. I'll content myself with watching its progress from afar... for now.