Beckett Gaming

Four major cities gone and four classes gone. It’s shocking news to say the least, especially since the news was dropped so suddenly. Obviously my first reaction was shock, and then a feeling of being let down. Or relieved?

On the one hand, it’s upsetting… after all of the release dates being moved back and a strangely untimely announcement of the final class, we find out that four of the classes, two of which have been around since the beginning, are gone with nothing more than a “they’ll be released at sometime in the future.”

There’s also the fact that the tanks especially are very hard to replace. Let’s face it, every class brings their own flavor to a game, but WAR still only had six who could stand up in front of a big monster and laugh as it hits them. That’s a big blow, and it puts a lot more pressure onto the four remaining tanks to pick up the slack left by the untimely departure.

Not only that, but the Empire and Dark Elves who play in their particular zones will now no longer have tanks running around to join up with, especially when they start looking towards the Public Quests. Before this announcement, I was really looking forward to playing a Warrior Priest (I love playing DPS/Healing hybrids like Monks in games). But now that there’s no tank for the Empire, I’m not so sure anymore. What am I supposed to do now, heal the Bright Wizards while they run around pulling a boss and everyone runs after it trying to DPS it down?

I was also looking forward to trying out the Knight and Blackguard. What little I had heard about them sounded like a lot of fun. But who knows now? Maybe people would’ve been happy with a class that only plays okay (gods know I’ve been playing a Rogue in WoW forever, but I still enjoy it). And quite honestly, there are always going to be changes to classes. Players always find ways to overpower certain skills, and people will complain, and then Mythic will have to find a way to balance it out a bit without destroying the skill completely. Rinse and repeat.

Finally, the news about the cities being gone is… confusing. So what now… four races won’t even have a place to call home? Or will there be cities, they just won’t be “living” cities? What about lag issues, or imbalance issues between the two sides (at least before, the side differences would be a little more spread out)? And… what about lore?

On the other side, it should mean that there won’t be any more delays for the game. Everyone can stop playing whatever they are playing “just to kill time until WAR.” And even though it won’t be a full game with such major things missing, hopefully the stuff that is there is great and solid and a lot of fun. Hopefully they show everyone that they cut these things out for a reason, and that the quality of the game will speak for itself.

And hopefully people won’t be waiting a year or two to get back what was lost.

But is having the game now, not completely the way it’s meant to be, better than waiting even longer for these things?

I’m not sure. While it’s wonderful that a company is finally being honest and open about these things, which, might I add, was done BEFORE the announcement of a more solid release date, I wonder if it would've been better to delay the game a bit more. On the other hand, no game will never be fully polished. No MMO is. There are always changes, fixes, strange bugs that pop out of nowhere, class imbalance, and so much more that if we waited until everything was perfect, we’d be waiting for a VERY long time.

For now though, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if this decision was for the best. 

 -Rebecca Bundy

With only 20 hours to go before The Burning Crusade, I finally got my hands on a Grand Marshal's Dirk. It's still clean and new...I'm itching to make a Fel Orc its first target. -Rebecca Bundy

It’s about playing with material that no one has seen before. It’s about going through bug reports and doing your best to help a company make their game better for you and everyone else down the road. But in the end, as those last days of beta are ticking away, it’s all about catching the events that developers throw for their beta testers as a way of saying “thank you” and leaving them with a memory that’ll last them a long time.

Back during the original beta, I managed to catch much of the end of beta event, though I caught it more towards the end.

This time I also caught it towards the end (about 2 hours after it began), but like the last time, it was just as incredible even if I didn’t see everything it had to offer.

Like last time, every major city was hit by the Burning Legion, though this time that attack included places like the Gurubashi Arena (some of the website GMs picked avatars, made themselves monstrous in size, and PvPed, though I missed out on this) and Shattrath City. At the time, I was stationed in Outland so I flew over to Shattrath City to see what was going on. Pit Commanders, Doomwalkers, several dragons (Emeriss and Lethon) and Infernals were holding their guard at various locations across the city, making it hard to get anywhere (especially with the damn Doomwalker’s Aura of Death). Amid the field of bones I realized that, though efforts had been made to take down the various bosses, those attempts had been futile. Out of curiosity I flipped to my Draenei to see how Exodar was faring...and it wasn't promising. Hearing word of the attacks going on in other cities, I switched back to my main and jumped into the nearest portal.

Rumors about Illidan in Darnassus drove me towards my capital city, yet I didn’t see anything at all…not even the fire damage that Shattrath and, I’d soon learn, other cities had suffered. Lame. A boat ride later I was flying past Ironforge, since the chat was ablaze with talk about how Stormwind was the place to be. It’s a good thing I passed it up, as I later found out that everything had been nullified in IF by the time I flew by.

And then there was Stormwind. I’d heard that the event started out as usual with the Burning Legion storming the front gates. As I rode deeper into the city and finally into the keep, I learned that the Alliance weren’t the only ones who got a rather interesting surprise: the Horde had been ported from their safe, warm homes in their major cities and deposited into the middle of our event, complete with several super sized GMs summoning demons, conducting mass rezzes, and otherwise doing their best to add to the mass chaos. Just for shits and giggles, they brought both Thrall and Cairne into the keep as well!

Amid massive spell storms and utter anarchy, the Horde fell and their bodies littered the throne room before we took their two leaders down so they could join them in the afterlife. As we gazed over the destruction, we all reflected on what had just happened. It was a battle that ended in countless deaths, and even more laughs, good times, and great memories. -Rebecca Bundy