I managed to reach level 15 in my first two days of play in WoW. Mattt suggests this is achievable “in a few days if you play casually” so I'm stoked I'm ahead of the curve.

Whilst WoW has yet to vouchsafe to me the same shining vision™ that has put others on the One True Path, it's not been all bad. The game has plenty of things to do. There are plenty of the previously mentioned quests to do and they provide the main thrust of one's levelling. Unlike City of Heroes, which has plenty of missions but limits you to having three on the go at one time, WoW allows you to “overload” yourself with quests (available mainly from NPCs in towns who feature a floating yellow ? ! above their heads if they have a quest you can start).

WoW has the now de rigueur quest interface which provides a timely reminder of the things you need to do and updates when you achieve some of the more mundane tasks within a particular quest (these also pop up on screen when you complete them, which is nice). The actualy window itself is a little fiddly - it's split into two parts: a listing all your quests organised by which zone you got them and the details of the selected quest, but can't be resized. So scrolling through a large number of quests becomes tricky.

Perhaps my favourite feature is the return of “building skills through use” which I first encountered in Asheron's Call. Unlike AC though, you're limited to what skills you can actually have according to your choice of class, which should prevent any of the weird skill sets that plagued AC from appearing. In addition to the class skills you begin with and the advanced skills you can later learn, you're also able to pick two from a selection of three basic and six advanced trade skills.

The three basics are the “gathering” skills: skinning (where you can gather leather from dead beasts), herbalism (picking flowers which are found dotted around the landscape) and mining (er... mining for minerals from nodes found around). The six advanced skills (alchemy, blacksmithing, engineering, leather working, tailoring and enchanting) use the items you get from the three basics and make them into useful items. Some match up well with others (skinning and leather working for example) but you may still need to get some ingredients elsewhere.

There's also three freebie trade skills you can take without using up one of your two precious slots: fishing, cooking and first aid. Fishing lets you spend time around ponds catching fish which can, by use of cooking, be turned into health-replenishing items (which require you to be seated to use, preventing their use in combat). You can also cook many other items you find on creatures in the wild (eggs and steaks for example). First aid meanwhile lets you make bandages to heal yourself and others, though, like the food, they aren't meant for in combat use - there are health potions for that.

Another nicely executed feature is the transport system. If you played Dark Age of Camelot you may recall the horses you could hire to travel between some places. WoW has a similar system, except using large flying Griffon things. Unlike DAoC, you can't go to places you haven't visited by foot, but once you have it costs only a bit of your hard-earned cash to take a swift air journey. This also gives you a chance to see some of the areas you might no have already visited (even though you should also visit them by foot to get the XP for finding areas you haven't been to before - a system which players of Earth & Beyond may find familiar).

Finally, some minor items which caught my eye, in no particular order:

There are several divisions of “monster” in the game including beasts (unintelligent animals in the main, which are the only things than can be skinned - you can't skin more “intelligent” opponents, more's the pity) and humanoids (anything considered civilised really). There's also critters such as prairie dogs and adders which, at no XP for killing, add an element of life to the world. Sometimes you'll even see them adding an element of death when they get pounced on by one of the beasts like a wolf. They remind me of the rabbits in AC and AC2, though I haven't seen a cow to tip yet.

You can buy animals. There's a snake seller in the Orc capital who wanders around with three snakes following him. They cost 50 silver though, and that's more money than I've seen, let alone had spare to find out why you would buy one.

Speaking of the Orc capital - it either needs less dramatic background music or less of it. The tortured screaming isn't helping either.

The Lazy Peons are cool. Like the critters, they're fluff, supposedly gathering wood around one of the Orc towns. You click on them and they complain about the work they're doing.

In conclusion then: still well made, still well put together, reasonably involving but largely lacking in it's own sense of identity thus far.