I finally managed to login to a World of Warcraft server last night to try out my trial edition of the game. I ended up logging onto one of the role playing servers (RP) since the so called "normal" servers continued to be full and I didn’t want to get killed in 5 minutes on the player versus player (PvP) servers. I figured that I could do a little role playing if need be.
Now call me crazy, creepy, or whatever, but I’ve grown fond of playing female characters in online games, so I created a lovely female night elf warrior to play as. Since the trial is only for 14 days, I chose to start as a warrior since they tend to be pretty straight forward to play and I like to mix it up anyway. Next I just jumped into the game without reading the fine manual. I wanted to see how much I could do without RTFM first.
Cutting to the chase, I had fun! Yeah, first you have to level up in the usual slaughter the small animals sort of fashion. But, I was impressed with how well the automatic help system answered my questions as they came up in the game. And it only took a few minutes to get used to using mouse and keyboard for movement after being spoiled with a gamepad in FFXI for so long. I only played for about an hour, but I’m looking forward to going back in, after I spend some quality time with the manual.