The Recurring Theme Starts Now

This past week of game time has been me playing a lot of WoW. I have a feeling it's going to be a big part of my gaming for a while to come. I've got my warrior up to level 21 now, and I'm starting to get more accustomed to the game. There are a ton of major differences between this and FFXI, but quite a lot of similarities, also, so while I know what I'm doing in the macro sense, I often don't know how to do it yet in the micro.

I've probably spent 40 hours in the game so far, which is nothing for an MMO, but progress is always coming along at a steady clip. I've only been running around questing in two of the game's extremely large (by comparison to FFXI) zones, and I'm not anywhere near done with them. Today some higher level players ran me through Ragefire Chasm, the first instance I came across. I like the way those are set up; in instances, you can go in and kill stuff, and it stays dead forever, as near as I can tell, or at least until you opt to reset the instance. So you can go in alone or with a few people and chip away at the hordes of monsters before you die, and then come right back and pick up where you left off. I also like the flight routes in the game. It's pretty cool to be flying in real time over the zone below you, seeing mobs and other people down there running around.

The auction house, I'm still trying to figure out. It's not set up like the one in FFXI at all. You actually have to wait the full 24/48/72 hours for your stuff to sell to the highest bidder, unless you put a buy-it-now price on the item. I don't have near the knowledge of the game's economy to dig deep into the AH, but what's cool is that I really don't have to, because when I go to list an item, the game provides me with a good starting price for that item.

Again, 99% of the time I've been playing solo so far, but I can still get most stuff done as long as the quests are green/yellow/orange to me, and are not dungeon (instance) or group quests. I'm paying attention to the quest text and other lore as I go along, and I'm really enjoying it so far.

The only other thing I've played this week is Gears of War 2. I'm up to the beginning of act four in my solo playthrough, and just last night I played some co-op campaign with Necovia, AKA Lonesteban. We played through one of my favorite parts of the game so far, the abandoned research facility where the guys jump out of the glass tubes at you. Chainsaw spree! That's a lot of fun.