World of Warcraft: First Impressions

About two weeks ago I installed on of my free World of Warcraft trials and began my adventure into a game that has 10 million subscribers and is probably the most famous RPG of all time, perhaps even the most famous computer game. Now, time is running out and I have about 2 days left on my account before I have to pay or leave. So, these are my thoughts on WoW. I’m not going to give it a scientific review, just record my impressions. Firstly, I like this game. A lot. Secondly, I hate this game. A lot.
Part of this schizophrenic relationship has to do with the great limitation of a trial account: you aren’t allowed to invite people to join you on your questing. This means that you either have to find a group of people interested in doing the same thing you are doing (and good luck with that at lower levels) or you have to fly solo.
Flying solo is itself a schizophrenic experience, since the difficult curve scales in a punishingly steep manner. As you start out, you cruise through minor enemies and monsters like you’re eating a sandwich, but the moment you leave the secluded vale where you start and enter the “real world,” the game steals your sandwich and replaces it with a muffin stuffed with rusty nails. You have to play really, really carefully to avoid being eaten by mobs of enemies who descend from every corner of the map. Worst, the quests you receive give you absolutely no clue about how hard they will be to complete.
Another annoying thing about WoW is the time investment required. You can’t travel really fast at all until you reach level 30 (a goal completely out of the range of any trial account), which mean you spend the bulk of your time running around the same bloody forest looking for your quests. And if you should die you have to run all the way back to where you fell, and the respawn sites are located around populated areas, which means that they are far away from your corpse, so you spend five minutes running around as a ghost before you can resume the action.
Now, all of these flaws aside, I do like World of Warcraft as an RPG. It is quite well designed, as you would expect from Blizzard. The game feels like it has been specifically crafted to hook people, as it gives yo the constant feeling that if you only stick with it for a few more days your character will become the most powerful person in the land. It has good graphics, and implements quotidian things like eating and drinking in an innovative way. If it were only more forgiving on low-level players, I might be tempted to name it one of the best-designed RPGs ever made.
However, the time requirements are ultimately what turns me off. I play games in cycles, where I play one or two games for a couple months, then move on to another game in my collection. Also, I try not to play for more than a couple hours a day. World of Warcraft is not designed for such a casual attitude towards gaming. It demands that you spend lots of time with it, and it punishes casualness with difficulty in every aspect.