New Launcher Live in Beta

So today I wanted to do a post on the default UI in the beta, and how it affects healing, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I wanted to get a better feel for it first, and when I logged in to do so today, i was greeted by a message telling me the new launcher that was recently announced is now available, and I'd have to reinstall WoW. I thought I'd use the opportunity to take a look at this new launcher and how it affects game play if you fire it up before it's completely done patching.





The first thing I noticed was that my characters were not loading up right away. Instead, I got this loading bar across the top of my screen that let me know the progress. Each of them loaded up fairly quick though, only taking about 15-20 seconds. After she loaded up, I chose Aunna and let the game load.

After sitting on the loading screen for about 3 minutes, I got a message that the program was not responding, then it crashed. That's alright, this is a beta, and my upstream isn't the greatest, so I kind of expected it. I fired up the client again, picked my paladin again, and the loading bar quickly (about 5 seconds) got to where it had froze up before, and then finished loading. I was dead when i logged out last, due to an issue with an instance, so I ran back to my body to see what there was to be seen.

As a force of habit, I immediately opened my map, and it loaded up piece by piece. Not necessarily slowly, but it was obvious that the game was pulling up information as I needed it, and not wasting streaming resources on things I wasn't currently using.

Zone rendering was happening a bit differently too. I noticed the area immediately around me seemed normal, by in the distance, it wasn't quite loaded. I started to head that direction, just to see what would happen, and long before I got to the unrendered area, my view distance was as far as my computer could handle. You couldn't even tell I wasn't done patching yet

I wanted to see what sorts of behavior I could expect from the client around other players, so i headed to Stormwind. I was rather pleasantly surprised to find that everything looked completely normal, in terms of landscape. As I got to the trade district, I noticed player models were loading a tad slow, a bit like trying to log into Dalaran on a busy Saturday afternoon.

My latency at a more than healthy 46ms, and getting 35 fps, I decided it was time to stress test this a bit and go fight something. I swapped to my offset and headed to Hyjal. On the loading screen, I decided to tab out. This apparently is not a good idea, because my game crashed again. (I was tabbing out on the first crash as well.) I quickly logged back in, and spent hardly any time on the loading screens. Again, I was impressed.

After smashing up about 20 earth elementals without even the slightest problem, I was satisfied. Everything seemed perfectly responsive, even with several mobs on me. The worst thing that i saw was that the first time I used an ability, sometimes the animation wouldn't show, or the sound wouldn't play. But, everything after that first one seemed to have cued the client in that I was using that spell, and it acted just like normal. I don't know that I'd trust it for rated PvP play or a high end raid, but it seems perfectly fine for your day to day monster slaying.

I think I'll keep playing with this system every time there's a patch and I get a chance, but this first look at it, I'm really impressed. I almost couldn't tell that I still had 12 gigs of content left to download. I'm sure results will vary though, I'd like to see it on live servers with a higher population, in a raid environment, in pvp, and on a slower internet connection. I'll be on the lookout on the forums for folks with different experiences to sate my curiosity, but, this healer is dreading patch day just a little bit less.

/bubblehearth

The worst of it