first impressions

I set up my account and played Warhammer tonight for the first time (after an hour of dithering about what to name myself - Zsuzsa eventually came up with a name for me), and it was totally awesome. I had a lot of reservations about whether I would actually like this game, but I was completely absorbed. Sorry about the length of this post, but there are a couple things that I want to talk about specifically:

1) Gameplay mechanics: Warhammer just kind of throws you into the game, with very little instruction about how to do anything. I've never played a game like this before, so the first few minutes were spent trying to figure out basic actions like walking forwards, attacking, and talking to people - and feeling totally confused, because I'm pretty accustomed to games providing a mechanism to learn all that in a controlled setting. After an hour and a half of gameplay, there's definitely still a disconnect: every couple minutes I got jolted out of playing because I'd want to do something and not know how, and then spend a few minutes figuring it out. Or not figure it out at all, which is so frustrating. I still don't really understand how all this fighting stuff works - I managed to kill myself once, and I have no idea how that happened or how to keep it from happening again. Hopefully there's a steep learning curve; I'm already a lot more comfortable with basic controls, and I'm already picking up hotkeys, so there's hope yet. But so far, the in-game help function hasn't been very helpful.

2) This probably makes me a bad person, but I'm really surprised at how much I enjoyed being on the evil side. It's not even like it matters at this point in the game - I'm not even doing anything yet, but there's still some basic pleasure in hearing other dark elves criticizing and taking advantage of the high elves' noble ideals.

3) After about an hour, I had a moment of dread when I realised I had absolutely no idea how long I'd been playing. I also got desensitized very quickly to the fact that my character (I'm a female sorceress) is pretty much naked. I actually had a hard time deciding what my character was going to look like (and considered being a male sorceror so I would at least have some clothes on), and I wonder why I was so quick to just overlook something that was initially distasteful: whether it's just that everyone becomes accustomed to their character's appearance and then ignores it, the fact that I'm used to scantily clad girls in video games, or something else. If my character had been ugly, instead of just naked, would I have minded more? (I think I would have. But I don't know! For those of you who play ugly things, it's something to consider.)

4) I came out of the game really wanting to talk about it. I don't know whether it's because it's been set up in my mind as a community-based game, or as a social experiment, or whether everyone wants to talk about this kind of game once they've started playing. I want to know what you guys think!

played from 9:45ish-11:15ish.