Firstly let me say it’s quite awesome. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been dabbling in the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, Cataclysm,  but I’ll have more on that in later previews and impressions.  The latest build of the Cataclysm beta also sees the addition of the new World of Warcraft Launcher that allows patches to now be streamed.  Gone are the days of waiting hours for large patches to be applied. The patches have 3 levels of completion, different color has different meaning.  Red: you can’t play you gotta wait a little bit. Yellow: You can play but major stuff isn’t patched and you’ll experience some in-game issues. Green: The patch is pretty much done, but not 100%, you can play but again might run into an issue or two.  I’ve been saying for a long time that installing WoW is always not fun, there is always a laundry list of patches that need to be downloaded then installed.  It’s great to see Blizzard has come up with a nice system, that allows us to quest and do basic things in-game while the patches are applied in the background.

From the new graphics, to the flying all over Azeroth(gathering is going to be nice and quick now), to the new areas and the fact that the team changed something, in every area is great.  Like I said I’ll have some more solid write-ups in the coming weeks as the launch approaches.