World of Warcraft Previews

More previews have surfaced around the web for World of Warcraft, based upon the ongoing beta test. The first is at FiringSquad:
There is no item decay and given the way the rest of the economy is set up (around incredibly rare drops and hard-to-develop skills), we doubt Blizzard would implement it. To be honest, it's quite nice to get attached to a remarkably good item you got at a low level and it lasted you until your teens. Most of the quality items worth keeping tend to be soulbound - that means once equipped in the proper slot, they can only be used by you (though for some reason vendors still pay for them.) This also keeps their sale price fairly stable, as they're in demand because of their quality, but since they can't be re-sold, it keeps enthusiasm down. The one exception to this is near level 30 gear, since level 30 is currently the highest available in the beta, and nobody would sell the best items anyway - so the prices for even binding equipment are through the roof.

The second is at JustRPG:
At the heart of the game is Blizzard's impressive questing system. You obtain quests by finding important characters that have a yellow exclamation point above their heads. They will offer quests you can accept or decline, which will often reward special unique items as well as experience points for their completion. These quests do an exemplary job in giving the world meaning and a purpose beyond just simply killing creatures as you have seen in almost any other MMORPG. Blizzard Entertainment is not aiming to have just any MMORPG on the market with World of Warcraft but one of the best!

The third is over at GameZone Online:
Because you will likely end up hunting, acquiring the skinning skill will allow you to harvest leather from the mobs you kill. You can either sell it, or buy the leathercrafting skill. With leathercrafting, at the first level, you can fashion leather scraps into a leather product and also use leather to make boots and a vest. The boots and vest carry a defensive value of 11, which is much better than any new player will likely have or find early on in the adventure. Other skills are interrelated as well: mining is nicely tied to blacksmithing, herbology leads to enchanting and alchemy, and so on. If you take crafting skill such as herbology or mining, by triggering the skill, your radar will show the location of harvestable resources as you near them. Many of the resources are likely in mob-infested areas, so being ready for combat is a must.

And the fourth is at GameOver:
Besides having a class, characters can also learn (trade skills.) These involve things like mining, leatherworking, engineering, and alchemy. Each time you level up, you earn a skill point, and then you can use the points to learn a new skill or improve on an existing skill. The way it's set up now, with the level cap set at 30 (eventually the cap will go up to level 60), you can completely learn two or three trade skills. For example, rogues can only wear leather and cloth equipment, and so they might learn skinning, which allows them to skin animals for leathers and hides, and leathercraft, which allows them to convert the leathers and hides into useful equipment. Depending on your ability with a trade skill, you can use different (recipes) for your craft. However, these aren't anything like the Horadric Cube recipes from Diablo II. The recipes you buy (and find) will appear in a list, and then those are the only things you'll be able to make. And so if you see a really cool recipe being offered by a (trainer,) then that might motivate you to practice your skill so you can buy and use the recipe.