As I've said - I've been spending a lot of time playing World of Warcraft again, and the most recent Clan of Conan email arrived today to whet my appetite for Age of Conan, but I'm not quite finished bagging on Shaiya yet.

I can understand that free games are, well, free, and you get what you pay for. I can also understand when games are in beta and they are more concerned with the mechanics working properly than small aesthetic things.

But when faced with a game that has apparently won awards for its visuals and is simply a port from another language, I wonder why the developers don't take the time to fix some pretty simple things. Or perhaps check in with someone who speaks the language they are developing for.

One of the first things that  bothered me about Shaya was the word-wrapping. Words just wrap at the end of the text box no matter which letter it is on. It is a little distracting. And please, proofread your content! I already mentioned the difficult to read fonts last week.

Then, when going down to do the basic quests there are a large number of the same type of creature basically line dancing. There is simply not enough variation in the movement of the mobs. They also respawn ridiculously fast. I have no Idea why there are 150 scorpions when you can stand between two and just turn around to kill them back and forth.  It makes for a lot of clutter.

How the characters lean forward and run is just an aesthetic thing that I don't like, so I can get past that it is intentional. What I can't get past is the limited range of perspective. If I'm standing in front of a hill, I would expect my character could look up, and not have that motion blocked because mouselook can't drop lower than the ground behind her.

When I look at succesful MMORPGs (for varying degrees of success) it isn't all about some great story line (really, have you tried to keep up with the BS backstory for some of the in-game events) or great graphics (WoW certainly does not have those - good, yes, but made to run on commodity hardware). What they do have, however, is a bit of polish. The text is easy to read, the motion is fluid and smooth. The environment feels somewhat natural, and the interface is non-invasive.

By messing up any of those things you can take a beautiful looking, or innovative game and turn it from a diamond in the rough to an unlpolished turd.

What are your pet peeves in game interface and world design? 

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