I Guess All My Posts Are Really Long

Well, I'm back, and I've finally left Kalimdor. I finally broke down and bought the game, hoping to make it through the rest of this class on the free month and two guest passes that came with it. For round two (two and a half? three?) I decided to play as a dwarf. Since the primary thing stringing me along was the interesting settings, I thought that being in a frozen mountain would be a good idea. It turns out I was right. While not as beautiful as the rolling plains were, the mountains really are something to look at, especially iron forge.
I started out the way you do, doing some grindy quests before you can get to the interesting stuff, and I decided, fuck it, I'm just going exploring. I did, and to my pleasant surprise the game rewarded me almost immediately. While I was prancing around in the woods I came across a number of fun places, an eye-poppingly awesome city (seriously, it was like walking into Notre Dame. Of COURSE I don't mean that), and surprisingly I stumbled into the place I was supposed to go for my quests. This leads me to wonder if "fuck it, I'm going exploring" is exactly what Blizzard was hoping their players would say. Perhaps the quests are not the focus of the game after all. That would certainly earn them props on my part since thats what I'm enjoying right now.

A few comments on being a dwarf. First, while the location is good on the eyes, it doesn't have the same visual diversity that Kalimdor had. Pretty much everywhere you look there will be snowy trees. I feel as though Blizzard should have made the environments more extreme in a way, since after all the World is the thing that separates World of warcraft from other games of this type. Instead of being on a snowy mountain, I should be on top of something which dwarfs everest, towering into the clouds like a massive stone pillar, snow and ice whipping in the wind. Instead of being in a haunted forest, I want to be in a wild, untamed place of madness where the tangled, dripping branches block out the sun and paths snake through like a labyrinth. I feel as though they were too tied down to the environments they set up in the previous warcraft games, but the locations are so much more important now, and the whole appeal of fantasy is that you can magnify it as much as you want.
Second, being a dwarf is far too similar to being a minotaur (sorry, tauren) then I'd like. I know I've mentioned this before, but I wish the game play experience from one race to another would be less similar. I wish undead could fly, or never died, or that you could play races that lived under the water. I know that would expand the learning curve, but great, then the players have more to talk about with each other. As it is right now all I'm really picking is a paint job.