Of course I’m talking about the recently released Warhammer Online and not actual war. As you might have read from Malcom’s review below, Warhammer is a crap load of fun, so I’m not going to post another review of the game, instead I’ll post my opinion on what I think thus far.
Currently I have two characters, a Battle Priest, lev 11 on a normal server and a Dwarf tank, lev 10 on a open RvR server. Alliance all the way!
First I’ll start of when what I don’t like, cause quite frankly it’s a pretty short list.
Game Map – The main map does not provide any indicators of towns or outposts at all, even locations you visited. Now some towns/outposts are obvious just by looking at the map, however many are not. So when traveling between location and wanting to look back, it’s hard to remember where things were. Minor inconvinience which hopefull will be corrected in the near future.
Mobs – My main problem here is the respawn rate and the amount of time they chase you when running away. The respawn rate in some areas is so fast that it’s rediculas and frustrating to do quests in that location. The chasing is just as annoying because to me it feels as though they chase you for twice as long as any other MMO I’ve played. Put these 2 in together and some quests, even easy ones, just became very frustrating.
Public Quests – While I love the idea, I don’t really like how they work. PQs are broken into chapters, I believe there are 28 chapters in the game, with each chapter having multiple PQs to complete. Then each PQ is broken down to stages, each stage becomes harder until you complete them all and finish the PQ. You can complete a chapter by getting points by participating in PQs, however you don’t have to complete any of the stages or more than 1 PQ. You can farm the first PQ and just do the first stage over and over until you get enough points to complete the chapter. This becomes extremly boring and tedious as you’re killing the same things over and over. The other problem is that when you do complete a PQ, it’s normally no where near the amount of points needed to complete the chapter, so in my experience so far, players just do the same PQ over and over until they have enought points, which again is very boring. As I said I love the idea, I just don’t think it’s implemented correctly.
Now on to what Warhammer Online does right, which is everything else. In some of my previous posts, I sometimes come down hard of PvE, but to be honest, I don’t mind it that much. PvE can be fun, I just hate being forced into it and having no options to do anything else. Within 20 mins of starting Warhammer online, I was doing PvE quests, in the waiting queue to participate in a RvR senario quest and joining others in PQs. A few hrs later once I gained some levels I then entered some RvR areas and joined a warband to kick some Destruction ass.
Having joined both servers with either low or medium population, I have yet to wait in line to login and the waiting queue for RvR is very fast, normally 3-5 mins. The best part of RvR senarios is that you can do other things while waiting, then you get a popup asking you if you want to join. Great way to keep the game exciting and constantly changing up what you’re doing.
PvE quests are your normal run of the mill MMORPG quests, however if you don’t want to do any of them, don’t, you don’t have too. Don’t like RvR, join a normal server and just play the normal PvE quests. The best part of Warhammer Online is that it doesn’t force you to do anything you don’t want to. I love that!
I think it’s safe to say Mythic has a kick as MMORPG on their hands with Warhammer Online and I definietly have a new home game wise.
I’ll be playing exclusively now on the open RvR server, much more fun imo and will post some updates as I get further into the game. I hate to be Funcom right now considering a good PvP game just came out. Ouch!
It really is interesting to read the varying opinions of people playing this game…
For example, you shower praise, yet on westkarana.com a few choices paragraphs from a simple commenter paints another picture..
“I still think you’re giving WAR too much credit. Just mentioning public quests is sure to generate some sort of positive publicity. As much as I tried to avoid the hype surrounded WAR, and I thought I did a good job doing it, I’m still severely disappointed having purchased such a shallow, linear, tedious and contrived world. I was looking forward to it based on the few blog posts I couldn’t avoid that extolled the virtues of open groups, public quests, etc.
In truth, PQs are a joke — they sound good on paper and fail in practice. I have to wait in a queue to log into my server but find that the only PQ that’s possible to complete is the one nearest to the largest city. The server is full but there’s not enough chars to complete the content?? The other PQs remain empty and I had to wait in line to join the server! The singular, popular PQ is fun for 10 minutes. After you max out your area influence you’re given a reward. Being clever, thinking I can head to a different realm and do that chapter’s public quest, I find the same situation, empty PQs save one and the same exact item reward (possibly with a different name) for the same slot with the same stats. How shallow. And don’t even think about doing a public quest if it isn’t between the hours of 6-11 PM.
I rolled a dwarf eng and I nearly quit him five minutes after realizing his first two abilities were near exact copies of my elven healer’s abilities. One melee attack and one short ranged dmg attacked. The first quest was a direct copy of the elf quest in the other realm — instant quit. How contrived.
Battleground scenarios? Fun for 30 minutes, and then you get tired of doing the same exact map over and over again. I am not a fan of warcraft, but the warcraft battlegrounds are much more fun than any PVP I’ve experienced in WAR so far. Plus there’s that whole other PVE thing that, frankly, WAR just manages to make completely boring, tedious and irrelevant. I didn’t know a game could become more boring than WoW, but Mythic pulled it off. God help you if you want to join a scenario and it’s not during prime time hours too.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but it’s hard to avoid the hype and not get excited when everyone is calling WAR a WoW killer. At best, it’s a feeble attempt to capitalize on a very, very small part of WoW’s success while adding in some theoretically great additions that end up being mediocre at best. I’m going to resub my EQ2 sub tonight which I just started playing. Tipa, I should have taken your advice months ago and started playing but I was too proud to leave EQ. EQ2 is really fun so far!”
I find it fascinating really.