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Former WoW player on Warhammer - An Honest look
Simkyn
Member Posts: 42
So I read a lot of reviews that seem to say this game isn't what it should be and it made me feel a little uneasy about getting it after experiencing other releases the past two years. Still I decided to give it a go and see what it had to offer.
On logging in to a server, you get to pick between Order or Destruction. Once you choose a side, you're locked in on that side. Similar to how WoW used to be and how DAoC was. You can see how balanced the sides are when you choose a server.
Character customization was alright, nothing huge. Similar choices as in WoW, though you get a few added features like eye color and some scaring or tatoo's. Guess it depends on your class.
Logged in, standing there looking around. The graphics are definately much better than WoW. I can't even believe these people that complain about the graphics being like wow are playing the same game I am. Maybe they didn't turn them up or they have crappy graphics cards, but what I was seeing was definately much much better than WoW.
Movement is just as smooth as I would have imagined. Only problem I had there was sometimes when you target something, like a quest giver and chat with them, your toon gets stuck attempting to look at them while running. Figured out that dropping target fixed that pretty quick. Either way, everything was nice and smooth running.
Right away, you get experience from information being added to your tome of knowledge, which is on of the coolest ideas ever. It keeps track of everything. If you saw it, its in there, if you killed it, its in there, if you had it, its in there. It keeps track of titles and and any awards you may have. EVERYTHING. This is where all the Lore is stored away for you to browse over, and there's more Lore in this game than any I've played before. You get experience from anything added to your tome, so even exploring is rewarding.
So I go out and do a few quests, right away I'm immersed. Feeling as though I'm a part of whats going on with the story line. Anyone who thinks there's not enough PvE in this game is nuts as I spent most of my first few hours doing only PvE. There's plenty of quests and mobs to keep you busy.
I finally run across a quest asking me to join a battleground. I decided to wait for it till I was a little higher level and complete my other quests. Around level 5 or so, I decided to jump in. This was similar to WoW in that there's a timer before you can run out and start accomplishing things. The idea was you had to capture 3 points on the map and try and defend them. You'd respawn back at the starting point if you died. I'll admit it was very hard, but right off I noticed there seemed to be real balance between all classes. All in all, the battles are very very fun. First time in the battleground, I died a lot, but had a blast and came away feeling excited about trying again.
After doing that a few times I decided to move on and do more quests. The quests are very creative. While playing WoW, I enjoyed how creative those quests were, but I had no idea how creative these quests could be. PUBLIC quests are just a blast. You're running along and you get a message on the screen saying you're in an area public quest. You look around and see a bunch of people doing whatever is required of the quest, which I noticed next to my minimap. There's several stages to a public quest, first stage is like easy mode, second gets a little harder, and the final stage is where something epic pops up and you have to put everything into killing it. You can participate as much or as little as you like, though the more you put in, the bigger your bonus to your roll is in the end. Which brings me to the looting. After everything is said and done, you click on the public quest and it brings up a list of people involved and their bonuses, then it starts a random roll from 1-1000 or something like that. It adds your bonus, and then determines based off that who gets loot. If you scored high, like in the top 1-5, you might get a rare bag, 6-8 might only get a normal bag, the rest dont get anything, but if you stay and try again, you get a persistance bonus as well, so I kept trying. When you open your bag, you get a choice between several items for crafting or adventuring. There's tons of these types of quests, just have to look around.
While that was a lot of fun, I finally ended up making my way to a battleground camp. These camps are located on the fronts of open battle areas. They have quests just like any other areas for pve, but they also have RvR quests. Once you pass into the open RvR area, a countdown starts and eventually flags you PvP. The idea is to attempt to take and keep control over several areas. Similar to frontier lands in DAoC, except this was happening at level 8 for me. Apparently tier 1 area is 1-11. If a higher level player tries to pvp there, he's turned into a chicken and stripped of his abilities. Keeps the gankers out. Thats a FUNNY sight to see.
So just I decided to check out one of the capital cities. Every battleground camp has a flight master who will take you to any capitol city. Can I say wow, these capital cities have been designed with love and care, well at least the one I went to. There's so much detail and the size is just amazing. I decided to head to where everyone likes to go, the Auction house. Sure enough, found the guy and checked out the auction system. Can I say very intuitive. I loved the way it was layed out and it functioned perfectly unlike some other game I've played. Bought a few items and ran off to find the mailbox. Mailbox has 3 tabs, one for recieving mail, another for sending and the last for auction items. Grabbed my stuff and headed back to the flight master. Though the flight doesn't show you landscape, like in WoW. Travel is pretty much, you see yourself take off and fly away, screen fades, you land where you decided to go. Nothing awesome, but effecient. I like that since I had better things to do than look at the landscape for 20 mins.
Anyway, this is all from a days look at Warhammer. Leveling is a bit slower than WoW, but I'm happy about that. There's 40 levels and I dont want to just fly to the top and miss things along the way. There's PLENTY to do and if anyone says they got bored playing, they're not actually playing the game.
Some things I missed: Crafting is so so, but whats there is very interesting and different. My wife, who is an avid crafter actually enjoyed it. You have 3 experience bars, your main experience, your influence (which you get from RvR), and public xp. All 3 end up giving you items or abilities. After making it to the battleground camp, I found a trainer who worked with influence. With him, you could add abilities or points to your character, like Intelligence or a boost of 5% to your RvR experience. At level 11 you get your first mastery point. These points are similar to spec points like in any other game. I haven't reached 11 yet to play with them, but I got the idea.
All in all, there's a LOT to this game, and you have to get at least past 6-7th level in order to even get a vague idea of what it's all about. It's been just about the smoothest launch I've seen in any mmo and I've played most of them. Hardly any bugs, and any bugs that are there are minor cosmetic bugs. Anyone who bashes on the game after playing for only 10 mins has NO REAL idea what they're talking about. I've seen a lot of posts attempting to say bad things with no basis at all, which leads me to believe it's just people trying to retain the player base of their own game. Got news for you, if they're interested in playing another game at all, it means the one they play now is boring enough for them to wander to begin with. No complaining will help your cause.
This game is DEFINATELY worth a look at. Give it a go to at least level 10, try a little of everything and then see what you think. It might not be for everyone, but what game is. For the first time in litterally years, there's a game thats definately going to keep my attention for longer than a couple of weeks. I'm off to go do some open RvR.
Sorry this was so lengthy, its just that there's So much to this game and it seems there's a lot of people who are not sure if they'd like it. I was one of those people and most of the reviews I saw weren't giving the game it's justice. I decided to give it a go even though I've tried so many other games the past few years that I just got bored with in a few days or weeks. Hope this helps you decide if you want to try it.
If you must contest anything I've said, please be as constructive as possible.
Comments
Kind of a long read but glad you like it. Fun game, VERY fun game.
OP gave the game a chance and turned out to like it. This is how I believe you need to walk into this game. You cannot jump into WAR expecting it to be WoW 2.
As a "fan" myself I will say, great post! Sums up my thoughts nicely
Thanks for this. I enjoyed reading it.
Yeah, again sorry its so so long. Its just that there's so much to the game that people seem to miss and spending only an hour in the game doesn't give it justice. There's a lot of posts that go back and forth, but not a lot that seem to cover WHY its fun.
This is the first game in years thats actually got me excited to play.
great post thats exactly how i felt playing it
Very good read....it pretty much covered everything I wanted to know from what seems to be a very honest prespective.
Great review. I was unsure about the Auction part in the Open Beta, but now I know where it's at.
I think another fun part of the RvR is where you can control the Siege Weapons. If the enemy gets too close to your Warcamp, you can right-click on a cannon (or rocket launcher...thing) and fire on the baddies, getting you a splash shot of like 400 damage. Then they begin to run away. That's always great. ^__^ It's a FPS mode and the wind changes after every shot, and it is limited at where it can fire, but it gets the job done if your peeps are getting overrun.
This is almost exactly how I feel, except I'd add that it's a little rough around the edges performance-wise right now - lots of high end machines having stuttering and hitcing, so let's hope Mythic takes care of that ASAP. However, this game is great for people who are tired of WoW, but not tired of WoW. Meaning you're tired of Warcraft, you're not tired of the auto-attack/skills combat system, questing, and all the things that'd make a game a "WoW clone".
In fact, for me, this is how WoW should've been.
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A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
excellent post mate sums up my views well not since pre-cu SWG have i spent 9 hrs in a MMO and it not seemed like a chore yet I can do this in WAR as there is just so much variation.
The game does have some polishing to be done, but what game doesn't at launch. For the most part, this game runs much better than most games run even after months of updates. The fact you have so many things to do though makes it so any bugs are easy to overlook. Most are very minor cosmetic bugs.
Bugs I've noticed:
Minor pathing bugs with some mobs. Nothing even vaguely problematic.
Small amounts of lag here and there. very minor lag, nothing lasting even.
Something targeted keeps your toon wanting to look at it even from a distance, so running like that just looks a little strange. no big deal.
I found one mob stuck in a rock. Haven't seen any others like that.
Some spell effects do need to be worked on, and sometimes they don't show up at all. This tends to be after a couple of hours of play, which means memory leak. Still compared to most game releases, this is very minor.
Have had some overhead icons disappear on quest givers and such. Again this happened after a few hours of play and seems to be connected with the loss of spell effects. Relogging from desktop fixed it np.
Anyway, thats as many bugs as I can think of.
Things they could improve on would be crafting. They need to add more crafting in my wife's opinion. I personally don't care about crafting, but it is a good time sink if you want something to do while you wait for that battleground instance to pop up. Some sort've tutorial on crafting would be good. As it is, you get a vague hint about how to craft. It's not too hard to figure out, but since the system is different, a little help would be nice.
Aside from all of that, the game is really nice and polished and just about the smoothest release I've ever seen.
People with average systems seem to have no problems running it. I run with an 8800GT in vista 2G Ram and have no problems on High settings. I've heard some people have problems, but they admit their system might not be min requirements friendly.
Huge Wall of Text that crits you for 178977899 damage and you die!!! Not to bad a post,I do agree most games launched these days do get bashed way before they should. I think folks should give any mmo that releases at least 2 months before initiating a review of it:P
Again yeah sorry for the wall of text. I was just trying to give a decent view of what to expect of someone were curious on the details of the game and if it's worth buying. It's so worth it.
Excellent Post!
Not being a fan of level-based games myself, I went into WAR with skepticism and came away with respect. WAR is one of the first MMO's that wants to pull people back together again. So many times have I played MMO's only to feel like a solo entity in this vast virtual world. Not only has WAR brought MMO gamers back together, but offers enough variety to make what could be a very linear game, into something more complex and dynamic.
WAR has even managed to get me into PvP.... and I'm a carebear at heart. In fact I brought down my first kill just the other day in a 1 on 1 duel, and look forward to the challenges of others down the road. The review above pretty much sums it up, give it an honest try and you may be surprised. Will this be everyone's piece of cake... no..... but it was enough to give this avid EVE-Ryzom skill-based player something to look forward to when logging in.
You've hit on one of the key things about WAR vs. other MMO's. This game has a ton of depth. So much that it takes a while to discover just how much there really is. If they tried to throw it all at you at once, it would be very easy to be overwhelmed at the start. (Look at EVE's 3 hour tutorial before you even start really playing that game!) So what people do in the first few levels is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, games like WoW have trained us to think that what you do at levels 1-3 is exactly what you'll be doing for most of the game. For most MMO's, you have two games. The first game is a PvE game that gets you to max level. For most of your character's career, you do nothing but PvE questing. Yes, WoW throws in battlegrounds starting in your teens, but come on. There's no bolstering like WAR has (the mechanic that scales you up to 3 levels below the RvR area's max level), so unless you're in the top couple levels for a battleground you're basically going to be bait. And then WoW also penalizes your honor gains if you're not up near max level. Nor does PvP in WoW give any experience, with the exception of a pittance for a quest that takes you into the battleground. That means that to level your character in WoW or other MMO's, you HAVE to PvE. A lot.
Then when you get to max level, you get to play the "real" game, also known as the end game. Now you have raiding (which is more PvE), battlegrounds and arenas, and maybe some world PvP. Most of which is just disquised grinds to get better gear so that you can move on to the next grind.
With WAR, by the time you're level 10 you can be gaining XP and leveling your character through PvE, world PvP and battlegrounds. You get great gear from all of them. You get abilities from each. You're even getting raid-type bosses early on, thanks to the PQ's (and some of them are REALLY tough). In short, you're experiencing what many games call the "end game" already in your first levels.
Some people complain that it's too easy. These people obviously haven't seen much of the tier 2+ content. There's PvE questing that comes in tier 2 that is impossible to solo. Tier 1's RvR is basically just defeating an elite mob and staying near the flag for a few minutes. Tier 2's RvR adds in keeps, which are guarded by a raid boss with multiple elite guards. These keeps also allow the use of a few siege engines -- both as the defender and as the attacker. Higher tiers are reputed to be even more complex, and more difficult.
People who give this game a chance will be very pleasantly surprised. Every one of my friends is loving it to death. One friend had to be cajoled into checking it out. He messaged me yesterday to say he couldn't believe how much fun he was having. Another friend spent his first several hours playing multiple classes to about level 4. He told me he didn't like the game because it was too boring and there wasn't any depth. I convinced him to choose the class that he liked most and actually play it to level 10. Now he's our guild master, and convinced his wife to play as well.
On the other hand, some people very clearly don't want to enjoy the game, and never give it a fair chance. And of course, WAR isn't something that everyone will like. The true sandbox lover is going to be disappointed with WAR. I will say, though, that by your late teens WAR starts to feel more like a sandbox than one might be inclined to believe. There is a ton of content, and you always have choices as to what kind of gameplay you want at any given time. (Questing, scenarios, PQ's, world RvR, dungeons in the capital cities, etc.) The difference is that it's a guided sandbox, meaning that the game does tell you where to look for fun that's appropriate to your level.
Thank you for this post. I was considering of writing something similar but since you got to it first I would like to add some things to your post if I may.
Now I usually play PvE online games in general and rarely purchase PvP centric games. Warhammer caught my attention in the store the other day so I decided to give it a go and I was very pleasently surprised to say the least. I agree on all counts with you Simkyn but there are three things I would like to add:
Grouping: To group for a quest, public quest, scenario or RvR one does not need to search for a group since its done automatically. You just look for the open groups available, join them, and you are ready to go. This feature is something I really liked in the game. No more looking for group for 30 m- 1h to get something done(if you get something done). I really respect Mythic for what they did here since they essentially removed the most annoying time sink in MMO's.
PvP: Usually I dont PvP, but what I liked here is how gradually one is introduced to PvP and how casual friendly it was. To be honest I started playing and got used to it in no time. It is a great experience.
Chat system: Normally I wouldnt comment on that but I feel obliged here to do so. One thing noticeable in the game is that there is little to no chat going on in the general channels. That is because Mythic has only one general channel that is changing whenever you change a location. Of course when you're in a group people talk and communicate normally. The NPC's talking doesnt help either since its filling the chat screen (its more practical if one filters it out)
One can debate whether this is a good or a bad thing. I persoanaly welcomed the direction they took with the chat system because there is no more chat spamming and people talk only when they are in groups. But this system does need a little love from the developer though in my opinion. They should add a trade channel as well as an advice channel for anyone who might need help.
I never believed I would be playing a PvP game to be honest but Warhammer has certainly made me a believer. I also recommend this game to anyone who may have doubts about it.
one other thing I'd like to note.
If you dont like the area you're playing in, the good news is you dont have to stay there. I noticed that once you hit your warcamp, which is usually 2-3 camps away from your point of origin, you can use the flight master to head to any other warcamp at tier 1 or your main city.
So say you started out as Goblin and you wanted to head over to the Chaos area to fight with friends, just run down the road till you find yourself at your warcamp, use the flight master and pick the Chaos map and then choose the tier 1 camp. Off you go. You'll probably have to do some dodging along the way to avoid slightly higher level mobs, but the roads are usually pretty safe.
Anyway, just thought that would help if anyone didn't know.
Oh and they do have a Zone wide chat that doesn't change. "/1" will be heard by everyone in that zone. It's not world chat, but it does cover all of whatever tier you're in. Again, I think most people dont use it because they don't know about it. It's not like you just click on the chat bar and select the type of chat to use. More and more I see people using it though.
Good review
. I'm only level 5 and i'm really enjoying it so far. I can't wait to get to tier 2 or 3.
Wait till you hit 7-8, it's a huge difference.
You almost feel twice as powerful each level. I posted someplace else that when you start this game, you feel pretty wimpy, but after 4-5, you start feeling more powerful, and each level after that just adds to that power. Once you start RvR and speccing renown points, you can add to that power. At 11, you start getting mastery points which adds to it even more.
If people only play the first 4-5 levels and then drop the game, they're missing out on what the game is really all about. Fair reviews on if the game is actually fun will only come when people hit the higher levels, as the character development is far more complex than other games.
Best review yet I've seen on the PvE aspect of WAR. It makes the detractors look like immature kiddies (which they most likely are). And the pvp is about 10 times as fun as the pve, so that's saying something.
If anyone is interested in Modding the UI, they have them available now at curse.
http://war.curse.com/downloads/addons/
Not a lot out there as of yet, but it's still early on and people are busy playing. The stuff they do have is pretty cool.
I had a similiar experience coming from WOW :-). Here was the link to mine
http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/203512
There Is Always Hope!