Warhammer online - pass! (just a brief review)

Ever since Lineage II slowly withered away (aka people i know, and are respectable left or slowly left, and are replaced by douchebag), i have been hunting for something on a similar level of game play with a similar lot of people. WoW opened up a whole bunch of possibilities, coinciding with my increasing work and school load.

yet it wasn’t enough. Don’t ask me what I was looking for, I think i don’t even know it myself.

Age of Conan was a major and expensive (not to mention hugely irritating, lying, piece of shit) disappointment. And so, I was just a little wary when Warhammer’s date of release was announced. I didn’t purchase a copy for myself, but Waife did. And i took his copy and have been banging corners into it to find if i could possibly find what i was looking for.

Current I am only level 5, so please take into consideration when you are reading this. I haven’t gotten the chance to experience much of the game, and I am pretty sure it still has plenty to offer.

First off, let me just say this - for a product only this recently launched, it has been pretty smooth sailing. there were the usual “launch bugs” of sudden, unexpected game client crashes, not to mention some slight graphic bugs and “unknown commands”. The UI itself can be severely unresponsive: i am still waiting for my profanity filter to move its ass and allow me to read what Wrekked’s been trying to call me all week.

Beyond all those minor bugs though, the gameplay has been nothing short of awesome. Taking lessons from WoW (as most games nowadays seems to be doing), they have seperated servers into “core” (pve) and RvR (which is essentially open pvp). Like WoW, they have some races forming alliances with each other, the “Order” and the “Destruction” - and they fight each other. It’s pretty much open pvp zones through out if RvR is your chosen server.

the slightly different arc in all these is that races are paired against each other right from the start. So, Greenskins vs Dwarfs, Dark elves vs High Elves, Empire vs Chaos. as part of your “training” (or better yet, “story line”), every “chapter” of your life involves pvp-ing with the npcs of your paired opposing faction. There are also optional quests involving going into battleground-like (or arenas for L2 people) pvp areas.

From a healer’s perspective, this game is definitely alot more… coordination required. Every race has got their own healers. Most of the healer classes require damage output before one can throw up a heal (from what I have understood so far), not too dissimilar to building up rage before one can use a skill. Rune priests and something else (can’t remember which one) seems to be the only 2 classes that has been spared that problem.

Still, it is not just a plain “throw up a heal, then sit and disappear into background” kind of role anymore.

What is also interesting (and i am speaking from a WoW gamer’s viewpoint), is that they seem to have taken many of the add-ons WoW gamers, with some twists, used as good inputs into the game. For example, there’s quest helps, but not to the point where you are just blindly walking into the zone and picking up quests/quest items/quest npcs. There are links all over the place to help guide you smoothly into the game.

the guild system is interesting too. you can “gain xp” for the guild, which opens up things like guild calendar (ahem, add-on, ahem) that are useful to the development of the guild.

The ui itself has been pretty intuitive and ready for “customisation” - albeit it’s pretty bugged right now and hard to make things work. The basic layout is good enough though, and the graphics are smooth enough, and big enough, for basic, normal usage.

From what I can see and guess, they toned down the graphics so everyone can join in and play regardless of pc systems (to a degree i guess). Even then, it’s not overly shoddy, and is on a slightly better… standard than WoW, not quite L2 yet though, and definitely no where near the crazy graphic requirements of Age of Conan.

The only complaints I have at the moment is how ugly their elves are. Their elves looks no where near graceful, somewhat hawkish and gawky is more like it. The female elves looks no different from the male, some of the faces are quite.. man-ish. The best of all was, thankfully, similar to angelina jolie (dark elves), albeit the worst of all looks like a smashed up asian face, also from the dark elves.

Levelling wise, it’s not as casual friendly as WoW, even with the help of rested xp, an idea from WoW i guess, and huge amount of quests, it is not as quick to get from, say, level 1-10. In wow, i can probably accomplish 1-20 in about 2-4 hours. The levelling time probably isn’t too far from how Lineage 2 was, but it’s not as much of a grind, considering the quests and story line each has to fulfill.

Any questions? i will try and answer them ^^