WAR (Warhammer Online)

An honest Warhammer Online review

Tbh, WAR just isn’t my kind of game; I knew this from the beginning. That it caught me still enough to play it says a lot about its qualities. Now I can not rightfully bash or praise WAR, and never was it so difficult for me to make a real verdict. Where WAR is strong it is really strong, and where its lacking I found it quite lacking. Now whether you will regard WAR as a great game or rather “meh” is entirely a question what kind of MMO gamer you are.

RVR

The definitely strongest point is the RVR fun. And its plain fun, to rush into open battle with just any class, and even more in the higher areas which become more complex with castles to defend and siege. Also the scenarios, which are a simple, short fun to rush into. Or old WOW veterans will translate all these things, so for them scenarios are battlefields. It’s a kind of weird footnote worth mentioning how far WAR went to rename everything you know from “some other game” just for the sake of renaming it”, down to the point when a simple Ranger isn’t called Ranger but “Shadow Warrior”, or why a Pet Class like While Lion is named after its pet, and not after the guy who controls it. But that’s just one of WAR’s oddities. RVR is fun. And for those Planetside-like players this is all that counts and for the fun of the RVR alone WAR is worth their money. So the question if WAR will hype or disappoint you entirely hinges on your value or PVP battles. Its not to say the rest is rubbish, but nothing of the rest is really standing out compared to other MMOs. Personally I had the feeling they focussed to much on one aspect, but I am getting ahead of myself.

CLASSES & RACES

I must say I found the design of the classes and races mostly underwhelming. Its again that Planetside like style, where you are more designed to be a number, a uniformed part of an army than the hero of an adventure. Despite the few different drops and colorizations your character will about 90% looking like everyone else, and with the characters high stylisation you are indeed a copy cat of everyone else. Now for those seeking to be adventurer this must be a letdown, and a game which – gladly IMO – chose to be less gear dependent, its quite strange they had so few customisations. Sure, I didn’t expect another City of Heroes, but the diversity of looks in clothing and armour is quite a letdown for me. Also to be totally honest, the races look shallow at best and horrible at worst. While the Chaos faction has some charm and the Empire humans are ok, I found the Elves outright ugly. While almost all WAR faces totally lack soul and character, the Elves are the worst with the hollow stare into nothingness, their vampire-like features and animations to shed tears about. The Chaos faction is the only of all six which has faces and design with some soul and character, even the greenskins are WAY to generic if I take the great variety of the Trolls and Orcs from WOW as comparison. Now for any soldiering Planetside gamer it may not matter, but for those for whom a MMO is an escapism for their alter ego this sure comes as a great letdown. Playing some classes further along a few were fun to play, like the Bright Wizard, but I found none of them characterized enough in terms of combat as to be really thrilled with the idea, like I was for instance with the Vanguard or AoC classes.

GRAPHICS

No sure we never expected AoC or LOTRO or VG wonders in terms of landscape, and while its not that bad than the videos or screenshots made me fear in all honestly its bad enough. For once, travelling by and far into the late 30ies areas I must say the entire game world is WAY too much made of brown and grey, I am sorry. Its like they were shy to make use of colours, which is quite odd given the otherwise cartoony design. I am not going into the debate whether WOW stole the cartoony design, but if so WOW definitely made it better. Personally I love lush landscape, and that is another area in which the Planetside-PVP geek will just shake his head like “I am in war, I don’t have time to look at the scenery”. I can understand that, but those escapism “alternative ego” gamers like me just have another perspective. I take one example which stands for many, the beach in the NW of the human starter area. There is a beach with ships on the horizon and chaos barbarians conquering the beach and that beach just looks… boring. I dunno what exactly they missed, but that beach has zero atmosphere. And its only heightened by the oddity that those barbarians practically stand still, waiting for you behind rocks and you can safely run between them – they don’t care a bit. It makes both the scenery of the beach and the feeling of the apparent danger of invasion null and void. It was one more place I could safely navigate and farm, but lacking all feeling of soul. Sure it was ok craftsmanship, but if you explored wonderfully designed of awe and wonder like LOTRO, AoC or Vanguard the entire WAR world will look rather boring. Its not so much a matter of polygons, it’s a matter of design, of placing, of usage of colour and light and in that WAR totally falls flat on its face. I haven’t seen so far a single vista where I stood in awe and admiration. The was more like the graphic standard when EQ2 was new, and summed up in one word: functional.

Now there are a lot of other things we could refer to, like the game is quite free of bugs and released quite complete, which are all good things. WAR has a ton of really good concepts, like the Public Quests and the easiness to find fun stuff to do. That is sure a legacy to stay in the MMO design.

However, I could so far never help than to feel more in a theme park, like some big Disney Land, than in a real alternative world. You are led entirely linear through a tube of quests. There are no player hubs where people of the entire world meet, because once you left one tube behind there is no reason ever to go back. Its spread the playerbase over the world and never makes them really meet in some place to socialize, player hubs like Qeynos or Stormwind/Goldshire were. It kinda feels like you are led by some entertainer through the various highlights of the Theme Park and once one attraction is done, its done. As a result WAR is the most unsocial MMO I have ever seen. The regional chat is almost entirely silent and never so far have I seen a MMO were people interacted so little. Everyone rushes from quest to quest, from battle to battle, and there is no place or commodity to stay or converse or just form social networks. You just don’t make friends, you bring friends in or you will stay alone. In this social aspect WAR is the poorest MMO I have ever seen. Both in the design of the world, lacking social hubs, as in the Disney-World-like “guided entertainment” you have neither reason nor opportunity to make friends here.

WAR is a wonderful game for people with very little time, it is likely the most casual friendly MMO ever, and especially those for a Planetside-like PVP playstyle. The world design, the classes, the roleplay, the graphics, everything else is just too mediocre to catch people who play MMOs as act of escapism, of playing an alter ego in adventures. Sure there are PVE quests, but they are average fare and the lack of a “whole world” simulation just kills any purely PVE centred gameplay very fast. WAR is not an alternative world you escape into to live some weird alter ego. It’s one big battlefield. That it is good, but it is nothing else. If that suffices for you, you are going to have a blast in WAR. If not, you will race to level 40, and then, having seen everything, you will leave the game for greener pastures. It remains to be seen if the latter are the biggest part, and I do suspect that after the initial hype WAR will face a similar downsizing as AoC does now. It never pays off to focus a game on one, narrow idea, no matter how well designed this idea is.
 

Perfect review. Agree with every point. You could also mention that the game is lacking the real potential. It's a linear circle that is already looping in itself. To bring something new, they will need to break the circle which almost never happened in the past.

It never pays off to focus a game on one, narrow idea, no matter how well designed this idea is.
 

How's that?. WoW is concentrating simply on pve raids and is doing fairly well.

1. WoW is basically the same as far as quest node progression. You hit a node, do the quests, and move out. The difference is, WAR doesn't include the grind for each quest that WoW(and eq2 lotro etc), so it's fairly in and out.

2. The graphics... I can't really agree with you.  from the areas I've seen they were all fairly realistic.  You seem like a real wow fan(surprising seeing as how you scream open sandbox player). where the areas are COMPLETELY unrealistic, and are like BAM BAM changing from a jungle to a desert.  But the graphics in WAR are great.

img.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Bladin/BladinM_002.jpg

img.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Bladin/GallickM_002.jpg

img.photobucket.com/albums/v153/Bladin/GallickM_003.jpg
 

3. You are totally ignorant when it comes to the fact that Warhammer is like a 20+ year old IP, and WAR has drawn off it. It’s a kind of weird footnote worth mentioning how far WAR went to rename everything you know from “some other game”  was a very stupid comment.  The classes are named off their warhammer origins.  Such as the White lion, where it's origins are them being strong warriors who basically went into the wilderness and killed a white lion in a epic fight to the death, and wore his hide.  That's where the name White lion originated from.

4. Mythic has stated they wanted to have people look at someone, and know what class they are just from a glance. While I admit there could be more armor types, you have to remember that every single class(20) has it's own armor and appearances. So while there may only be 1-4 variations per tier, it still is quite a few actual armor types.

5. I completely disagree with your class comments.

6. people who play MMOs as act of escapism. WAR was never market'd as being this, never was told to be this, never WANTED to be this.

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To me it sounds like you went in with a chip on your shoulder, and a lust for a open sandbox game.  Your never going to find it, there will never be a good one of those.

Sounds like you expected Warhammer to be a pvp game only and nothing else and got confirmed.

Without haveing played it and for the same reasoning you do I will probably not play it. I guess it is still good at what it tried to do. A casual easy pvp game for people to spend a few hours to have fun.

I am still unsure though how they will keep their playerbase with just that concept. Either the turn over rate is big (means enough players try it for others that quit) or they manage to keep the people playing for long times.

Originally posted by wilq

It never pays off to focus a game on one, narrow idea, no matter how well designed this idea is.
 

 

How's that?. WoW is concentrating simply on pve raids and is doing fairly well.

To defend WOW a bit it has more playstyles than people credit it for.

Sure it is not UO (played UO for 8 years) but it has questbased PvE and Dungeon/Raidbased PvE.

It has limited PvP (actually wow could have world pvp if players just organised it themselves)

It has crafting professions, not very sophisticated ones, but more than some other games and it is some kind of mini game besides PvE/PvP.

Fishing is another mini game in itself too having nothing to do with either PvE or PvP and is something you can do when the other things are not at the moment to your liking.

Is wow  then a game with lots of playstyles? No, but it has more than many generic games out there and I bet that it is one of its real strengths, besides that it is a cultural phenomenon and not just a game.

I doubt Warhammer has so many choices and will be interesting how they retain their playerbase.

Originally posted by obii

Originally posted by wilq

It never pays off to focus a game on one, narrow idea, no matter how well designed this idea is.
 

 

How's that?. WoW is concentrating simply on pve raids and is doing fairly well.

 

To defend WOW a bit it has more playstyles than people credit it for.

Sure it is not UO (played UO for 8 years) but it has questbased PvE and Dungeon/Raidbased PvE.

It has limited PvP (actually wow could have world pvp if players just organised it themselves)

It has crafting professions, not very sophisticated ones, but more than some other games and it is some kind of mini game besides PvE/PvP.

Fishing is another mini game in itself too having nothing to do with either PvE or PvP and is something you can do when the other things are not at the moment to your liking.

 

Is wow  then a game with lots of playstyles? No, but it has more than many generic games out there and I bet that it is one of its real strengths, besides that it is a cultural phenomenon and not just a game.

 

I doubt Warhammer has so many choices and will be interesting how they retain their playerbase.

I have to agree with this guy. I'm not a big fan of either games b/c they both are pretty restrictive in what you can or can't do but I have to say WAR is a little underwhelming. Granted WoW has been out for a while and has been able to add stuff and maybe with time WAR will catch up in that sense.