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| Great MMO | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The PVE on this game is average for an MMO. However it pales in comparison to the PVP. Very well designed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| My Review | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Pros:
- Interesting classes and abilities - Fun to play while in a guild - Guilds level up like characters - Public Quests - Grouping is fairly easy due to the system they use - Tome of Knowledge is cool - Patches and updates are common - Can level up from PvE or PvP since you can XP from killing players - Lots of lore - Lots of events: holiday events and the sort Cons: - Pay per month - Mediocre music - this is coming from someone who greatly enjoys soundtracks from games. - Population imbalance: Most people play destruction - Class imbalance: If you compare order classes to their destruction counterparts, order mirrors are generally superior. For example, the bright wizard and sorcer are supposed to be mirrors of each other, yet bright wizard is greatly overpowered. - No large PvE encounters. Dungeons are 6 man at the max. - Laggy servers, especially in fortress battles. To solve this, Mythic simply capped the # of people allowed in a fortress, which results in people being teleported out of the battle. - City raids were greatly dissapointed. Was a PvE encounter and there were zero order players - Destruction and Order purposely avoid eachother often in PvP in order to grind renown by killing PvE targets. - Tons of CC - Rather than fix current problems, Mythic often just added new content - Crafting is very poor and underdeveloped - Obtaining items VIA PvP is very difficult compared to PvE. If you want the best stuff, you will have to PvE, despite this game being marketed to PvP players Overall, I would recommend this game if you have a guild or a group of friends to play with, if not, I wouldn't. |
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| A Growing Pleasure | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Warhammer Online launched with the intention of reaching over a Million Subscribers. As most know this mark has not been met. However the issues that hurt the games launched have been fixed. Anyone with a day to spare should download the endless trial. The endless trial offers the ability to play tier one completely free for as long as you like. That is not bad at all for a game with four tiers.
The game is great fun and the next update looks to be even better. The previous reviewer before me mentioned that the imbalance to factions was their reason for quitting. I suggest trying the game now that the next update, coming out very soon, includes a system for balancing out factions with the dogs of war system. |
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| After a year of playing, serious problems | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I had high hopes for Warhammer. The ideas in it are very good, and this game could have been a killer. After playing it for a year, having left once and come back, I am reluctantly leaving it again. The problem that Warhammer has been unable to resolve is player number imbalances on the servers. I've played on two servers and they both have the same problem, way more players playing the Destruction "bad guys" than playing for Order. Although I don't know the actual numbers, the Order players are so outnumbered that they have practically no chance of winning in the core "open RvR", PvP fighting. Two nights this week I was unable to find any open RvR action because all the Order player had simply left. Most of the time, Order will try to get a warband going for PvP, and will immediately be run over by Destruction warbands with twice as many players. I believe the problem is self perpetuating because new players and existing Order players will start Destruction characters to be on the winning side, making the imbalances worse. I've played a Destruction character also, and it got boring fast also when there is no opposition. If the trend continues, and it does appear to be getting worse, soon all the players will be on one side only. Good PvP combat should depend on teamwork and skill, not just having more fighters than the other side.
This is a serious flaw in what could have been a very good game. As it is, there is little enjoyment and a lot of frustration. |
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| 5 Star attitude, 2 star talent. Too many promises. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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No disrespect to the developers and artists that worked on WAR, but it was a horrendous piece of work.
So they pushed the game back a year to fine-tune and polish it. Well, that didn't help at all. But let's start with the good things. First of all, public quests started out as an amazing idea. In the lower tiers, everyone participated and it was fun. But at some point, they made you grind them over and over to max out the rewards....and past the first couple tiers, you were grinding them solo and they no longer became public, or fun. Truly the best thing WAR invented was The Tome of Knowledge. Everything you did and everything you saw was all confined into a neatly organized book. Whoever came up with that was awesome. Unfortunately, that's where the good things stopped. I wanted this game to succeed. I pre-ordered it, I made several of my friends pre-order it....then I had to apologize for it :( So what was the major flaw? For me, it was the ridiculously terrible engine. Many things they promised: massive RvR, city sieges, keep sieges, etc failed horribly due to a lacking game engine that couldn't support more than 20 people on the screen without major lag and framerate drop. This happened on every system of every spec. And for the framerate, the graphics looked terrible. Sure, you can go and manually enable AA and all the goodies on your video card, but the jagged turd just turned into a smooth turd. Bad art is bad no matter how crisp it looks! In addition to the terrible graphics and framerate, the engine contributed to an unplayable combat system. While the concept was solid, the implementation made it unusable. There was a lag between every button press, so it felt awkward. The spell animations never matched up with what was actually happening, thus ruining the immersion. You never controlled your character, you were controlling an interface to your character. No other game feels like that. Period. This is the root of the problem because as they kept piling on more and more content, the engine became increasingly harder to change. They're basically stuck on top of a really crappy base. Even with the technical aspects aside, this game failed in class balance....another promise that wasn't delivered. Don't be fooled, there weren't 20 classes. Every class had a mirror that was nearly identical, but they even failed to balance that correctly. Anyone that thinks Bright Wizards were not more overpowered than Sorcs were lying to themselves, or playing a BW. Also the Tier system looks okay on paper, but in an MMO, it makes progression EXTREMELY linear. A tiered system promotes no exploration and no long story/quest arcs. There was nothing new about the quest system, which they also promised would be revamped. There were countless videos from developers/promoters/paul barnett & co saying questing would not be a grind and it was never just 'go kill x somethings' or 'go find x.' All lies. And a few weeks into launch they reduced the XP for quest turn-ins, but didn't add any new quests, so there were not enough quests to level up properly. You were left stuck in areas with no quests and too low of a level for the next chapter. Tiers 3 and 4 were the grinds of all grinds. I'm fine with grinding, but I came in expecting, and more importantly, promised, otherwise. Also, it is a really bad idea when death has absolutely no consequence and basically becomes a device for traveling. That's just bad design for an MMO where your persistent character should be worth something to you. Speaking of worth, gold is worth nothing in this game. Because gold was worth nothing, there is no economy. Of course, this was exacerbated by the fact that the crafting system was an afterthought. Nothing of value could be crafted, and the crafting system itself was overly complicated with no payoff. No, it wasn't hard to figure out, it was just not at all intuitive. It's just bad design. Crafting has been done in other games and done well, so there's no excuse. It's not like they had to reinvent something. I'm sure there's a lot more wrong with this game, but I've tried to erase whatever I could remember of it from my mind. Sigh. That basically sums up WAR. Epic fail on many fronts. Other games will grab the good bits and do it better. |
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