Warhammer Online Review

[Forbez 0]

Having never been a fan of the whole ?warhammer scene? I wasn?t sure what to expect from warhammer online, also known as WAR. I still had images of spotty faced teenagers rolling dice after dice, in a darkened room, with friends just like them, moving small painted figurine armies, pretending to be a high ruler of the elves and other such role playing, but I digress. None the less, I decided to ring my friends and tell them I wouldn?t be emerging from my bedroom for a few days, this being usual protocol when starting a new mmorpg (massively multiplayer online role playing game), or so I heard from other gamers. So I logged in to my account and made a character. I was drawn to the dark elves of destruction and chose the class called disciple of khaine, which looked like a typical make-up-wearing goth. Within the character selection process there is a lot of choice, there are 2 alliances (realms) and 6 factions to choose from with over 20 classes. Unfortunately, only 10 of these classes differ as they are mirrored over the two alliances, but if it?s any conciliation you can be either male or female, unless you are a green skin, and can change your characters appearance. Entering the world of WAR, I quickly noticed the cartoon like graphics, and with that, the game World of Warcraft sprang to mind. However, I was quickly reassured by every other WAR player on the server that this was nothing like WoW, in the same way that the crusader knights reminded people Islam was nothing like Christianity. I completed a few quests to level and got new skills when I decided to try out the ?innovative PvP system? called the scenario , this is when I realized that it doesn?t matter how great a game is, it matters more who plays it. The PvP was great fun but due to the highly imbalance in the number of people playing certain class types, it resulted in a lot of vexatious whining when people died from not being healed. Another feature offered by Warhammer was the player quest, which was basically an open raid where any player could join in at any point and help complete the objective and at the end be in the dice roll to receive a reward. Depending on how much you helped complete the objectives you would get a boost to your roll to stop people joining towards the end just to claim the rewards. During these PQs, when you complete or partially complete objectives, you obtain influence which can be used to buy things from certain vendors. However this system in itself has its problems, when you want to complete a certain chapter in the PQ you need other players to help you as they are impossible to solo, leaving you waiting for other people to show up to your PQ which can be a very long time. Also, completing a PQ at low level was pointless due to levelling quickly of scenarios rendering the equipment, you spent time obtaining, obsolete. The game, whilst still being relatively new, has a few problems. The servers have a queuing system to stop them being flooded, this means on an over populated server you could be waiting over half an hour to join. This left me overly frustrated after being disconnected from the server after 5 minutes of game play and starting the waiting process all over again. But maybe some people find it fun to have to predict half an hour before when they will want to play WAR so to avoid the queue, I can safely say I am not one of them. Another problem in WAR was the imbalance of people wanting to play Destruction rather than order. A lot more people wanted to play destruction as the developers made the mistake of giving it all of the aesthetic features and making Order from what was left over. This meant that if you were playing Order, you were constantly outnumbered in open RvR (realm versus realm pvp) and, if you were playing Destruction, the scenario queues took a lot longer due to the lack of order to fight. But I have the feeling that after a while this problem might be fixed due to people being sick of waiting for the scenario or server queues, or just wanting a bit of a challenge. Overall this game could have been great but how the developers went about favouring one alliance made the game imbalanced and pretentious. It has a certain appeal and for a while brought some fun and joy but showed no real longevity and so I always felt like putting any effort into the game was a waste of time. I found my experience with this game a little mixed and after enjoying classes for a short while I felt that maybe I would enjoy a different class a lot more and that I was missing out. But after every class change the game showed to be very repetitive and so I started to resent playing, seeing it more like a chore than fun. What I really can?t understand is what all the hype with this game was about, people got frustrated as the game had delay after delay and disappointed when the game they had been waiting so long to play and it hadn?t played up to their expectations. I think the worst problem about the game is the audience it attracted, teenaged gamers who ran around blurting out ?I r pr0 at PvP? like they had self-gratification tourettes syndrome.

[onscreen 0]

With scenarios in the game, open pvp is no longer touched by players. All they matter is the keep and BOs and taking turns to capture it. As new generation players venturing into MMOs, the old school MMO gaming is no longer exist in the game. The community is only about being leet or else...

[deadplayer 0]

WAR is said to be WoW killer.

[onscreen 0]

WAR is said to be WoW killer.

WAR isnt developed to be a WoW killer and it never be.