Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning First Impressions
Every few years, a massively multiplayer online game hits the marketplace with an enormous splash, creating waves for the rest of the industry. This year, gamers have been lucky enough to have two monstrous games hit in the same summer: Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. While Age of Conan has seen a variety of issues since its launch, it's now WAR's turn in the spotlight. Ten Ton Hammer's Cody "Micajah" Bye jots down his first impressions of this immense title and tries to give gamers his reasons why he grew to really enjoy his WAR experiences.
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Although Ultima Online had plenty of competitive elements and Dark Age of Camelot was built on this sort of competitive gameplay, neither of those games had truly captured the sort of hectic, instant gratification type of competitive gaming that so many players enjoy in games like Halo and Madden NFL Football. Realm versus realm warfare was different, and it instantly took my dark, gloomy thoughts about Warhammer Online and turned them on their ear. The game was built for competition, and the players could feel it as soon as they jumped into their first scenario.
I gotta say when I read the first few paragraphs about "Some games come out with all guns cocked and loaded" and then you swung it the other way I was a little shocked, because to me, one of the best things about WAR is there are 40 solid levels of play, as opposed to say... WoW at launch was 59 tutorial levels and one level of solid play.
Reading on however I realised what you really meant and I'd have to agree.
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Honestly - I wasn't overly thrilled with WAR when I first sat down. But - after some solid play time - it grew on me and continues to grow on me. In MMOGs, the first few hours are CRUCIAL to any game, and I must say that WAR really hit it off at about the 45 minute mark - right when I hit the RvR scenario.
After reaching 30 on one char, 22 on another, 18 on a third and 5 on my new one.... The game holds less appeal to me than AoC. Granted I was not really looking forward to WAR as I have played in both closed and open beta, but I did hope that they would've fixed some of the most glaring issues in time for launch.
The first time you go through it it's fantastic, even with the impossibly large number of bugs, some extremely frustrating (server positioning lag, animation lag, various skills not working as advertised, broken quests).
Scenarios are enjoyable... from 1-20. The T3 Scenarios have some of the worst designs I have seen in any MMO when it comes to team PvP content - Example: Tor Anroc (or something like that) is a Scenario where in 95% of the cases the team that gets the Bauble (call it a flag) first wins. It receives renown over time and extra renown every time it kills something. The easy and usual way is for everyone to sprint to the Bauble, someone grabs it and runs back to the base. At that point the oposing team must fight against a formidable defense, as the carrier is kept healed (impossible to kill if he is anything but a cloth wearer) and any casualties quickly come back to the fight from the spawnpoint 30 feet away. When that happens, even if the other team plays brilliantly, the game is already lost. Most other T3 Scenarios follow the same idea, making me wonder what genius designed them.
PvE is not as enjoyable as in other games. WoW and AoC (yes, even the stunted content in AoC) blow the PvE of WAR out of the water. This might be fine if you could level off PvP alone, but realistically you can't. You can gain a few levels quickly early on, but after level 12-14 PvP provides meager rewards in terms of experience. You also cannot raise your Renown Rank higher than your normal Rank until you are 40, and since early on you will gain RR faster than normal Ranks (actually the trend carries on to 30, probably later too), you end up fighting Scenarios or RvR for no reward other than measly experience that can be acquired far easier from PvE. Not to mention that you will not be able to wear Renown Rewards right away, especially at later levels. For example my level 22 DoK is RR 17, but I cannot use items that require RR 17 until level 24-25. Seems like wasted time for me.
PQs are a nice concept, and when you manage to find a decent group they work relatively well. How contribution is calculated is actually pretty chaotic or cryptic, since I have had times when I joined a group that was halfway through stage 1, went afk a few minutes, came back for the boss, healed/killed it, and got top contribution even though in terms of damage or healing I had done nothing. There are reports of other characters standing still, not moving, not healing, not tanking for entire PQs and still managing to get top contribution. The fact that there isn't a level limit on PQs screws lowbies too. On my level 5 Magus I had the pleasure of watching 1 Marauder level 4 and 1 Sorc level 26 plow through the PQ I was trying to do with a group. They got top contribution 5 times in a row while we got no xp, no inf and no loot at the end. This is happening extremely often on all servers, especially since PQs are a good source of Apothecary Vials.
Last but not least (still on PQs), they vary so wildly in difficulty, fun and loot that most of the time you will only find 1 PQ/chapter or even series of chapters that is run by more than 1 person. I have spent 3 hours in Avelorn at prime time on a full server trying to complete a few C10 PQs. The only one I could get a group for was a C12 one which everyone was farming. There were literally 15 people there, while every other PQ in the zone was deserted. It wasn't that the loot was good, in fact it was subpar, but the PQ was so easy it was preferable to even C10 PQs. This is a trend I started to see around level 12-15 on all my chars, and it continues all the way to 30 and possibly 40. There is no incentive to do a harder PQ, except the chance to fail more often. They should either up the inf/item rewards or reduce the difficulty.
And finally there is the class imbalance in PvE. On my DoK I level extremely fast. I do huge damage in PvE (not as much as my Sorc but around 70%), I am nearly immortal (heals, 50-60% armor, 3.5k hp) and I can easily take Champion monsters even 2 levels above me. My SH, rank 18, cannot kill a Champ 2 levels under him. His killing speed, with the best items available, is around 30% that of the DoK and 20% that of the Sorc. My friend plays a Zealot, the "healbot" class. We started our chars (DoK for me and Zealot for him) at the same time. I play roughly 5-6 hours a day, he plays 8-10. He is 20 now and struggling. It takes him at least double the amount of time to kill an equal con target than my DoK. Sure he can join groups and heal for xp, but groups don't grow on trees. Usually he joins a PQ group, the PQ ends, he is out on the street struggling again. In PvP he gains more Renown then me, but much less xp. In T2 Scenarios, when I was 18 and he was 17, I was getting 9-11k xp and 700-1000 Renown, he was getting 7-8k xp and 800-1100 Renown. Since he doesn't do any damage, he does not gain bonus xp when players are killed, just the basic amount. He can heal his ass off, he still gets much, much less than me/scenario. In T3 the difference is even bigger.
I'm sure some of the issues will eventually get fixed, but so far the game seems quite lackluster to me. Except for the occasional RvR brawl, there is nothing that stands out as "well done". Graphics are ancient, the engine is poor, memory leaks abound, servers lag, mechanics are cryptic in most cases, crafting in underwhelming and classes are not as different as they look. From 20 classes you maybe have 4 unique ones (Chosen, SH - SW, WL). The rest are mirror images of their counterparts, reasonably reducing the number of true classes to 10-12. Items are standard (in graphics) across entire tiers. A level 11 sword looks the same as a level 19 sword. Itemization past 30 is a joke, with useless stats distributed on class restricted gear (int for Witch Elves etc).
The game is as incomplete as AoC was at launch. It just takes a while longer to notice, as the leveling and in general PvE/PvP speed is much slower. While AoC had the combat system (still the best I have seen in any recent MMO) and graphics, WAR has the RvR and PvP focus. The only problem is that if you leave something up to players (as RvR and PvP), you can rest assured that on some servers it will not work out. At all. Already there are many servers where one side dominates another (usually Destruction), and it is human nature to pack up and leave if it does not enjoy itself. I am pretty sure that in 2-3 months many a server will be a ghost town, while some lucky few will end up with long queues or overpopulation simply because they will have some semblance of balance.
As with AoC and its Tortage fever, we are seeing the early reviews that discuss basically nothing but the early levels. Few can argue that the first time one went through Tortage they were not impressed, but the game is downhill from there. The same is with WAR. They are banking on slower leveling speed to give them some time to flesh out the endgame, which is at the moment incomplete. Most reviews that I have read of WAR never really went past level 10-12, and up to 20 the game works fine.
The only problem is that if you leave something up to players (as RvR and PvP), you can rest assured that on some servers it will not work out.
I see this as the biggest overall challenge that WAR is going to have to overcome if Mythic hope to maintain a larger number of subscribers. In some ways it distinctly reminds me of what I saw as the biggest flaw in LotRO.
At launch, LotRO had plenty of players to fill out groups for the main storyline quests at the lower levels. A few months later though, that population had thinned out by a fairly large degree, leaving anyone starting the game at that point in the unfortunate position of wanting to experience those quests but not having any other players around to do so. All that was left was running 'kill 10 rats' quests, and hoping you could come back to the main story later on.
With WAR, nearly every single aspect is build on that same, flawed notion. To truly experience the potential of the game, there simply has to be other players online, in the same areas and interested in doing the same things as you. PQs, scenarios, open world RvR objectives and keeps, and even crafting all fall into this category. What happens when the majority of a server's population is all in T4 and taking cities, and new players launch the game for the first time? Will they even get to experience any of the things I'd listed?
After my server of choice ended up being one of the group that got cloned, I was one of the few who decided to play on the clone server rather than deal with the queue times. At one of the later T1 PQs, there was a group of 3 of us attempting to complete it. I think we failed stage 2 4 times in a row before ultimately giving up. The whole time we were also queued for a scenario which never came up either.
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Taking all of that into account, I'm glad that it was something you did touch on in your preview Cody. WAR is awesome when you're wrapped up in the middle of the war, but loses a lot of it's luster if you ever find yourself forced to focus on little more than questing from hub to hub due to the core design of the gameplay requiring lots of other players in the area to experience things.
Since it sounds like you've done a bit of server hopping already, I would definitely suggest playing the game on both a high and low population server while considering your full review to see how well the game holds up when it's difficult to complete even simple objectives. Oh, and definitely sit down with a stack of 20 seeds and experience Cultivating in all of it's glory.
At any rate, an excellent article as always! I'm glad you continue to take a much more analytical approach to impression / preview / review pieces than what you'll see at a lot of other sites. While I do think there's some fantastic moments in WAR, I'm a bit surprised to check Metacritic and see some 100s listed. Then again, maybe this is just the Year of the Perfect Review Score, as was also the case with many sites for GTA IV - It's better than the Godfather! Honest!
I'm thinking people got too caught up in their own hype with these reviews. I read most of them and I'm thinking "Am I playing the same game?"
On the other hand I have 6+ months of advance knowledge on the game so have had plenty of time to leave behind most of the hype and hopes and see the game as it really is. Good but not great.
It'll prolly be the same as with AoC. Game comes out, everyone is ecstatic, everything is new, shiny and awesome. You do not notice the grime, the rust and the bugs underneath all the glitter until you can actually take the time to look. That won't happen for at least another few weeks to a month, but after that the flaws will become apparent.
I want this game to succeed, but I will not turn a blind eye to its glaring issues and be persuaded by calls of "it's all going to be well, you'll see". Experience has taught me that the sooner people notice the flaws, the louder they can clamor for them to be fixed.
Another great job, Cody. Thanks for being objective and sticking to your first impressions.
I, too, played WAR since last autumn and up front, I say that Warhammer Online is an outstanding, successful MMO.
However, I didn't purchase the retail box/start a game subscription.
Two main reasons, both of which Cody touched on in his article here and both were also mentioned in posts above: PvE leaves a lot to be desired and the population issues.
Time will tell, but right now, I'm thinking I'll sooner go back to Age of Conan than play Warhammer Online in retail.
Honestly - I wasn't overly thrilled with WAR when I first sat down. But - after some solid play time - it grew on me and continues to grow on me. In MMOGs, the first few hours are CRUCIAL to any game, and I must say that WAR really hit it off at about the 45 minute mark - right when I hit the RvR scenario.
I know exactly where you're coming from. I got into the beta and was like...'meh' and began to feel like I might have made a mistake doing the pre order. But once I started looking 'under the hood' so to speak and got involved in the RvR and the Scenarios and seeing that 'control bar' up top...I was starting to get that feel that there was a WAR going on! And that made all the difference.
BTW, nice article!
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I don't know why everyone gets all upset about there not being enough people at the pq's.
U get more influence points when u do it solo anyway, and you only need to complete it, IF u want the special loot bag at the end.
The real rewards are at the rally master and you just have to fill the bar to get the reward, not complete the whole Public Quest.
I just go around doin the first parts solo (sometimes 2nd part too), fillin my influence bar up fast and gettin the loot.
Each realm's rally master offers different loot, so you can get a full set of good gear by just doin the 1st parts of the pq's in each realm, plus you level faster because you are fighting mobs that are 1 or 2 levels higher than you so kill exp is better.
I'm rank 19 rr15 and all my gear is level 16 to level 19 and green or blue, and i got most of it from doin pq's solo (by choice). (figured this out around rank14)
If you got enuf peeps and wanna do it for fun go ahead and finish the pq, but its really not a big deal if you cant. Maybe in a year from now if your still playin, there will still be new things to experience when u roll a new toon.
The only thing i dont like about the game is that the monster pathing gets messed up too often and the direction that they are facing is messed up and makes position attacks error.
If they fix that i'll be playin this game for a few years like i did DAoC. if they cant fix it, i'll be out after 3 months.
This game is about the pvp, pve is just a way of getting better equiped for pvp. i've done most of my leveling in the rvr(pvp) scenarios, you only really need pve for the loot, money, and crafting supplies. the only thing i grind is the influence points for gear, and that is fastest when done solo.
Plus everyone else is in the same boat, nice to have a level playing field in a pvp mmo, not a bunch of twinked out retards one shotting everything w/ their gold for cash crap. How good you do actually reflects on your skill, not how much time and money you have.
When the masses are home from the daily grind of working and making a living the chances of getting into rvr scenarios is high. So thats weekday nights and weekends for enjoying the tru purpose of the game WAAAARRRGGHH !!!! The rest of the time can be spent grinding out influence points for the rally master rewards.
If you want to pve, play AoC or LoTRO, great pve games.
If you want to battle other people on a level playing field everyday, go for WAR.
The problem is this is an MMO, you play it with other people. If the only time you are grouped is when you PvP, then 70% of the time online is wasted. PQs are suposed to be the alternative to dungeons/raids, of which WAR has precious few and in general far poorer than the alternative games.
Like it or not, PvE forms 80% of the leveling time in WAR and will still form 40-70% of the time after 40. You need Apothecary supplies, gold, Talisman items etc.
The PQ problem is acute, especially on lower pop servers where even players leveling now have problems getting groups. In 5-6 months many a player will not be able to get a group for PQ or most PvE encounters from 1 to 35-40.
P.S.
PQs are an excellent (or usually the best) source for items, not for the Inf ones, but for the final loot. There are Greens, Blues and Epics and after 30 they are one of the only options of PvE gear.
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning First Impressions
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