Showing posts with label warhammer online. Show all posts

Showing posts with label warhammer online. Show all posts

Warhammer Online - Bottomline

on Friday, 5 December 2008
WAR is fun to many of its players, yet WAR is also boring to quite a few. Some guesses about what kind of players who may not like WAR:
  • Players who don't like playing alone. Certain servers or periods of time have less players around, so for a large part of the PvE experience, you'll might be doing it alone. This applies to players who don't like to join strangers as well. The party search, public quests, scenarios, etc. are designed to make it easy to group with strangers. Even if you're in a guild, play times are different; sooner or later you'll run out of guildies of the same level to play together (when you're still far from max level 40). If you can't bear to level alone and prefer to only play with people you know, especially if you don't enjoy discovering and reading lore or hunting for Tome of Knowledge unlocks, you definitely won't like this game.
  • Players who get frustrated by randomness. In Open RvR or scenarios, the warband composition on both sides are entirely random. Due to the careers not being played equally, you'll sometimes find yourself in a situation where there's a distinct lack of healers or tanks. If you don't like losing because you're in an unbalanced or disorganized group, then you might not like WAR's style of PvP. Also, the measure of contributions for public quests and keep sieges appears, for now, to be quite random as well. If you go in expecting an appropriate reward for your contributions, you're just gonna disappoint yourself. Play for the sake of playing, and not for better loot and you'll do fine.
  • Players who love non-combat skills. In many MMOs, like World of Warcraft, there's a separate set of skills and an "economy" for training "crafting" skills and for acquiring materials for those skills. In WAR, the crafting skills are very simplistic and somewhat unpolished. There's really no depth to it. Don't expect any sophistication with crafting and you'll be happy.
  • Players who don't want to pay for an unfinished game. As of right now, even with version 1.0.6 and, I suspect, 1.1, this game is far from polished. Graphics clipping, graphical delays, activation delays, crashes to desktop, login timeout issues, scenario queueing issues, population balance issues, promised content, etc. are significant negatives. The key thing to bear in mind is that MMOs are always under development; just that some are released with more polish. Even World of Warcraft had their own issues when it was released. If you're very picky about such things as bugs and minor glitches, you might want to wait a little. The more people who decide to wait though, may indirectly affect how well the game gets polished.
  • Players who rush to the end-game. Personally, I think I play at a moderate pace. Not too fast and not too slow. Just enjoying it as it comes and trying to see and unlock everything there is in one place before moving on. Some players simply love rushing through the game, as if not levelling up at least once per play session is a blasphemy. For these people, they'll probably run out of things to do rather quickly. Because for them, it's all about maxing levels and getting loot. These "hardcore" or "powergamers" tend to get bored the earliest. I'm not there yet (halfway at level 21 on my main character), but I've been reading complaints from level 40s that there's not much left for them to do. Don't agree with their complaints but then again, I can't relate to their play style, so this is certainly something to consider.
Anything else? I donno. If you don't fall into any of the above, I think you'll love the game... if you like RPGs, online games, and can bear the subscription cost :P personally, you won't really feel the pinch. Just skip one expensive meal a month and you'll be fine, well.. if you're in the working class that is. Even if you do fall into one of the above groups, try it, you might still like it. I guarantee it'll at least be a distraction for at least a few months as you level up. See in the game!

WAAAGH!!!

More RvR Keep Sieges:

Warhammer Online

on Wednesday, 3 December 2008
The latest patch of 1.0.6 to Warhammer Online is massive, containing balance fixes, bug fixes, general improvements, as well as the addition of two new classes: the Knight of the Blazing Sun and the Black Guard, which were previously cut from release due to time constraints.

So far, I've been enjoying the game tremendously (yea, the subscription fee is a pain, but bearable). My man character is a Witch Hunter. While Guild Wars still holds a special spot for me, this is definitely something that will tide me over until Guild Wars 2 comes out (at least, that's the plan, who knows, I'm already getting addicted, heh).

What I love about it is that the PvE side is not boring (especially if you love really rich background stories and lore). What's even better is when you get to RvR (Realm versus Realm). Search for videos on Youtube, there's already an incredibly large number.

What I really really miss from Guild Wars (and where EA Mythic can improve) is instantaneous map travel, shared character storage, and more beautiful graphics. Cutting down travel time, better item sharing between characters of the same account, and better art will definitely improve an already impressive game.

And for players around the UTC+8 timezone, there are Malaysian guilds (with a smattering of other nationalities) on the Ironclaw server. For Order, check out Vosian (me in this guild). For Destruction, check out Celestial Order (my Guild Wars guild).

For Warhammer resources, check out WarDB, TheWarWiki, HammerWiki, and the Warhammer portal on GamePressure.

Trailer 1:


Trailer 2:


Tier 4 Keep Siege RvR: