Same Old...

Now while Warhammer Online isn't a bad game in terms of Big Rigs is a bad game, however it just shows the poor direction the mmorpg genre is going in which has become stale and really in many ways Warhammer Online has taken a step backwards, not forwards. I mean it still doesn't make me like Warhammer games and it still doesn't make me like mmorpgs.

Now I've been playing mmorpgs since the 90's and I started with Ultima Online and then Everquest which were really the two big main mmorpgs that kicked the genre to the next step. They were big on freedom and customization and making a challenging and no forgiving game to play. I thought the genre would just expand on these and create more freedom and bigger worlds, however instead they've slowly stripped away all this and instead of becoming social online worlds they've very much become just games. I loved the Star Wars Galaxies format before the the NGE and CU where it was a very social online seemless world that forced you to relly on other players and had punishments. Now however and this is the problem with WAR is they've made them too easy and taken out all the social aspects and just made them so solo friendly that you never feel challenged and satisfied when you accomplish something because it's all instant gratification.

I was hoping WAR would be Mythics DAOC2 and expand on alot of the stuff they did with that game, however it became very clear this was more like WOW. The problem is that WOW does nearly everything WAR does, better and it becomes like "I've played WOW and it's much better so why do I need to play a worse version again?" lol. I made my first character and logged in and just thought to myself, wait a second havn't I done this all before? I knew from then on what the game would be like and just thought, Can i really be bothered to do the same old things all over again?

WAR never made me like Warhammer because from the opening scene (which doesn't help that when they're describing the race in the intro video that background sounds drowned the voice out lol) it wasn't in much depth and still left me like "so why should I care to fight the enemy?" You still havn't given me enough hate for them. Then exploring the world all the quests were just your average WOW starter quests of kill 10 of these and come back. Nothing really set the tone and there was no lore to make me care...... I just found it all very bland and generic and wanted it to focus more on setting the scene. Exploring the world still didn't make me care because it all feels very dull and lifeless and theres no major Landmarks which you go "WOAH" to because Mythic havn't done a good job creating an interesting world like Blizzard did. Another problem I have with the world is how it's laid out.

So the world is split up into 3 lands and each land has 2 factions that zone runs parallel to eachother with the RVR zones running through the middle, or at lower tiers it's just a small part at the bottom of the map. It's basically one linear path with quest zones dotted in camps by this path as you progress through. The quests never get any harder because you can solo everything and they all feel like your average mmo quests with nothing kool or special like other mmorpgs out such as EQ2 or WOW. The PVE int he game feels very basic.

Public quests were a main point for the PVE and people are saying how they change everything but I don't see how they do. They seem to replace group instances which is a shame because instances are much more fun to play through and have a kool story to them and are very unique from the world content. Public Quests however are just zones in the world you can walk into and start grinding on mobs with all the other people in the zone. Killing the mobs gives you INF which gets you gear and people just grind INF to get get all the gear they can get and leave, some people even sit AFK in groups to gain it like in AV in WOW for honour. It just seems like Mythic are tyring to take out the social aspect of the game by making everything far too easy because you just walk in there and grind mobs and noone ever talks and because you all share the rewards that everyone tends to go solo. As you can easily look up all the groups in that area and auto join theres noone asking to join a group anymore so even more reason for noone to talk.

Another problem I've found is everyone is too spread out because they have sooo many places to go that alot of public quests and RVR zones are just empty. People tend to go to the Empire and Chaos zones because they're the only ones who have main cities in the game so the only place RVR is meaningful and where you can capture cities, also because they're just the most popular races. So the other 4 races have empty lands because the content is pointless and because their races arn't as kool and it becomes very lonely or takes forever to get into a scenario.

It seems RVR is pointless until you reach level 30+ and get into tier 4 which is where you start fighting for keeps to advance to the capital cities to capture them. Every until then seems to be grinding scenarios because they are much more fun than RVR and much faster to gain RP and levels. Scenarios are basically WOW battlegrounds or as I like to describe them as like joining a FPS multiplayer game because they play like a RPG version of that. Seeing as they are all instanced it feels like they're taking everyone out of the world and making it feel much more of a lonely place which is a shame, it would have been much better if you could only access them in spots in the world, instead of entering them from anywhere.

Once you get to the high level RVR to capture giant keeps and cities however it becomes so repetitive and boring. Seeing as the game never made me care for what I'm fighting for and the lore never caught on and there was never any kool or memorable characters, I just had no motivation to fight for the keeps. It's like a constant back and forth game of Planetside where you capture the same looking keeps over and over again and once you captured one then the enemy seems to take another and it's like a this enless cycle. Theres no risk in losing keep so it doens't make you care if oyu lose it and theres no reward so again you still don't care. It doens't help that the world is sooo boring that you don't care for the lands your'e fighting for. Once you get to a city or the enemy gets to your's it's instanced which is a shame and you don't really care if you lose your city ot take theirs. The cities are sooo boring in the game too because they feel so lifeless and so pre generated, they just don't have the intreresting and handcrfated feel of WOW's. So really in the end RVR just isn't that fun and becomes boring very fast.

None of this helps when the game has such a poor combat system because most the classes feel the same and have the same basic skills that it becomes veyr button mashy. Like theres no different crowd control skills or escape skills for each class as everyone has the same one and everyone has the same flee skill. If you want to use some skills you needed to use others first so you had to go through this skill chain and thats very limiting on the tactics. So I found myself hitting the same few skills over and over again until they died. What I hate is it's all about the class or how many you fight which depends on how you win. Some classes just can't beat others and it doesn't matter how skilled you are because you'll never beat 2 vs 1 like you can on WOW. It's just lacking depth and I dunno it makes you really appreciate how diverse and fun WOW's combat is.

Another problem I had linked to my fun of combat was I couldn't find a class I liked. There's 20 odd classes and yet alot of them feel the same and I'm just left thinking what if they merged 4 of these classes together to make one super fun class instead of watering down one class into 4 bland ones... Quality over quantity like. It doesn't help that classes are restricted to race and sometimes gender so if theres a real kool class but you think the race looks ghey or you don't want to cross gender game, then you ownt play it and you're restricted to boring classes you don't like. I'd rather have 9 unique and fun classes which are all different from eachother and all have fun spells, than 20 odd boring ones.

Onto crafting which I didn't do much but it's not in depth at all and really boring and shallow. It serves no purpose in the game because really you don't need anything you crafted so none of it is useful and everything you loot, you can get so easily and it's much much better. So I don't even understand why they added it into the game because people who like to craft have much better games out there.

I found the customization to be piss poor too because from mmorpgs in 2003 like SWG where you could customize every little bit of your character and the great customization in AoC to something where all you have to choose form is a beard, hair and a face.......... pretty poor and everyone looks the same. I mean this is 2008 and I expected more to offer than that, it's such a shame because I can't feel unique. The armour in WAR is so easy to get that everyone looks the same and it doesn't help theres only 1 high end PVP gear for each class so wooo The Clone Wars.

The graphics of WAR are really poor too from the horrible combat animations to the poor spell effects which make combat that much more boring. How the game lacks blood and in it's place puts bright colourful effects even though it's Warhammer and should have blood and guts instead. The textures are horrible and the viewing distance is horrible......... It just feels like a generic WOW and really isn't interesting and doesn't look nice. The sound of the game aswel is subpar with ambient music missing from the game and what's in it is pretty poor anyways like one guy made it on his computer.

So yeah WAR is a very lacking mmorpg that feels very dated and based on a stale format that people are just getting bored of. I've played WOW (and it's much better) so I don't need to play another one. Sure it builds on the flawed PVP of WOW but all they've done is replaced one flawed system with another. The game is too easy and too boring and offers no depth or complexity or customiztion, the world is set out like a series of game levels, rather than a online world.

I know I don't have a good word to say about it but overall it's not a bad game as in broken, just as a veteran of the genre I find it to be very lacking and very boring. I mean if you're not looking for a mmorpg or never played a mmorpg before then I spose it's a game you might like but if you've come from WOW or anytoher mmorpg then you'll probably feel like how I do.

Going through them early quests it's like "oh I can't be bothered to do this all over again" lol.

Edit:

I was in a rush to finish this because I had to go out at the time but I want to add another point. This is the fact that RVR is also broke due to side balanced and how noone wants to go Order and they seem underpowered and just not as kool or fun to play as destruction. This issue is making WAR very unplayable for the Order side. It doens't help that theres far tooo many servers and the population is so spread out over them all and alot of them are low/medium when a game at launch should be all full.