• Official Site: Warhammer Online
• Developer: Mythic Entertainment
• Publisher: EA Games

Warhammer’s Preview Weekend has ended as of 6am PST today, bringing to a close one of the best group and mass PvP gaming experiences since Ultima Online over 10 years ago.

What Mythic has brought to the table with Warhammer Online is a true RvR oriented game that delivers on it’s promises unlike pretenders to the throne, and 800lb gorilla’s that feel eSport PvP = PvP.

It’s no understatement to say that many of the MMO PvP community have felt disenfranchised from their preferred gameplay for years.

With no real say or representation many that enjoy PvP have been forced into PvE grinds, Raiding, or other game mechanics in order to make the best out of their given MMO’s PvP system. WAR has instead turned this upside down, you’re no longer forced to chase a never ending PvE carrot in your race to level and gear for PvP. Simply PvP or PvE in any manner that you find enjoyable gaining levels and equipment regardless.

Throughout the preview weekend I experienced numerous PvE quest lines, scripted Public Quests, Scenario’s with their mini-instanced PvP zones between teams of Order and Destruction battling over objectives, and large scale RvR fights in the Empire region with over 50 Destruction players pushing to our very gates as the outnumbered Order side held solid with combined ranged and siege weapon fire.

The servers and game client performed admirably given the 1500-2000 players per server with little if any noticeable lag. Occasionally a few crashes to desktop were experienced such as the first time I used the flight master, during several zone restarts, and about once per 10 hours of non-stop play. Overall WAR ranks up as one of the most stable pre-launch test events I’ve experienced.

There was an issue due to a recent patch for the Preview Weekend that messed up monster pathing, combined with lag it also affected pet classes like the White Lion severely. As beta testers already knew, the beta code had been working just fine over the last 2 months up until the recent update. Mark Jacob’s has confirmed and addressed this in a post to the IGN forums.

Never was there a feeling of nothing to do, or a feeling of I must do [x] to progress. Through normal adventuring starting with the very first quest I found myself always funnelled into a variety of gameplay, never lacking fun, and always being rewarded with experience, loot, and equipment for every activity I did.

Public quests were a nice change of pace, playing like mini public raids often with over 20 players at launch running wildly killing everything in sight or completing objectives in order to advance to the next stage. They’re very fun and likely to become a standard for many upcoming MMO’s.

As populations out-level or thin out like they do on older MMO servers that have been around for years, one future issue to watch out for on public quests will be the inability for single or small groups of players to ever finish the final third stage in order to get the full rewards due to boss stage difficulty. If Mythic could make public quests a little more dynamic to scale with the number of players participating it could go a long way to making this a more viable gameplay feature for years to come. Otherwise it’s likely to become just as abandoned and lifeless as the level 30-60 group dungeon quests in World of Warcraft.

The PvE quests were all pretty simple, the more difficult ones only being so because of how well the objective was hidden in the area marked out on the map. My only complaint here being quests requiring a quest object, which are hidden away in section of your inventory tabs used specifically to hold quest items. These items aren’t automatically used when clicking on quest objectives. As a new player, even an experienced MMO gamer, it just wasn’t obvious or intuitive enough at the beginning.

As a disclaimer PvE content isn’t WAR’s strength, it serves it’s purpose to drive you through the lore and story which most skip as quickly as they can click the accept button on the quest dialog. But it does keep you progressing and moving around experiencing everything WAR has to offer, and provides a good alternative for those who still gravitate to PvE but still love the RvR experience when they feel like it.

If you’re simply looking for a new or better WoW in this area, you’d be better served to hold out and wait for Wrath of the Lich King, this isn’t it – nor was it meant to be.

Exploring the world at times could be amazing, Mythic really did capture much of that grand feeling one gets as they come across tower and spires that seem to rise forever into the sky, or various encounters with massive giants or creatures that loom several stories over your character.

Character generation was basic with only the expected and standard customizations. I felt few of the face textures were of good quality, many were disappointing, but I’ve found this all too often in every MMO I’ve played. The customization screen also had a rendering bug where many of the face selections were slightly distorted, yet if finished and accepted the character they would render and look much better at the final character selection screen. It’s a small issue, but one that I hope can be addressed before release, it’s frustrating trying to find that perfect look and not have it match up to the actual in-game texture as you preview it.

For those that are alt-a-holics, you can rejoice as once again you’re gifted with 10 character slots per server if Mythic decides to carry that number on through to the games release.

One problem I did have was the early character levels for the majority of classes. WAR has a serious problem with a lot of the classes in that they only start with with two abilities, such as an attack and a heal or ranged attack. Compound that with starting level 1 hybrid classes that do piddly damage and you’ll find yourself just smashing a single action button repeatedly till you nod off asleep or your finger ends up a bloody nub.

Due to how many classes mirrored the other side I found that problem mainly with the hybrid DPS, hybrid healers classes such as the Chosen, Disciple of Khaine, Archmage, and Warrior Priest.

I can’t help but to fault Mythic for not making the majority of the classes more fun and interesting at the start. While it may only take a day or two of solid playing to reach rank 10 before you really got a feel for whether you liked the class or it felt powerful or unique enough to continue playing. I found myself quickly dismissing and abandoning classes within 4-5 levels if they didn’t improve and returning to my flashier and more engaging DPS classes. I just don’t think too many players will have the patience to suffer through those rough starts making multiple classes as they try to find the perfect one.

Originally I had planned on playing Destruction for a change of pace after several years of playing Alliance in WoW and regretting it. As best laid plans go after trying every class in the game I once again found myself leaning more and more towards playing Order due to what I felt was better designed classes.

Some like the Bright Wizard were nothing more than a copy of the Sorceress with fire spells, It just felt more interesting and powerful due to impressive fireballs and AoE effects. The spell backlash feature also took some getting used to as I routinely wounded or killed myself as I forgot to keep tabs on it during my initial ranks.

Others like the Shadow Warrior were very straight forward and played much like a Hunter or Ranger from other games with standard bow attacks. I found this to be an excellent class overall, and extremely efficient in PvP and RvR allowing me to rack up over 40 kills in many skirmishes or scenario’s before I was eventually run down.

The Witch Elf was also a blast to play, her mirror class the Witch Hunter also played nearly identically. Combat was fast and furious and extremely gratifying with lots of damage being dished out. Stealth was also well done with it’s one minute timer making it a tactical option, not a perfect invisibility option.

While I did play most classes up to rank 8-10, for the sake of brevity I’ll save any full impressions of those for a later article.

Is Warhammer Online perfect? No. They have a number of issues and improvements to work on.

Animations:

Character and Spell Animations are lackluster, along with a number of graphical artifacts and bugs. It’s not uncommon to see your character “stuck” in combat mode, or fire off a spell and see nothing, or worse yet – fire off a spell and see a pathetic swirl of magic spring forth. Leftover spell effects were also a common sight seemingly stuck on the battlefield like rifts in space. I also felt some of the racial movements and animations seemed too jerky and stiff.

For a MMO produced in 2008, unpolished details like this really stand out and can seriously cause potential players to dismiss the game based on this issue alone.

Combat Responsiveness:

Melee classes really need help in this department, as their attacks and general feel of fighting is definitely wanting at this point. Many times it’s hard to tell when your attack has fired, hit, or finished and the pacing still feel somewhat off.

Realm Imbalance:

As you’ve heard many forums and blogs, the realm imbalances over the weekend between Order and Destruction were true, and it could be pretty ugly at times with what felt like a 2:1 ratio of Destruction pushing Order all the way back to their starting point. Realistically the figure was probably 20-30% more, but the sheer mass of Chaos players in the busy RvR spots was undeniable. If it wasn’t for the incredible siege equipment located at the camp entrances there’s no way Order could have held off those assaults.

Despite the negative side of not being able to break out more than a hundred feet of our base, my group which was manning one of the siege cannons was constantly able to slaughter swathes of Destruction players who were foolish enough to enter our multi-barreled cannon’s range. This had me running back to the RvR quest giver within seconds of returning to the battle from my previous RvR quest turn in to receive my 1000xp reward for killing 5 enemies. It was almost comical how quick it could get, but given the situation and the way the greenskins threw themselves at our side, I wasn’t about to complain about the free levels and realm rank gains.

It has been rumored that Mythic will implement an XP bonus for the outnumbered side, but given my experience in other PvP style MMO’s like Planetside that had the same problem, that simply won’t be enough.

The solution I’d like to see is a combination, of a health and XP bonus in PvE areas, and a health and damage bonus in PvP/RvR areas for the outnumbered side (Or a health and XP bonus).

Adding only a XP bonus offers no help at all to players in the battles themselves, and does absolutely nothing at the end game where the focus is fighting, not leveling. There needs to be a bonus strong enough to shift players into wanting to help the other side, even if that means still being outnumbered at times.

Conclusion

What Mythic is offering is a niche game for a set of PvP oriented gamers who really haven’t truly been represented in the MMO market for a long time. They’re not trying to re-invent the wheel here, nor are they trying to compete or beat other established MMO’s as many would like them to, or wrongly fault them for. This isn’t a revolutionary game, it’s an evolutionary one.

WAR isn’t all that pretty, it’s still rough around the edges, but damn is it fun to play. I’d be seriously disappointed with any PvP’er that didn’t try this game, yet I can’t fault those that don’t take to the lackluster early impressions with many of the classes.

Give WAR a chance, try a few different classes up to rank 10, bash lots of stunties or greenskins, then decide.

See you at launch!

Have any specific questions on game features, mechanics, or classes? Just leave a comment.