Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The First Week

According to Mythic’s art department, that outfit you see on the left is a “gown.” I don’t know who they think they’re fooling with that one.

There were only two classes in the game that really appealed to my sense of “I want to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” the Bright Wizard, and Sorceress. After running down the skills and talents for each and finding them to be nearly identical, with only the skill names and damage types changing, it came down to a matter of aesthetics:

Do I want to play a Bright Wizard, and have my character stuck with some sort of bizzare Dragon Ball Z-esque spiked mohawk or Bride of Frankenstein beehive?

Or, would I prefer to run around half-naked, looking like a two-bit whore?

In the end, I decided that sometimes you have to be willing to sacrifice your clothes for DPS.

I’ve been playing my Sorceress for a week now, ever since the Collector’s Edition headstart began last Sunday, in preparation for writing my full review of the game. You can consider this (and any further posts I make before publishing) the pre-view to the re-view.

The game has had a very pleasant launch so far, better I would say even than DAoC’s, which was no slouch to begin with. The servers have been up better than 99% of the time, with only middling lag, and while some of them do have queues, Mythic at least made the effort to clone the worst of them, giving players the opportunity to pick up where they left off with characters, guilds, and achievements intact on a brand new server.

The worst offender I’ve seen, Volkmar, had queues of 1-2 hours last night during primetime.

I’ve also been hearing reports of crashes to desktop, but have only experienced one of them myself so far. Everyone having them regularly seems to be playing the game on an nVidia card, while I use ATI. Perhaps, contrary to the sponsorship banner at the bottom of the official site, nVidia is not the way it’s meant to be played, after all.

The only major problem I’ve had with the game so far is most of my friends have refused to take it up with me, despite my begging, pleading, and threats of great bodily harm if they did not comply. They all seem far more interested in waiting two more months for Wrath of the Lich King to come out…  which I’m sure will no doubt stoke my undeserved reputation over on Warhammer Alliance of being an unabashed WoW fanboy.

So, I’ve mostly been soloing, which, despite Paul Barnette’s statements to the contrary, I haven’t been finding particularly fun. In scenarios you typically need a pocket healer following you around at all times if you want to live for more than 45 seconds–and the pickup groups I’ve been involved in haven’t been real big on healing, in general.

My other primary complaint is that doing the same scenario over and over again gets old after the fifth or sixth run, and to queue for another pairing’s instance you have to physically travel to their zones. Not letting you queue for all three of the tier 1 or 2 scenarios from any tier 1 or 2 zone in the game feels like a glaring oversight on Mythic’s part.

Still, Sorceress seems like a moderately overpowered class, and I reguarly top both the kills and damage charts, which is always gratifying.

Not particularly gratifying is the PvE side of the game, which I engage in while sitting in queues waiting for a scenario to open up (which on my server typically takes from ten to fifteen minutes). The quests are bland, interchangable, and all kind of meld into each other after awhile. Go here, kill this guy, bring me his head. Now go pick up a scroll off the ground and bring it back. Etc., etc.

If there were enough world PvP on my server to support it, I would never touch a PvE quest in the game from levels 1 through cap. For now, I just have to grin and bear it if I want to keep up with the curve.

That’s the gist of my first week in WAR. So far, I’ve found the PvP side of the game to be fast-paced, fun, and exciting, with the PvE side being exactly the opposite–dull, repetitive, the sort of things we’ve all seen before. Not much changed from my third impressions piece prior to launch.

For now I’m going to continue leveling, and I’ll probably sit down and write the first part of my full on review some time after I hit 20. Stay tuned within the next week or two for that.