Warhammer Online: Impressions, Part 3

With the initial launch days behind us, and people well on their way to maxed out characters (I’m sure some did that days ago), it’s worthwhile to ponder some of the negatives. Not to be negative for negativity’s sake, but you have to take the good with the bad. Click on…

First and foremost, I find WAR to be really really really sensitive to any network latency. If you’ve got something downloading in the background or something eating up your network resources somehow, you’ll really notice it with this game. Ability progress bars will start to empty with the effects lagging behind by seconds, enemies will be able to hit you while standing behind you, etc. I know lag is an issue with all MMOs, but even when any steady network use is happening this game can lose its mind, to your detriment.

There’s the odd glitch I’ve seen where I’ll chuck my axe at something to pull it, and the axe throw progress bar will sit at 100%. If I walk up to the enemy and start attacking it won’t react, sometimes for minutes. Giving up, I’ll wander off and then well away from that NPC, I’ll suddenly start taking damage from the invisible beast, eventually dying no matter how far I run.

I’m a Marauder, so my arm changes shape. For some reason after I dye my armor, any armor, I end up with two normal arms even though my arm is insisting it’s been morphed to a different shape. It’s just a visual glitch of course, but a strange one. Not sure if other classes have similar issues with stance changes and such.

The End User License Agreement. All games have them, all games have you agree to it in some way shape or form before you can play. WAR makes you do this. Every. Time. You. Play. Please Mythic, end that. I agreed, I clicked the button. I don’t need to re-agree every time I launch the game.

Gold sellers, yeah, most games have some variant of this. I’ve had tons of gold seller /tells since launch, it’s just ridiculous. I will say though that Mythic’s got a very aggressive stance on gold farming, and it’s hilarious when they ban one from the game. You’ll see the announcement on the screen in a popup window, in a RP form. Clever, not too obtrusive, and something everyone can chuckle at. Well, except for the farmers.

My first character was a High Elf, and to be honest I found their starter area to be rather boring. Visually it was extremely plain, and from what I’ve seen it just seems overall that the Destruction side got a lot more attention. Or maybe being bad is just a more visually compelling concept. 🙂

For the most part there’s not a lot to gripe about with Warhammer.  Yet?  The game’s still new, and still going through growing pains.  I wasn’t hit with the issues of folks all being on the really popular servers which got cloned to alleviate lag, I know that would suck having to be forced to play on servers your friends weren’t on.  So far the game’s client is pretty stable, though it eats 1.2 gigs of RAM on my system.  The players are still settling in and discovering things together, which is nice to see.

Mythic’s not a bunch of noobs to the genre, and that’s shown with the Warhammer launch.  It’s disappointing when you hear that whole cities and classes aren’t there, but it’s nice to know they’ll be adding that content back in for free later.  So far I’m enjoying Warhammer a lot, and hope that people give this a try and aren’t scared off by the prospect of the RvR component.

That ends my initial impressions of the game for now, but I’m sure I’ll be blogging every so often with updates from the front lines.  Hope to see you out there!