So… WAR…
So after Jode/Beldri/Fox were going on about WAR all those many months ago i decided to give it a try and see if i was right about it being a WoW copy...
Now before i go any further i have only gotten 2 characters to the tier 2 mark, so i havent done any high end stuff. I also still dont know what im doing with some crafting things. With that stuff in mind i will commence with the good the bad and the ugly, well as far as WAR is concerned.
The Good
Public quests
Now these things here are something that other MMOs should take onboard. Its basically an area of the world where everyone works together to achieve goals, be it killing X amount of X creature, or examining X items or even assasinating X person. Now it may not sound that much fun, but when you have a decent amount of people in the area and you are all getting to the last minute of the chapter with 5 more eggs to find ontop of a mountain in the middle of nowhere it gets quite exciting. Once everyone has chipped in and completed the 3 chapters of that public quest, a rewards chest appears that everyone rolls for, now its all automated so none of that need/greed rolls that people exploit. It just works out whos put in the most work, and gives them a roll bonus, giving them more chance to win something, quite good fun and you get influence that will allow you to get other items from NPCs.
PvP Leveling
WHY OH WHY cant other MMOs do this? WoW is nice for PvP when you dont do it often, but after you have done AB or AV for the 3rd time you start to wonder why you are spending time running into battle, dying and then having to spend a few mins running all over the map again to get killed to get a piddly amount of reputation and badges... WAR takes PvP a step further and gives 3 PvP scenarios per tier, although im not sure if there are other PvP types later. So far ive visted about 4 out of the 6 available PvP scenarios and ive possibly spent more time leveling from PvP than i have out in the open world, well on one of my characters.
Its not that being out in the open world is not fun, as it is, and the random wars that occur are great fun in open PvP, but in scenario PvP you can keep repeating quests, items drop from players occasionally (not their items but random drops), its like being in a battlefield all the time, which is what WAR is about i guess.
World Map Quest Locations
The world map itself feels clunky and unhelpful, however the quest part of it seems great! it tells me where my quests are (roughly) and will tell me a summary of what im doing. Genius for mapping out where to go to make best use of your time.
The Bad
Cheap WoW Ripoff in SOOOO many ways
Forgetting the whole warcraft may have ripped off warhammer years ago or whatever, when you first log into WAR you could be tricked into thinking you were in WoW. The UI is pretty much the same, and i mean LOOKS THE SAME and is positioned the same to begin with. There is the obvious similarity between WoWs art style and WARs, i mean the elf lands have towers that look like they could have been taken from the blood elf lands, and the dwarf areas and just ironforge, however once you get out of the starting areas it starts to get a bit more unique and different. The models for the players look a bit more detailed than WoWs and the game has a *slighly* more adult feel to it, but at the end of the day its impossible to look at WAR without remembering WoW.
Battle System Is Flaky
Now this is one of the more important points... When i first started playing, Jode and myself were running round the orc areas on our little RP-PVP server (we thought there would be fewer idiots on there), and we came across a dwarf healer who was only 1 level above us. He came to attack and we both tried to fight back, although heres where the problem occured.
The game was a tiny bit laggy anyway, but whenever we were using our skills it wasnt seeming to hit the dwarf and we were not using up energy, although the animations were being played. We chased him around for ages trying to hit him and whenever we did land a hit he just healed back up and was unstoppable... We then decided to run away and he gave chase using some flame wreath style move, and he ended up killing both of us AND a hunter who joined us mid battle. After another attempt the ONLY way we could kill him was if he stood still and we wailed on our skills, and that just feels wrong. At least in most other MMOs when i click my skill it will either tell me that they are out of range or i dont have energy or something, it wont just play as if everything went well but nothing acctually happens. This just makes battling feel a bit ropey and there have been times where im mashing all my skills in PvP to find out none of them were even cast on the enemy, or i cast a heal and it never acctually went off. This is something they SERIOUSLY need to address in the up and coming patches, as its hard enough to heal yourself never mind other people that the game decideds not to cast upon.
The Ugly
General look of the game
Right well thats not really fair... as it looks ok, but it runs like a slugh with salt on it. I play it on minimal settings on a laptop with 2x 7900 GTX cards and a 2.5Ghz Turion and 2GB Ram. Now ok im not expecting jaw dropping FPS and settings but it would be nice if the game looked a little better and ran a little smoother. WoW is roughly 3 years old now, and it gets away with average graphics because of its art style, however WAR is a NEW game, has only just come out, yet it looks like games did about 4 years ago, which would be fine if it played like games 4 years old do on newer systems. I can run UT3 on full settings without any worries, with this on low end settings it sometimes stutters around, especially in PvP. I think they should try to optimise the game alot more over the next few months, WoW is a bit sketchy on my machine, but only when i run it in top end settings with all my addons on.
THE AMOUNT OF BUGS
Christ its pretty much a beta game they released early, ive had random bugs such as text from PvP ground staying on my screen after battles, UIs that wont dissapear, falling through floors, being unable to hit people hitting me, public quests that dont dissapear after i leave the area, skills that appear active even though they are not. I mean when i first started i wanted to follow Jode (/follow) as i was lazy and he knew the way, however when i right clicked on him, follow was grayed out. Tried it on many people, always grayed out, yet if i type /follow it works fine. Same sort of thing with dancing, ive tried to dance with some people just for a laugh, and it tells me "You refuse to dance"... WHAT... I JUST TOLD HIM TO DANCE! It just feels ropey and unfinished in alot of areas, which are not too great when you are competing with the MAIN MMO these days, and its about to release an expansion.
Crafting
Crafting just feels badly put together. It is nice how they have given it a twist so you dont know what you are making, you just plonk stuff together and hope for the best, but there are 2 trades that are pretty much useless. The only decent gathering skill i found was scavenging, as it meant i was able to get vast amounts of crap and sell them. It just feels broken and pointless making talismans or potions. Also it has a great tendancy to bug out when you fail a recipie but want to try again, so you have to reset your crafting screen and start again... im glad someone tried something new, but crafting can be implemented simply and made to be complex, but this just seems complex without any real gain.
Ultimatly it feels like a Cheap WoW Clone, which takes some of the good MMO concepts out there and tries to add some new features, some well some poorly. They should seriously look into doing some chat improvements, such as adding shift click items into chat and clicking on peoples names lets you PM them, rather than having to manually type a tell to someone every time. Its all the little things that make other MMOs bareable past the first few months that the game seems to be missing at the moment. Dont get me wrong the PvP makes up for alot of this, but these seemingly simple problems could be overcome fairly quickly if they wanted to, and would make the game run ALOT smoother for players.
Although im enjoying the game more than i expected, its pretty much just me playing at the moment but i dont mind it too much as i can PvP or join an open party at any time, whereas on WoW it just feels like a grind from log in to log out. Anyway there is an update on it incase anyone is interested!