I’m amazed that there’s no thread on this game yet. I’ve been following its progress for about a year and have been very interested in it despite not being much of an MMO person generally.
Has anyone got this yet? Any good stories to tell? Should I invest?
I was planning on getting the game, despite the 110AUD price tag. That was until I discovered that there was also a 15USD monthly fee. That’s just obscene.
Pretty standard for most MMOs as I understand it - that’s what it costs to play WOW.
Yeah, but a game that’s roughly the equivalent of 90USD just for the DVD better be a special edition.
Is the AUD that low compared to us (Regular cost : 50 USD, I got the collectors edition for 80…are you sure thats not what you’re looking at?). I’m playing now, with a bunch of people that can’t quite settle on a server yet. Low population servers have no login queue, and also no PVP instances running. High pop has plenty of PVP, but a wait to log in. The game is still settling, but the actual launch has been amazingly smooth.
One Australian dollar buys 84 U.S. cents, but game prices here are higher than the exchange rate would suggest.
I was looking before the game was released, so it’s possible the store I checked in just got it wrong.
My wife and I started up two Human Warrior Priests last night on the Tor Elyr (sp?) server. They’re a lot of fun.
We don’t like PvP much… in other games. We did a short PvP scenario last night and fairly enjoyed it.
For whatever reason, it is not unusual for Australian retailers to sell games at around $100 AUD, which is as mentioned going to be anywhere from $50 to $100 US. (!!!) Yeah, its freaky. I suspect a lot of Australians are taking a quick trip to Direct 2 Drive or Steam.
I paid $150 for the collector’s edition. Twice. Because hubby and I both needed a copy 
And it was worth it. The two hard-bound books you get with it are sweeeeet.
So far we’ve been alt-whoring a bit. Chaos is as disappointing as I thought it would be. Which breaks my heart as a long-time follower of Khorne. Stupid Tzeentch.
Da Black Ork is my favourite by far. I’z mashin ‘eds and luvvin’ it! Squig herder is also pretty fun, but works best when hubby’s playing his Black Ork.
Also having fun with my Dwarf engineer. Not really feeling any of the other “Good” classes yet, but then I haven’t rolled a human of any sort yet. I want to punch the High Elves in the face, but hubby likes his Elf-dude, so I play the archmage from time to time.
I’m having a lot of problems with bugs in quest logs and graphical glitches, though. I’m hoping these things’ll get ironed out over the next few patches.
Work sucks, because it’s taking away from my valuable levelling time!
[ETA]: Public quests are mad fun. I like the whole mechanic of quests that people can just walk into and get some sweet loot from. And scenario quests are pretty good too. They’re a lot like WoW’s battlegrounds, but the system auto-allocates you into a battle with players who are all equivalent level to you, rather than the Battleground’s fixed “10-20”, style setup. This makes for a lot more enjoyable fights, because you’re not being thrown in with level 19.99999 'tards who are twinked out beyond belief and can smack you down with one hand.
For those of you on the fence about WARHAMMER, here’s a copy of a (rambling) post I made on my guild’s forum reviewing the good and bad bits (warning, it’s realllllly long and rambling) – it also comes later in the thread, so there may be some references to earlier discussion that you won’t understand. It’s also a WoW guild, so a lot of points are in direct comparison to WoW, and uses WoW terminology instead of the WAR equivalent.
<–snip–>
So onto some praise and complaints.
Praise: Interesting classes (Dual-wield Swords priest? Rogue who shoots ppl in the face with a pistol? Shaman whose gods get jealous and entice him with spell bonuses? Wizards who blow themselves up along with everyone else? Kiting people through a maze of turrets? Sweet. I don’t think there’s been a class yet that I haven’t enjoyed playing – besides Witch Elf, but only because my main in WoW is a rogue).
Complaint: Tradeskills suck, period. Apothecary is marginally useful, because abusing health/action potions during RvR is marginally useful if you’re 1v1 or 1v2. Talismans is pretty hosed, because it’s so difficult to get together all the components, and 80% of good magic equipment you get don’t have talisman slots, at least not in the level brackets I’ve played. Cultivation is more of a bad joke/prank than a tradeskill (Watching the grass grow has never been so … bleh!).
Praise: RvR is the foundation of the game, and it shows. Queue up for a BG anytime, anywhere, and get dropped off in the same spot once it’s done (make sure you’re not in the middle of a spawn area!). If you’re low level for your bracket, you get auto-leveled in terms of Health and Ability dmg/heal amount (in the 1-11 bracket, you get leveled to 8, in the 12-21 bracket, you get leveled to 18, etc). You can contribute, and not be completely pwned, but you still lack the leveled abilities and gear, so you’re still a bit behind the curve, but it’s not completely futile. This happens in both the BGs and the world RvR objective areas.
Complaint: Low population and off-hours makes BG queueing and world RvR the suck. Mythic has to do a lot of work to monitor and balance the populations on each server. Curious to see how they handle this, it could become a big issue later on (or not, if they’re smart about it).
Complaint: The mail system sucks. You can only mail one item/stack at a time, and there’s a 20-second wait in between each mail you send. Why, Mythic, why?! That and opening mail seems a bit slow, and sometimes you run the risk of deleting the wrong mail if you’re not paying attention, even though you have the correct one selected.
Praise: PvE and questing is quick and smooth and easy. Level progression isn’t as quick as WoW, but it never feels grindy, since you can switch back and forth between PvE and RvR so seamlessly, and still earn exp/gold/loot in RvR (dead player bodies often yield nice magic items – randomly generated, not their own items). In fact, players give about 2-3x the exp/gold that a monster would, since you can’t grind on them the same way you do monsters, heh (and killing the same player repeatedly in a short time span yields diminishing returns).
Praise: Once you reach a renown level, you can just go buy that renown level’s gear. No honor/mark/arena point farming. The Renown talents that you purchase also help you in PvE (extra stats, resists, and later on, abilities). Unless you spend all your time dead, you split renown with your group, or gain proportional renown according to the dmg you did if you’re solo, so no matter if you’re a PvP god or you’re a 10-thumbed sucktard, you get rewarded just for playing. Healers have it easy – you gain renown for healing your allies, the enemy doesn’t have to die for you to collect – that’s just extra!
Praise: You gain bags as you level, automatically. Don’t have to save up to buy xx-slot bags from the AH.
Complaint: You gain bags as you level, automatically. You can’t buy extra bags if you’re a packrat, like me.
Praise: You can dye your armor and wear various trophies on it that you’ve collected.
Complaint: The look of the armor is pretty homogenous for each class in each bracket. There’s no way to preview the look before buying/equipping (which binds it to you if it’s magic). And even if you could preview, what’s the point? You pretty much already know what it’s going to look like.
Praise: You look more badass as you gain in level and rank. Your character physically grows and beefs up (unless you’re a dwarf, I think your beard gets more distinguished). A naked level 1 ork and a naked level 21 ork look staggeringly different.
Praise: Character titles! Yay. Unlocking them all can get grindy, so I don’t think I’ll bother with that. Except “AHHHHHHHHH!” I just love that one, and I found a spot in Greenskin Chapter 4 where I can do it in less than 10 minutes. You can also display several “boasts” when a player inspects you. These are special achievements that you unlock during play (ie, exploring obscure hard-to-reach areas, killing 100 dwarves, looting 100 corpses, talking to 100 NPCs while naked, killed by enemy players 100 times, etc).
Complaint: I can’t play my goblin
Praise: RvR has quests for extra exp and gold (kill 10 players, play a BG scenario (win or lose), scout the RvR objectives, etc), a few of which are repeatable (most notably the kill 10 and play a BG ones).
Praise: Artillery! boum
Complaint: 1-shot kills for getting too close to enemy guards. I always seem to chase the cowards just a little bit too far… prevents griefing, though, so I can live with it.
Praise: RvR forces you to earn exp, so no twinks. Higher levels who wander into a tier too low for them get automatically turned into a 1-shottable chicken as soon as they flag for RvR, sound effects and all (I think they can still help with PvE content though, as long as they don’t get flagged)
Praise: What death penalty? That 15-minute (PvE) debuff that I can get rid of for a few coppers? That 3-minute (RvR) debuff that’ll wear off by the time I’ve rejoined the fight? Hah! There have been times, though, that the fight was close enough that I stacked the thing 5 times (10% less hp each time – so I was at 50% max health, which is the max debuff), but it’s trivial to buy the cure, it’s hardly even worth mentioning.
Complaint: WoW still has better and smoother graphics, despite WAR having higher system reqs (even if it’s still moderately undemanding).
Praise: Collection quests – 100% drop rate for everyone in your group who has the quest, unless it’s a ground pick-up, in which case you’re looking at a 10-30 second respawn, but there’s usually plenty of it around so you may as well just keep moving (unless it’s a unique object, then you’re either waiting 10 seconds, or it simply won’t disappear at all, seems about 50/50 between the two). No more “I killed 20 headless murlocs before I was able to collect 6 murloc heads. wtf?”
Praise: Public Quests are a fantastic idea, and are great fun with enough participation, and yield great rewards.
Complaint: Public Quests absolutely suck if you’re on low pop, or off-hours, or chose a race with no tank class (neither Dark Elves nor Empire have tank classes, but sometimes tanks from other races come to level in that area for that very reason – they become like, gods, to all the newbies, heh). Some Public Quests in the same chapter are much harder than others, resulting in everyone doing the same easy one over and over and over again instead of exploring the story behind them all.
Praise: Sometimes the opposing factions will share the same PQ area, with opposing objectives, which leads to some crazy impromptu PvP. Plus, it’s always fun causing the opposing faction to fail their PQ if they’re flagged, or locking them out of it for one cycle by completing your objectives first (in which case, they’ll be trying to make you fail if you’re flagged, which is also fun, especially when you win anyways).
Complaint: Sometimes it seems like I get flagged for no good reason at all. Getting unflagged is 10 minutes with no RvR activity, or death, whichever comes first. Usually death comes first, because there are so many group-benefit abilities for every class, that eventually everyone is flagged, and the timer gets reset every time those abilities are triggered, which is often. Not like being flagged is a huge deal anyway. We play WAR to kill people, after all. Sometimes it’s just nice to finish a PQ with no interference, though.
Praise: The scenarios (BGs) for each race area and level bracket are varied, fun, and interesting, employing a variety of different mechanics and tactics in each one.
Complaint: Sometimes a certain faction will repeatedly dominate a particular BG in that race area for that bracket, leading all races from that faction to flood the queues for that BG, and all races from the opposing faction to leave it, going to other race area BGs, instead.
Praise: When I get tired of repeatedly being pwnd by Order in the Greenskin BG, I just hop a flight to the Chaos area and level/BG over there for a while, instead – hah!
Praise: Good healers and tanks make a HUGE difference in RvR here, as opposed to fully prot tanks (stop poking me!) or fully holy healers (aka “lunch”) in WoW – lol?
Praise: Skill > Gear (given the same level opponents). Because pretty much everyone earns the same gear. The difference between a good player and a mediocre player earning the same gear is measured in hours here, not months like in WoW. A good player will have more renown, and thus more renown talents, but those don’t make such a huge difference – they’re just helpful enough.
Complaint: Not enough to do “socially.” For instance, WoW has all the booze, social non-combat pets, social clothing/armor sets, social engineering items, social emotes. WoW put a LOT into making the game socially fun. I’d like to see more of that in WAR, even if it’s still all about killing each other. Then again, WoW has had 4 years to keep adding stuff like that, so we’ll probably see some improvement here in time as well.
Complaint: Not enough storage/no way to expand storage. Like I said, I’m a notorious pack rat. I’m constantly destroying stuff to make room for cooler stuff (every single one of my characters have earned the titles “Litter Bug” and “Wasteful”). This is probably a good thing for their servers, though 
Complaint: Positional Lag. Often I’ll have an enemy player freeze in front of me, only to warp 20 feet away 5 seconds later, making it impossible for my melee toons to finish them off. Normally, this would be INCREDIBLY frustrating for me, but there are so many targets to choose from in RvR, I just hit TAB a few times and move on. If I made him flee, he’s out of the fight for now, anyways!
Complaint: Ignore function not working properly. Gold spammers FTL. No right-click-report-and-ignore-spammer functionality like in WoW, which, in my opinion, should be standard across all games by now. Why the hell isn’t it, really? :mad:
Praise: I can un-list myself from searches and /who lists to avoid gold spammers. I don’t have to worry about missing out on groups this way, because…
Praise: “Open” groups. List all open groups in my area, sort them by distance or activity (PvE, PQ, RvR), just click to join! No more /2 LFG! Or I can just start my own, and it eventually fills up nicely (during peak, off-peak notsomuch). Complaint side to this is it’s easy to end up with a couple of idiots, but that’s really no different from normal group mechanics in other games – it just doesn’t take as long
Praise: The goblin shaman special emote: Their destruction god lights them on fire, and they frantically roll/drag themselves around on the floor screaming trying to put themselves out. Would be much improved if they actually took damage, imo, but that’s just me being twisted again.
Praise: Control of RvR objectives gives your faction combat bonuses. Controlling an area with a dungeon gives your faction exclusive access to that dungeon (I think, could be wrong – dungeons seem kind of an afterthought in this game, anyways).
Praise: Your capital city and your guild can gain levels from player contribution, unlocking more and more cool stuff.
Praise: You can jump in and play for an hour and log off and still accomplish quite a bit, instead of getting stuck in a dead-end heroic idiots expedition that spends 2+ hours accomplishing absolutely nothing but repair bills and wasted consumables, and then it’s time for bed and you feel like you’ve wasted an evening.
Praise: Quest rewards, PQ rewards, and Keep Lord rewards are all tailored to your class/race. Nothing is useless (unless you already have better) There are also green drops that need to be repaired “Broken weapon, Ruined Jewelry, Shattered Armor, etc” and when repaired they become something different, depending on your class/race. Not guaranteed to be something you can use in that case, though, but it’s a better chance that you’ll be able to use a particular random drop (you can see what it will become for you before you roll on it). The downside is, more competition when rolling for those ruined items, since it becomes something useful for almost anyone in your group. But did I mention gear doesn’t exactly make or break your toon in this game? So nobody really cares.
So yeah… phew… another stinking novel from me.
← snip →
ETA: Overall, solid praise, with a few minor quibbles that will probably be improved as they patch. In the entire history of MMOs, Mythic (DAoC, and now WAR) is the only development company to have such smooth and polished launches. No gross class/faction imbalances (that I can see yet), no major technical issues (other than long queue times on certain servers, which they are handling admirably), relatively few crashes and glitches. Their customer service reps, overall, are also quick to respond and as helpful as is possible, given their limitations. Color me impressed!
How do you get “AHHHHHHHHHH!”? I keep getting “Ow, my eye!” because I keep clicking myself rather than mobs near me.
Die by falling 25 times
In Greenskin chapter 4, the respawn point is right next to a platform overlooking a strip mine. Just keep throwing yourself off the platform and you’ll have a nifty new title in about 10 minutes hehe.
Sweet. I totally see my Black Ork having a new title very soon
Are you going to go for “The Pancake” though? 
Well so far I’m not thinking much of the game. My char, that I worked up to level 15, disappeared, and support wont get back to me.
Ugh, no way. I’ll get it eventually in the course of getting knocked off cliffs during fights against engineers, I imagine 
I played open beta for a couple of days (i pre-ordered the CE), and then played once the servers were live for about 6 hours.
I found the game boring beyond belief, and seriously doubt I will put much time into it.
I have extensive history with RPGs (both P&P and video/MMO), and this game just doesn’t do it for me.
I thought Headrush042 gave a great summation of different points of the game, both good and bad, btw.
for me tho: PvE is boring. The quests I did lacked depth or originality, and really did nothing to further any kind of storyline. I found combat as a tank to be mainly autoattack and then hit “3” to do my special zinger swing. over and over. no real challenge, and no real reward.
the ToK is unbelievably complicated, and I really don’t want to wade thru an endless book while I pay $15/month to play the game.
The titles are cute, but do nothing for my character.
I find the re-labeling of PvP as RvR very annoying. It’s PvP. Period. What’s next? No warriors? Gonna call them Soldiers instead? why? what’s the point? Relabeling something doesn’t make it new or different.
I also found the graphics to be somewhat un-detailed, particularly with respect to character creation. WoW and CoH/CoV offer much more customization of look, and even old EQ offered a chance to make your base stats different than anyone elses. WHOAR is basically just choosing a class and name, since some classes are gender-specific (wtf is that all about anyway?).
The lag I experienced with 2GB of RAM and a 512M video card was completely unreasonable. I run WoW at 60fps steady, no matter where I am or how many other people are around, but WHOAR was so choppy that I couldn’t even target other players at times in PvP.
Also, the way the world is set up, that I cant just roam all over the earth but have to go to specific “areas” is annoying. Seemed to me like I could play on the Greenskins board, or the Human board, etc. but there is no “world”.
Admittedly, I haven’t spent even 20 hours playing since the game went live, so I may have missed things, etc. but right now I have no inclination to get involved in the game. It basically seemed like WoW, without bright colors or sunshine, or interesting quests, and with a lot of overly complicated experience/factions/renown.
just my 1st impression, and I’ll definitely be using more time of my first free month to check more out, but right now I doubt I’ll be playing at all by November.
Actually, the term “Realm vs. Realm” has been around for a while in MMOs, to differentiate from games where free for all PvP is possible.
Yeah, DAoC was coined as RvR to differentiate it from, say, UO which is FFA. Now they chose to really, really cling to the label this time for some odd reason, but it is a useful distinction.
IMO it is a useless distinction. Since the game has hard-coded teams, there cannot be anything but team vs. team PvP. You cannot even hit some1 on your “side”.
IMO this was done in a feeble attempt to make it all seem different from WoW PvP… but it isn’t.
I’ve been gaming since the days of Akalabeth, and have never heard anyone use the term RvR before this release (although I admit I did not play DAoC). So which other games have used it?