WAR First Impressions

18 September, 2008. 590 words.

Well I finally got the WAR beta client downloaded, unzipped, installed and patched up for the head start (a process that stretched over two days and nights), and I played a little bit on the Grimnir server last night. That means I got a one day head start on the retail public riff-raff, since the public launch is supposed to be today, the 18th.

I’m trying to keep my expectations pretty low since the hype surrounding this game is pretty unbelievable, but here are a few of my initial impressions:

I picked Grimnir, a Core rules server which, at the time, had Low populations of Order and Destruction. I rolled three Order characters, and got one of them to level 2, for a grand total of maybe 1 hour of playing time. I only played PvE quests; I didn’t try any PvP stuff.
I didn’t experience any lag or connection problems, except for about 15 minutes where the account authentication server was down. By game launch standards, that’s pretty good.
There is no doubt that this is an evolutionary game, not a revolutionary game. The gameplay appears to be entirely derived from previous MMO games (*cough* WoW *cough*). Graphics and animations are very similar to other MMO games (*cough* WoW *cough*). The jumping and falling animation, as one example, is the exact same one we’ve been seeing since Asheron’s Call, where your guy splays out his arms and legs in a DaVinci-style Vitruvian Man pose.
There’s a curious amount of “inside baseball” information in the game. For example, when choosing your class, it says “tank” or “melee DPS” or “ranged DPS” right there in the character description, which obviously is not the terminology you’d expect to see used by characters in the game world. It’s like the Warhammer lore is just a thin varnish over an otherwise generic MMO engine.
Combat is like WoW in that you have to click on your special action buttons in order to do real damage, otherwise you’ll be doing minimal damage with the default attacks and the fight will drag out forever. However it is different from WoW in that your special actions don’t consume much of your action bar… you can keep clicking on your special action over and over and over again and not lose more than a third of your action bar (at level 1, at least). It takes about 3-4 special attack hits to kill people at level 1.
Side note: Is it really necessary for us to pick the eye color of our characters? I mean, seriously, it’s like 2 pixels worth of information, and besides you only get to look at your character’s back during the game anyway. Seems like a wasted effort.
On the guild front, I found out that you have to collect together a group of six unguilded players before you can register your guild. Oh well. Maybe I’ll start a web page anyway and just pretend like it’s a guild. Yeah, that sounds pretty sane.
Player behavior is relatively innocuous so far, with one exception: One guy came up to me while I was trying to get a new spell from a vendor, and he’s all trying to chat and stuff. “Hello.” “Hello?” “Helloooo????” What the hell is wrong with people? I’m trying to play a game here! I don’t have all night to sit around chatting with needy, attention-starved people or guild trolls. I need a macro for those kinds of situations. “No time to talk! Small window of playing time! Thx bye!”

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